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Is there any point in handing back exams ordered by grade?
Back in France I had a few teachers handing back exams in order from the highest grade to the lowest grade, and I recall there was some tense suspense, especially for for the people at the bottom of the stack. Is there any point in handing back exams ordered by grade? Assume there is no online platform to release grades.

Protecting because it's on list of "hot network questions," which tends to lead to answers from users of other SE sites who don't necessarily have any knowledge of academia.

@ff524 it'd be great if you could "protect" upvotes too, because once a question gets hot it can be quite poor (not worth downvotes, but not well researched!) and get more than a 'proper' question.

@AlecTeal What do you want me to add in the question?

@AlecTeal While I agree with you in spirit, I think this would run against common SE spirit. @ Franck I don't think there is anything wrong with this question, I understood Alec's point more as a question of principle, not a specific criticism of this question.

Funny that you mention this. When I hand back exams, I often make it a point to tell the students that I am not handing them back in any particular order, because sometimes I've sensed anxiety building in the room – no doubt because some students were wondering if I was following this practice.

@xLeitix Then he should post his comment on meta as a question.

To add some competitive incentive to do well

I remember my middle school teacher doing the opposite thing, ie. starting from lowest grades. It was a nice thing for students who underestimated their skills.

No good reasons, only tradition (this is how we've always done it) and sadism (the poorer scoring students should be shamed into doing better). In the US, these days, at the college level at least, it also might now also be considered bordering on a FERPA violation by some. If you announced that the grades were returned in score order, but didn't reveal an actual number, you might get a pass, but I bet you'd get a lot of complaints. If you announced the scores as you did it, you'd definitely be in violation.

Thanks, any idea how the tradition started?

None whatsoever especially since I've never experienced it. I have experienced the posting of grades publicly by last name, last 4 digits of SSN/Student ID number, and the calling out of grades in a classroom setting. None of these are allowed here now both for privacy reasons (FERPA) and to protect the feelings of students (which is related).

Yeah, in the US grades are considered confidential information, so I'd be worried that passing them back sorted by grade could be construed as a violation.  And as a child I remember hating when my elementary school teachers did this.  I was almost always the top score, and it just made it so easy for the kids to know who to ostracize.  College students are a little bit more mature than that (I've seen semblances of the behavior in them at times, though), but even without the legal consideration I avoid this behavior out of bad memories.

@FranckDernoncourt This is anecdotal and poorly sourced, but I have heard that French education has historically tended to embrace the practice of publicly shaming students who perform poorly, in order to push them to do better.  Handing back exams like this would be part and parcel with such a philosophy.

@jakebeal Good point, sounds true to me, though not necessarily targeted at shaming students who perform poorly, but any, and I think in the teachers' mindsets it's more about teasing, and as you say, well-intended.

(which is related) — [citation needed] I find it very hard to believe that FERPA was ever intended to protect student's feelings.  Employment, credit, insurance, housing, and overall privacy, sure.  But feelings?

@JeffE, which is related to privacy not FERPA. Privacy just happens to be the thing that FERPA tries to protect. Sorry if it was confusing. People get upset if their privacy is violated. The state can take action to protect that.

@jakebeal I can confirm that from my own experience (as a grown-up in two separate French classes), and this was the reason given by French colleagues why they didn't want to speak English - they are indoctrinated to feel shameful about anything other than perfection. Terrifying system.

@FranckDernoncourt: it may not be intended to ashame students nowadays, but certainly in the past, in the era where bad students where forced to wear the bonnet d'ane (donkey hat). On the other side of the coins, it is also to honor good students: in my mother's era  (60's, 70's), good students received small awards from teachers (images,...) or from the city hall (dictionaries for example), and only good students could attend middle and high school. The book/movie La gloire de mon pere  is a great place to have a look on "old school" French educational system.

@l0b0 Anecdote as a reply: my aunt is French and has spoken English as part of her business for many many years (15-20). She doesn't speak English to her children at all because she's afraid her English isn't good enough (my uncle is American so he fills in). It's a very complex issue for French nationals, and quite honestly I don't know if it's something that can be changed without amending the education system in France. It's perhaps even deeper than that, a cultural issue that will continue to affect French citizens.

When I was a student, some twenty years ago, there were two common ways to release grades after a written exam:

putting a notice on a board along the university corridors;
gathering all the students in a classroom and calling them one by one to the desk.

In the first case, the order on the notice was typically alphabetical. In the second, the order of the calls was frequently by grade, especially when written tests were followed by an oral examination to be started soon after the release of the grades. In this case, the motivation was probably that of practicality: it's easier to draw the boundary line between those who have to take the oral examination and those who failed.
A funny note: I recall an exam in which the professor listed first those who passed the exam, and I wasn't there; then he listed those who failed the exam... and I wasn't even there; lastly, he added minaciously: and then there's Ortolano...

So did you fail or pass? :)

@FranckDernoncourt: I was borderline, but he admitted me to the oral examination, menacing of failing me at the first wrong word. I eventually passed the exam with a grade slightly above the bare minimum ;-)

@Joe: why new? It's old actually ;-)

@MassimoOrtolano New to me (and that's probably why it's new!)

I often sort essays by the grade so I can do a final check on the distribution and the consistency of the marking. We return essays through the school office, so the order does not matter. If I was handing them out to the class, for them not to be in grade order, I would have to introduce a random shuffle. Throughly shuffling 200+ essays would take a little time, likely in the critical 10 minutes before the start of class. That said, I would probably do it.

I agree, the only upside I could think of was to avoid shuffling the exams.

You probably wouldn't have to do a thorough shuffle, as long as no more than 2 or 3 at a time were in order. Even that might be overkill, as nobody except for the recipient sees his grade, and the order is unimportant unless people can guess what people got. That guess won't be exact, so probably just randomizing eight groups would be enough.

I also think that the underlying reason for sorting-by-grade is just that it makes some sanity checks easier.

You wouldn't need to shuffle, just grab them from a "random" point in the pile instead of from the top.

I agree with @Lohoris – you could also "cut the deck" three or four times. The order wouldn't be completely random, but it would only take 15 or 20 seconds to introduce some degree of unsortedness.

You check the grade distribution of 200+ exams without a computer, sorting them by hand?

@FedericoPoloni Gives you time to think about the distribution as you discover it... :)

@FedericoPoloni we use letter grades so I just make 10 stacks on my desk. I can sort them pretty quick. And yes,  I could shuffle them pretty randomly in 30 seconds, the key would be remembering to do this before heading to class. Our support staff enters the grades, so I do not get an electronic breakdown until too late.

What happens in a high school setting is that the pupils will be curious about how their friends did in the exam. If you hand back the exams in this way, you'll be able to resume the lessons very soon after you're done giving back the exams.

similarly students will try to establish how well they did, based on the difficulty of the exam (rather than on raw mark), and one way to do this is by comparison to students of known quality. Eg I know Bob is a really smart dude, I did better than Bob, so I must be doing OK. Or I know Sam never shows up to class, I did worse than him, I guess my failure wasn't cos the exam was hard, but because I don't know the content. Thus there is chatter and speculation as a attempt to work out true proficiency.
That said, I think a better way to know true proficiency is to release the mean and std dev.


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Are awards in academia useful?
Is there any research/study that looked at the usefulness of giving awards in academia? By useful I mean weighting the positive and negative effects. I'm interested in three kinds of awards: awards to students, awards to teachers, and awards to researchers. (let me know if I should post as 3 different questions)

A quick Google Scholar search shows a lot of research on the topic in the context of students and people in general. My naive guess is that researchers wouldn't be much different.

Useful to whom? The recipient, the rewarding institution?

Academia is all about recognition, awards are one of many complementary ways.

@MarcClaesen: I thought that academia is about advancing knowledge, whereas recognition is a side effect, sadly, often optional and/or not timely.

@vonbrand  awards to students + teachers -> for improving education; awards to researchers -> for improving research progress.

Are there many countries with a culture of awards to students and teachers? In Italy awards to students are rare and I've never heard of awards to teachers.

@MassimoOrtolano USA for sure (e.g. see Why are there so many awards in academia in the US compared with academia in France?), and regarding research awards quite common in computer science conferences.

@AleksandrBlekh sure, except that when it comes to funding you better have gathered some recognition for your fantastic science or the money well runs dry. I honestly wish it was only about science, but to get the opportunity to do science you have to gather recognition. If you've got Nature papers, funding comes far easier, though it hardly means you've done better science than someone without such papers.

@MarcClaesen: I understand your point. It seems to be somewhat of a catch-22 situation, since, as you said, "to get the opportunity to do science you have to gather recognition", but, at the same time, in order to get some recognition, you have to do science. In order to break from this vicious cycle, AFAIK, people start doing some science, then, hopefully, get some recognition, do more science on a bit higher level, get a bit more recognition, etc. - it seems that doing science follows a spiral path (when there is some progress).

An award can benefit people other than the recipient. For example, an award to a professor might benefit his students by giving his letters of recommendation a bit more weight.

Hmm I was thinking usefulness for the entire community, not for the recipient only.

This answer on Mathoverflow summarizes a study on the "productivity" of past winners of Fields medals (the most important award in mathematics; it is given each four years to four mathematicians under 40 years old).
The study is Prizes and Productivity: How Winning the Fields Medal Affects Scientific Output (2013), George J. Borjas and Kirk B. Doran.
TL;DR: The paper analyzes the output of 47 Field winners and 43 mathematicians of comparable level (often, people who were rumored to be "in the shortlist"). After winning the medals, their statistics diverge visibly. Field winners write about 20% fewer papers than non-winners, in the post-medal period, and seem to have slightly lower productivity, in general. However, there is another significant effect: they tend to enlarge their views and extend their research interests extend to other areas of mathematics, much more than non-winners, who tend to continue in the same area (25% vs. 10% probability of "cognitive mobility"). This necessarily comes with a cost, since one can't be productive immediately in a new area.
(and, to me, top mathematicians working on bridging areas of mathematics and looking for a unifying breakthrough is a great thing.)

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Why do tenured professors still publish in pay-walled venues?
I wonder why tenured professors still publish in pay-walled venues. I can understand that non-tenured professors are publication pressured, but once one gets tenured, why should one still place knowledge behind walls?

(originally posted on http://openscience.stackexchange.com/q/52/3)

"...and when did you stop beating your wife?" There's a lot of hidden assumptions in this question that really need to be discussed before it can be answered effectively.

@Andrew The only assumption I see is that some tenure professors sometime publish in pay-walled venues. I'd be glad to stand corrected.

there's a lot more than that. It's implicitly assuming that most people think of OA/non-OA as a primary factor in their publication choices - some do, certainly, and credit to them... but most simply don't prioritise it. A survey released last week finds most authors weight it substantially less than most other factors.

@Andrew This is not an assumption but one possible answer to the question (which I'd upvote at it's a good one). No intent to take sides here, just looking for facts.

"publish or perish" - they need publications for grants.
there is no money to publish in open access journals (some public grants/funding bodies apparently now start to make allowances for it)

See also: If tenured staff are virtually unsackable, why is the drive to find funding so strong?.

Are you (also) asking, "... and not provide a preprint as free download?"

This question suffers from a faulty base assumption that non-paywall is inherently, globally, unarguably, categorically "better" and to be desired by all by default.

@Light - I removed your second sentence. Your point is well taken, and (for what it's worth) I completely agree, but please discuss ideas, not individual people.

@LightnessRacesinOrbit This is not an assumption but one possible answer to the question. No intent to take sides here, just looking for facts.

@eykanal: Eh, what people do is completely relevant all the time. That is the manifestation of ideas. I cannot judge what the OP's ideas are without telepathy. Anyway, I don't even remember what the sentence was now since you have censored it! So this is a generic response

Why wouldn't they?

@CapeCode Making information available to anyone?

There are lots of reasons, but high among them are the prestige issues for their co-authors, especially their non-tenured, postdoc, and student co-authors. Everyone on the author list benefits from the typically higher prestige of the traditional (and paywalled) publishing venues.

Agreed -- I try hard to publish in open access journals when possible and non-profit ones otherwise, but I rarely write a paper without a co-author at the career stage where he or she is seeking a job or pursuing tenure.

So then the problem is prestige?  If exploitative journals are viewed as more prestigious than non-exploitative journals, what can be done to fix this perception?

@MasonWheeler, someone cares where professors publish. Prestige is a catchall word for the problem that works need to be seen and where better to be seen that prestigious journals. Profs are judged post-tenure for raises and other reasons, so prestige is a good proxy. I can't think of an exploitative journal that's prestigious, but I don't think of non-open as exploitative necessarily. I'm all for openness, but something has to pay the bills, and we need archival publishing

@BillBarth: Please pardon my bluntness, but if you don't think of non-open journals as inherently exploitative, you don't know enough about their business model.  The more you learn about how they operate, the uglier it looks.

@MasonWheeler Their business models vary quite a bit. Some of their business models are quite obnoxious, while others seem fine. One way or another, someone has to pay the bills of the publisher.

@reirab But what are those costs? They are desperately inefficient. The part of the process that should be most expensive -- reviewers -- is typically given for free. Too much is spent on formatting, printing & posting the big paper editions that no-one reads anymore... and on profit.
In some subjects, where self-typeset publishing and arXiv uploading are the primary mode of research dissemination, "real" journals only hang on because of funding agency metrics, and those are slowly changing. That ecosystem also inverts the normal power structure, hence block "auto-OA" agreements like SCOAP3.

@andybuckley, you've seen their cost accounting, or you're estimating?

I haven't seen internal accounts. But I don't think it's necessary: in my field the reviewing and main typesetting (in the journal's format) are both conducted by academics for free. I always need to point out and fix errors introduced by a journal (or its contractor) which insists on needlessly modifying what's submitted. All costs are internal, but add zero value besides that from the (free) reviewers. And yet they still have a ~40% profit margin. Companies this inefficient & uncompetitive don't survive in a real market, and the public deserve unrestricted access to research they paid for.

Yeah, like I said.  Inherently exploitative and ugly.

@andybuckley, I see that as pretty minimally exploitative if the editors maintain good quality. I'm sure you have it or I could find it, but I'd love to see the cite for 40% profit margins. Also, you may think that the majority of the editing/typesetting/etc have been done by authors, but I've certainly seen the staff of a journal need to get heavily involved. I think that there are a lot of these anecdotal stories that the main journals suck, but something is holding them down as the main journals.

@BillBarth Profit margin of Elsevier academic publishing in 2013 was 39%: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/elsevier-stm-publishing-profits-rise-to.html  I don't doubt that producing the huge dead-trees publications requires interference with submissions. The point is that there is still a profit margin that clearly indicates an inefficient market... and that those printed volumes are not the way that anyone I know actually reads articles anymore. For sure the thing keeping them in business is the connection between (self-sustaining) journal prestige and research funding.

All: Please remember, as the Tour says: This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat. and Use comments to ask for more information or clarify a question or answer.

A couple reasons come to mind:

Tenured professors still care about prestige. And they still have promotions to consider - for example, from Associate to Full Professor, or if they fancy going after a Chair or Deanship.
Open access publications are not (beyond perhaps their open status) inherently more virtuous as journals. It's possible that the best place to put a paper in terms of readership, audience, etc. is not an open access journal.
If they're funded by the NIH, they may be content with "It will be open access in two years anyway" and not be inclined to spend their group's resources on open access charges.
Linked to 1, just because you're tenured doesn't mean your funding is secured. Many tenured faculty can't necessarily sit back and make non-optimal solutions "for the good of knowledge" when they have postdocs, grad students and lab staff who still need to get paid.
The aforementioned grad students, postdocs, etc. who are also on the paper might benefit from a more prestigious publication.

Even if a faculty member has settled into a tenured full professorship they still typically have annual evaluations for the purpose of determining pay raises, and having publications in highly ranked journals can get them a better evaluation.

I wonder why tenured professors still publish in pay-walled venues. I can understand that non-tenured professors are publication pressured, but once one gets tenured, why should one still place knowledge behind walls?

Who says they are placing knowledge behind walls?  In many fields it's perfectly feasible to publish in pay-walled journals but still make the papers publicly available (through the arXiv, institutional repositories, etc.).  If someone does this, then their knowledge is no less available for having been published in a non-free journal.  Of course not everyone takes advantage of this opportunity, but that's generally because they don't care about the issue, not because they were constrained before getting tenure.
In the fields which have no such option, this question becomes much more relevant, but think about the psychological difficulties.  You may have strong opinions about where it's reasonable to publish, but your coauthors may not share your opinions.  Do you really want to spend the rest of your career debating this issue every time you publish a paper?  Are you willing to give up on collaboration opportunities because you fear your collaborators might insist on publishing in venues you disapprove of?  Are you willing to risk looking like a jerk by insisting that your principles are more important than your coauthors' careers?  It might be the right thing to do in some abstract sense, but it's not an easy decision.

+1 for mentioning self-archiving. I sometimes have to publish in paywalled journals, but every paper I've ever written can be downloaded for free from my website.

@Corvus I'm sure you know this, but your website will go away. You may want to look into more permanent ways of making your work accessible.

Excellent point, Raphael! +1  For a while I was also depositing everything in my institution's digital repository, but they stopped supporting this.

Often you are obliged to hand over copyright of your paper when it is published, meaning you are actually not allowed to make copies available through other means...

@Floris Handing over copyright does not automatically mean that you may not put the paper on your website, it depends on the publishers policy.  And even if putting up the original PDF is prohibited, your “own” version (before the proof stage, and PDF compiled by you not the journal) may be different.  In physics, at least, uploading to arXiv seems to be universally accepted, so why not on your own website?

@xebtl agree with the "does not automatically mean" bit of your comment but I believe it is true more often than you think and I suspect a good fraction of Arxiv items may in fact be (unwitting) violations of copyright for this reason.

@Floris I would hold against: (1) It depends on which journals you publish in; e.g., the Physical Review journals AFAIK allow at least arXiv, self-archiving, reproduction of papers in dissertations. I have not run a statistic, but I think many physicists publish mostly in these journals. (2) What really interests me is what is tolerated, not what is strictly legal. Nullus actore nullus iudex, as they say in law :-)

Many high-impact journals introduced a paywall to recover new costs when they began offering articles in electronic form in addition to the traditional print publications. Despite the growing consensus in the science community that journal impact factor (JIF) correlates poorly with the actual "impact" or quality of individual research articles1, having Science/Nature/Cell publications can make a huge difference in one's career development2. This doesn't stop at tenure either: the ability to get grants, acceptance into prestigious scientific societies, and so on depend on the impact of one's research.

1Just because you publish your paper in Science or Nature doesn't mean it's a good paper (due to variation in the review process, politics, etc). That said, a lot of really good science done by great scientists does get published in high-impact journals, and these journals by far have the widest readership.
2Academic science is very competitive, usually with tens or hundreds of applicants for each new professorship position. When there is no possible way to critically assess the quality and impact of every single publication of every single applicant, the journal in which it was published is a commonly (ab)used heuristic.

Just because you publish your paper in Science or Nature doesn't mean it's a good paper — That's putting it mildly.

I am a mathematician (full professor in a top ten US pure mathematics department).
In pure mathematics, the top four or five journals (in terms of prestige) are almost universally agreed upon; perhaps the least ambiguous three in the top five are Annals, Inventiones, and JAMS. None of these is open access: Annals is published by a university press, JAMS by a professional society, and Inventiones by a commercial publisher.
These journals have earned their prestige over a long time, as a combination of various factors: e.g. the quality of work they've published in the past, the make-up of the editorial board, the qualities of the referees they employ, and their current very high standards of acceptance.  This last point is crucial: their standards for acceptance are very high --- papers they accept are not only correct (the minimal standard of acceptance in any journal, one hopes), but of fundamental importance for the field.  If you are on a committee reviewing a candidate's CV and you see a paper published in one of these journals, you can be quite confident that it is top-level work.
For a post-doc, having one or two papers in one of these journals, together with one or two additional papers in journals that are almost as good, is basically enough to guarantee a tenure-track position in a (roughly) top twenty university.
But for a senior researcher, publishing in these journals also serves as strong signal about the quality of one's on-going research.
Many senior researchers are still ambitious!  E.g., they might want to move institutions (for geographic reasons, or to move to a higher rep. department, or to raise their salary, or ...), or obtain competitive grants, or win prizes, or be awarded named chairs.  Essentially any competitive award in academia is based on the quality of the candidate's research, and publishing in top journals is a strong signal for this.  (It's not the only such signal, since peer review, through letters, or grant panels, or prize committees, is also very important; but publishing in top journals is still an excellent and efficient way to signal quality research:  it's something that a committee member can easily discern just by skimming over a CV, and it's a concrete fact that a letter writer or other supporter of the candidate can draw attention to.)
Personally, I try not to publish in journals that belong to commercial publishers, because I agree with many others that (at this point in history) this publishing model is basically rent-seeking from the academic community.  I am happy to publish in journals like Annals or JAMS though (if I should be so lucky as to write papers at that level), since they are published by non-commercial publishers (though not open access), and I have some interest in continuing to accrue the resulting prestige.
However, many of my co-authors are more vested in accruing prestige through publishing in top journals, for some of the reasons described above, and for them, if a paper is at the level that it could plausibly be published in one of these top journals, career-wise it doesn't make sense not to submit it to one of them.   It's not reasonable to always submit to exactly the same one or two journals, and so for this reason I end up publishing in commercially-published journals from time to time.

As a side note, CUP recently established an open access mathematics journal whose goal is to be at the same level as Annals and JAMS.  My impression, though, is that (even with a very prestigious editorial board) it's not taking off as quickly as one might like.  One problem is that younger people who have top quality work are often reluctant to publish in a new journal; it's riskier than publishing in a journal whose reputation has been cemented as top quality for decades.  And even senior people have the concern that the journal won't establish or maintain the reputation that it's aiming for, and so are reluctant to "waste" a top-level paper by publishing it there.
In this sense, trying to create a new, maybe open-access, journal that serves the same prestige-signaling function as the current top commercially published journals involves something of a prisoner's dilemma: if top-level researchers simultaneously agreed to grant the journal the desired level of prestige, and all submitted their best work their, it would indeed become a top level journal, and continue to attract good submissions.
Variations of this scenario have succeeded in mathematics.  (Not with open access journals, as far as I know, but with very successful non-commercially published journals such as Geom. Top..)  But, as we all know, it is unfortunately somewhat exceptional for a real-life prisoner's dilemma to be resolved in a positive manner.

One way for new journals to bootstrap might be to find a way to operate in parallel with the established journals. I haven't read the copy license text used by the "big boys", but depending on how it's written there may be room to come in at a slightly different angle -- perhaps start out just publishing abstracts or slightly popularized descriptions of the work -- build a reputation, and then try to get some folks to start giving them first-publication material. Or jump on a new specialty before the others can, again build rep as the place to find some of th best work, and expand from there.

... which is, after all, how the current folks established themselves.

A hyperlink to the OA CUP journal would really improve this post!

Since folks objected, let me simplify my answer to the key point:
Because the journals they want to publish in decided to paywall their websites.
To change this, you can create an equally (or more) respected journal (or equivalent) which isn't paywalled, and/or find a way to encourage parallel publication in non-paywalled form, and/or find a way to convince the journals that paywalling is not necessary.
I wouldn't be surprised if one or more of those eventually happens. I'm also not surprised it's taking a while for that to happen.
[In this form, I think I'm probably overlapping strongly with what others have said, and may kill this answer.]

It's not necessarily clear that the costs are so high, or need to be: this is a subject of considerable controversy. Some new journals appear to be able to provide all these services at very little cost. Ironically, the features you mention (curation, editing, review) typically have no cost at all: editors and reviewers work on a volunteer basis.

If you can get the subscriber rate up, costs per issue can go way down. Problem is, it isn't clear that the reverse will happen. It may require an entirely new generation of journals to cross that barrier, folks who don't have a prior investment they have to break away from and in fact can only break into the market by innovating. That's actually the most common mode in which technological change occurs... and that really is what we are looking at here.

"professionally-edited, professionally reviewed journals" -- doesn't always feel this way. The "professional" part, that is.

"The business model for those journals is a relatively expensive one" -> FYI:  Why are journal subscriptions so expensive?

This answer is pure bilgewater. The author does the typesetting; the reviewers are not compensated; the single paper purchase option has always existed...I could go on and on. Almost every sentence is misguided or outright false.

Although I didn't down-vote, I must say that the (to my perception) inaccuracy + recital of for-profit-publishers' PR was what pushed me to write an "answer" to the question. Srsly, I can understand the attraction of some belief systems, given their "simplicity", but, ...

@PaulGarrett: I agree that we disagree about some points. Since they' seemed to bother some folks, I've dropped the comments based on my understanding of the publishing industry in general... though you can confirm most of them by talking to publishers/editors/writers in any field ... and refocused upon the simple point that this is the publishers' decision,  not (directly) the authors'. If you want to invest time and effort and money in establishing competing publication/archival/indexing/precedence-documentation  paths, that's great... but until someone does so, what we have is what we have.

Surprised none of the answers have mentioned this.
It's free.
If you publish open access, you have to find money to pay the article processing charge somewhere. It's not that you can't find the money - but if you publish in paywalled venues, you don't even have to find the money in the first place.

Why am I the first to upvote this? That said, "free" would be better "free (for the author)". Someone still has to pay the publisher, at least their cost, and in non-OA, it's the reader that has to pay (directly or indirectly), not the author.

(For the record, it is indeed about "status/prestige", if not for the senior person, for junior co-authors, who are invariably judged by the most conservative possible standards (the convenience of which is that more negative conclusions are allowed...), ...)
My slightly-new point here is that "tenure" does not promise good pay raises, a decent office, civil teaching assignments, or anything else. I don't know whether it ever did, but certainly in the current climate in academe in the U.S., every year we (=faculty, in my apparently highly-rated R1 university department) are required to write up a report on our activities of the most-recent five years. Sounds reasonable, until one learns that "good" or "very good" in all categories (research, mentoring/teaching, service) is only worth a 1.8 percent pay increase...?!? Sure, inflation in the U.S. has been low... but...
So, to fight for NSF funding (whose decision procedures have been "streamlined", which may operationally mean "degraded" to using second-hand metrics to judge things...) for that extra month or two summer salary: bang, ultra-traditional notions of publication (again, if only because there are too many obviously-qualified applicants, so the issue is looking for excuses to disqualify, rather than looking for reasons to "qualify").
At some point in one's life, in R1 situations in STEM fields, one might contemplate the very real issue of whether one wants to budget one's household, family, life on an extra 2/9 salary, or not. If "yes", then this game playing is obviously mandatory, because without it one can't compete for those very-limited bonus-resources.
(The glee with which for-profit publishers greet this tendency is surely limitless, ...)

I must add that the issues about "curation" or "careful review" and so on are of essentially no interest to me, even without addressing issues of conflict-of-interest with referees who have reasons to want to delay/sabotage their competitors, etc. I suppose often it's not really conscious unethical behavior, but I have repeatedly witnessed it. And, then, there're other problems with the self-referential editor-referee cycle. Once-upon-a-time, maybe a little less bad than now (in mathematics), but always problematical, and now worse, due to constrained resources for which people compete.

... and, decades ago, I did start advocating that the status-enhancing venues should be left to the tenure-needing people, abandoned by the got-tenure-already people, and I was surprised at the angry reactions I got from (well-tenured) people. Pro-tip, kids: don't drink the Kool-Aid, but maybe pretend that you did, as necessary.

Perhaps their particular niche has no open-source high-reputation venue. It still costs money to operate a publication site, and if it produces a print edition there might not be enough interest in the publication through advertising alone to cover its costs, and maybe only subscriptions are enough. I mean, how many people are going to want to read "Thumb Amputee Monthly," a (albeit fictitious) journal dealing with surgery techniques for restoring amputated thumbs and permanently interconnecting prosthetic thumbs?

With a few exceptions, my experience is that academic journals generally don't carry any advertising at all (as you say, there's no market). Costs are covered by subscription fees, publication charges paid by authors, or in some cases, donated by universities or other sponsors.

@NateEldredge IIRC advertising is a lot more common in clinically-oriented medical journals, but that's not my field so I can't say for sure! Agree it's a pretty minor factor for most titles.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Do some publishers offer to host a mirror of webpages used as a reference?
Using a link as a reference is often problematic as the link might disappear at a future time. However, the content might be of high relevance to the reader, so it might be worthwhile to add it as a reference. Do some publishers offer to host a mirror of webpages used as a reference?

What do you mean by "mirror"? Publishers don't have the right to just copy and redistribute content without the permission of the original authors.

@Thomas Maybe like the  Wayback Machine (http://archive.org/about/faqs.php#20)


text:
What determines the copyright year for a publication?
I wonder what determines the copyright year for a publication. I thought that the copyright year would be the same as the publication year, but seeing in (1)

put me in doubt (publication year: 2011; copyright year: 2012).

(1) Sutton, Charles, and Andrew McCallum. "An introduction to conditional random fields." Machine Learning 4.4 (2011): 267-373.

You are not showing the location of publication, however in the U.S., while Copyright is established the moment the work is created, the only effective way to claim infringement is to have registered the work with the U.S. Government's Copyright Office (http://www.copyright.gov). The date shown is more than likely the date that they received confirmation of the copyright registration from the office.
Subsequent editions will also refile copyright, so you can have various dates or a range of dates shown. On Molecular Biology of The Cell by Alberts, et.al, the copyright page has the 2015 copyright for the sixth edition but also lists the 2008 date for the preceding fifth edition.
I have generally seen date ranged copyrights on software, so if you select About This Mac on an Apple Mac computer, the splash screen shows (c) 1983 - 2015.
UPDATE
Even though copyright exists from the moment of creation of the work, an important reason for official registration has to do with the damages that you can seek for infringement. The following is from the Copyright Office's FAQ

Why should I register my work if copyright protection is automatic?
Registration is recommended for a number of reasons. Many choose to register their works because they wish to have the facts of their copyright on the public record and have a certificate of registration. Registered works may be eligible for statutory damages and attorney's fees in successful litigation. Finally, if registration occurs within five years of publication, it is considered prima facie evidence in a court of law. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “Copyright Registration” and Circular 38b, Highlights of Copyright Amendments Contained in the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), on non-U.S. works.

It's a common thing for publishers to set the copyright date as late as possible so as to get an extra year of copyright protection. It's quite common to see books that appear in print in stores in the fall of one year (say 2012) bearing copyright dates in the next year (say 2013.) Apparently, if someone were to pirate the book during the period immediately after its appearance (say late in 2012) the copyright law allows the publisher to enforce the copyright. Generally, the publication year should be used in citations, CV's, etc. rather than the copyright year. If there is no publication date listed but there is a copyright date, then you should cite using the copyright date.
With journals, it's relatively common for issues to appear after the nominal date of the issue. Thus the December 2013 issue of the Journal of Tribble Biology might appear in February of 2014. Here, you cite based on the December 2013 date even though the issue didn't appear on time.

I thought copyright was automatically in force from the moment something is created, until 70 years after the author's/creator's death (if not longer).

@BaardKopperud yes, but my answer was discussing the copyright dates that are printed in books and how to cite and catalog these publication rather than the enforcement of copyright by law.  The point is that for obscure reasons publishers frequently put copyright dates on books that are the year after the actual date of publication.

Yes, my point was that I can't see how delaying the copyright notice with a year (or ten for that matter) would change anything and "give longer copyright", since it starts to expire when the author dies (the 70 year counter starts) - not when the author wrote the book or filed for copyright.

This depends on juristiction.

Dirty secret of the textbook publishing industry: many textbooks list a  copyright date of the year after they are released. With US copyright protection lasting 70 years beyond the death of the author, they are not interested in a single extra year of copyright protection 100 years in the future (in many fields, textbooks are obsolete after a decade; even in fields where they are not they are replaced by new editions to break the used market). Rather, they seek to create the illusion that the book is recent. Instructors would rather use a 2014 book than a 2013 book, and pushing the copyright date forward is an easy way to gain a one year advantage on competitors.

The year of copyright is the year the work is created (if the published version is licensed), or the year of the transfer (when you sign over your rights). Journals can be behind schedule, so that a cover year can be any number of years behind the actual year of appearance.

Legally, the year of copyright is when the work was written. That can be very different from the publication year. Some texts have been buried in personal papers for many years after the death of the author, and only published posthumously.

I guess in the example the authors were behind schedule :)


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Perennial link to a research article
For convenience, I often want to give a link to a research article in addition to the citation. I am mostly look for the following two properties:

the link should be valid as long as possible
the link should provide as many sources as possible to download the article, ideally free of charge whenever available.

I use Google scholar, e.g.: Godbole, Shantanu, and Sunita Sarawagi. "Discriminative methods for multi-labeled classification." Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2004. 22-30.
I link to the "all versions" page:

Are there other any good/better alternatives?

the link should be valid as long as possible

There is no guarantee that Google Scholar will even still exist as a service in a few years, let alone that its URL scheme will stay the same. Who knows when another round of spring cleaning might come?
From the point of view of avoiding link rot, using a DOI resolver seems much better, e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24775-3_5
Related: DOI® System and Persistent URLs

Is there any DOI resolver that points to multiple sources, including free ones when available?

Citeseer does this, e.g. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1.3819 - but unlike http://doi.org they have made no commitment to maintain this service in perpetuity. And they don't seem to be using standard DOIs, but their own internal ones.

Thanks for the answer. Yes I agree about Google Scholar, all the more so as Google often closes its services, that's why I'm looking for better solutions :) Is there any DOI resolver that points to multiple sources, including free ones when available?

@FranckDernoncourt See update

The DOI system is run by a consortium of publishers and provides redirection to the publisher's copy of a paper- it won't help you find preprints or other unofficial copies of the paper.


text:
How do professors choose their summer salary?
In the United States, most professors are paid by the university on a 9 month basis for teaching (Sep - May). During the summer months a professor is typically paid from their grants and other revenue sources. How is the summer salary chosen? E.g. if a professor is paid 10kUSD/month, can (s)he choose to be paid 20kUSD/month during the summer?

In the Humanities, where grants are seldom seen, we choose our summer salary based on the number of courses we sign up to teach in summer session.  :)

@ewormuth, presumably that's up to a maximum of your current annual salary's monthly rate, right?

I can't remember -- it's been a long time since I taught summer session.  It always seemed like good extra money, though.  Your salary depended on your enrollment, with full professors getting the best deal (the fewest number of students to make a full salary).  For my last few years, I was 12-month faculty, so I didn't need to think about it any more.

Well, I know if I were a professor, I'd choose it early, often, and generously. That'll be $50, by the way.

At the two schools I've been at full time, one pro-rated my salary and paid me all year and the other expected me to teach in the summer.

I suppose this could depend on the funding agency.  For the NSF, your summer salary is determined by your academic year salary and you cannot receive more than that, although you could receive less if the program officer cuts that part of your budget.  I believe this is standard for U.S. funding agencies.
This situation is of course not fair to those who hold lower-paying jobs that do not reflect their achievements (but rather state budget priorities).  Like many things in grant funding, there's tremendous bureaucratic inertia and no hope of changing this aspect of the system.

I don't think you can receive less per month worked, you can just work less months on the project if the budget gets cut. I believe you have to put your correct academic year salary.

That's a good point.  I'm used to thinking of these outcomes as pretty similar, at least in pure mathematics, but I imagine it plays out differently in other fields.  (Many people getting summer salary from NSF grants in pure mathematics don't have many other funding opportunities and aren't going to do extra teaching or consulting over the summer.  If they get paid for less of the summer, then they'll end up doing the same research for less money.)

Yeah, if our people weren't getting paid for a particular month, we'd have to furlough them and shut the computers down with no one around to maintain them. With faculty, and especially faculty whose stereotypical work style is reading papers and writing out theorems, you can work wherever and whenever you like whether you get paid for it or not.

Under federal rules, it's not permissible to pay a faculty member on a grant at a higher rate (per hour, week, month, or whatever) than they are paid at other times of the year.  It is also not permissible to use multiple sources of funding (e.g. grants from different agencies) to pay a faculty member at more than 100% of their usual pay rate.
If a faculty member has a 9 month salary of $90K, and if they have a grant with an approved budget including two months of summer salary for the faculty member, then that faculty member can be paid an additional $20K for working on the grant for two months during the summer.
Note that NSF policy does not permit faculty members to collect more than 2 months of summer salary from any combination of NSF grants.  It is sometimes possible to combine funding from NSF and other sources to get a full 3 months of summer salary.

NSF allows more than 2 months summer salary with approval, and rebudgeting can also put you over as long as the scope doesn't change. But, you have the default rule correct.

NSF these days doesn't actually care about summer vs academic year any more. But the 2-month rule is still in effect.

Quite correct about NSF policies. But some universities allow faculty to earn as much as four months salary during summer period or equivalent, treating a two-semester academic year as eight months. This is actually quite rare, but three months is reasonably common for funding from agencies other than NSF.

Typically not. If the money comes to the university through a grant, then they just get additional months at their university salary rate. However, if they choose to do outside consulting instead, then they can typically set whatever rate they can agree on a contract for.


text:
Tax incentives for private companies to fund academic research
I wonder what tax incentives private companies have to fund academic research. As it is sometimes difficult to assess financial impacts of tax laws, I would even more interested to have some numbers reflecting the importance of these tax incentives, e.g. "For 100kUSD for funds coming from a private company, the later saves 20kUSD of taxes on average" (which would mean one could consider such funding to be actually ~20% funded by taxpayers).
I am mostly interested in the United States but curious about other countries as well.

The US has substantial research tax credits; in 2005, tax credit claims came to $6.6 billion USD, though it's not immediately stated what overall private R&D expenditure was in that period. (I suspect it would not be too difficult to find out...). Similar programs exist in many countries; see this 2014 survey.
The Deloitte report helpfully summarises (pp. 54-55) whether subcontracted research is eligible under the various national laws (which would cover academic funding); for the US, they are but you get a reduced deduction, while for Austria (for example) there is a 1m Euro cap on the amount that can be claimed for subcontracted research, and in the Czech Republic it has to be in-house to qualify.


text:
Is "scribe" a pejorative or a neutral term?
In the US, instructors sometimes ask one or two students to take notes for a given lecture, in view of releasing the lecture notes later on for the rest of the class. Such students are sometimes called "scribes". Is "scribe" a pejorative or a neutral term? If pejorative, is there any neutral or positive term? (I am asking as in French "scribe" can sound somewhat derogatory)

Neutral.  It's a simple English description of an honorable role. If you want to be sesquipedalian about it you could say "transcriptionist", but I see no reason to do so.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this is more about the usage of the English language (we have another SE site for that) rather than an academia-specific query.

you may wish to flag this for migration to [elu.se]

I voted to re-open, because although it is English-language specific, it is also academic-specific.

In all of the academic usages with which I am familiar, scribe is almost entirely a neutral term.

Every student must act as a scribe for at least one lecture this term.

The one exception to this requires further elaboration to indicate that what one is doing is merely "reproductive" instead of "synthetic":

He slavishly acted a scribe copying down the professor's words without understanding them.

However, such usage is generally written and somewhat formal (see how far you have to go to put it into a negative context).

"Scribe" is definitely hierarchical: some trust from "superiors", but not their peer. And then if everyone is a scribe, the "trust" becomes uncertain. E.g., is it just that the instructor doesn't want to spend their own energy? Or is it that the instructor has confidence that all the students can make reasonable transcripts?


text:
Register as a listener to access course materials with no intent to attend lectures
In the USA, is it regarded as OK to register as a listener for a course to be able to access the course materials but with no intent to attend the lectures?

First, the usual term in the US is not "listener" but "auditor"; you are said to be "auditing" the course.
People generally don't care too much what you do or don't do when you register as an auditor, so most likely this would be fine.  But I think that, as a matter of courtesy, whenever you are considering signing up to audit a course, it is good to contact the instructor, let them know what level of involvement you have in mind, and check that this is okay with them.  In some cases there may be certain things that they ask you to do or not do.
In this case, when you ask, the instructor might just offer to share the course materials with you directly, without you having to sign up to audit the class at all.

Rules on auditing do vary.  At my institution, I have to assign a grade of "SA" (satisfactory audit) or "UA" (unsatisfactory audit) at the end of the semester.  I generally require students to attend class (and could require them to do homework, take exams etc.) in order to get a grade of SA.

It's also worth pointing out that universities in the US typically require auditors to pay tuition just as if they were taking the course for a regular grade.

@BrianBorchers: True.  In a lot of cases, especially at the graduate level, you pay the same amount of tuition for any number of courses within a certain range (and in some cases that amount is $0), so auditing a course may not actually increase your tuition bill.


text:
Check whether an article has any correction or been retracted
Is there any website where I could enter the reference of an article, and see whether any correction or retraction has been made on the article?
I know some publishers indicate it on their website, but ideally I would prefer to use the same website to check (i.e. a Google Scholar for corrections/retractions). APIs are good too.

In principle you can always ask the author(s).  "I read your article X and found it very interesting.  I want to make sure I have the most recent version..." or something along those lines. Alternatively, if it's published you could try asking an editor (after searching their site for instructions on how to find it yourself).  I gather you are in need of something that specifically avoids the direct approaches, though, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to mention it.

Check out CrossMark. It is a link placed on the article's PDF which redirects to a web page that tells you whether the document is current or there are new versions. I know that at least some IoP journals use it. Here: http://www.crossref.org/crossmark/

Retraction Watch has recently announced a collaboration with  The Center For Open Science (COS) to create a free, comprehensive database of retractions.

Together, COS and CSI will develop the technical infrastructure needed to support existing and new Retraction Watch content on the OSF. Further, COS will enhance discoverability and brand awareness by integrating this content into the SHARE Notify (http://osf.io/share) system, a searchable database of over 3 million research-related events, and by associating Retraction Watch content with related article DOIs when possible. With the technical support of COS, CSI can focus on delivering new content and developing new audiences that can make more informed decisions based on accurate research outputs.

It sounds like this database would allow you to search for articles by DOI and get retraction-related events.
(The database appears to already track retractions from PubMed Central; presumably Retraction Watch would be added as another data source.)

Update (2018-11-06 by shamisen): Retraction Watch launched its database: http://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx

Retraction Watch launched its database: http://retractiondatabase.org/

PubMed usually shows you whether an article has been retracted, corrected (errata), or has some comments.

(p.s. I don't have anything against Weinberg, it's just that I was doing some literature research and these two popped up among articles I had to cite. Clearly I won't cite the first one...)

I am not aware of many websites that operate across the spectrum of all of academia at once.  (This website is an exception!)  The closest thing I can think of is search engines like google scholar, which indeed could be of some use here.  In particular google scholar catches citations to articles more quickly than any "manual" service I know, so that whenever I find an article of interest to me I usually type it in to google and see what the internet turns up on it.
The other thing I can think of is that some academic fields have databases that carry, or purport to carry, bibliographic and review data for all articles that get published in that field.  For instance in mathematics there is Math Reviews / MathSciNet and Zentralblatt. In CS there is dblp.  So e.g. in MathSciNet if an erratum is published on an article, then the erratum will be linked to the article and the written review will most often be modified to take the erratum into account.  The caveat is that individual, busy people have to do this so it may take some time, and the publisher will need to report the erratum in the right way in order for the bibliographic information to find its way to the database.

All reputable journals will mention this on the website that matches the article in question. The other place to watch may be http://retractionwatch.com/ .

Thanks, the point of the question is to have one commonplace to perform the check, vs. going to the publisher's website.

authors: เสือดาว เอกปาทาน


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Is there any established database schema to store references?
I wonder whether there exists any well-established database schema(s) to store references.
For example, the Perl package Bib2ML (aka. Bib2HTML) contains a bib2sql tool that generates a SQL database from a BibTeX database, with the following schema:

If there is no well-established schema, I am still interested to know about alternatives. One can assume the data it contains can be extracted from the paper or the BibTeX (i.e. no need to be able to store information coming from other sources, and the focus is on the reference, not the paper's content).

What do you want to do? Why is a plain .bib file not enough?

@Davidmh A SQL database to make it easier to query a set of references.

I meant what do you want to do with that database, as opposed to plain bib?

@Davidmh query it

If you would consider an approach of storing bibliographic information in XML format, either directly (as XML files), or indirectly (via serialization or XML-to-RelationalDB conversion), you might find the following resources of interest (some of the resources are general and/or database-focused):

Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) by The Library of Congress (USA);
Standards at The Library of Congress page lists a host of relevant information;
Apache OpenOffice bibliographic implementation and bibliographic database information;
development documentation for any other open source bibliography management software (JabRef, Zotero, etc.); for more information, see this list;
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI);
List of citation standards, which might be used to store bibliographic metadata (by DCMI);
Finally, for the NoSQL way of doing things, consider using BibJSON schema and, for the linked data emphasis, consider using JSON-LD (also see this relevant article).

I expect most reference management software uses some sort of database system to store the local data in an easily accessible way.
In particular I know that Mendeley stores the local database using SQlite, although I doubt there is any common standard across different software.


text:
Should I stay in school?
I am most of the way through my freshman year at Washington State University, pursuing a BS in  Computer Science. Going away to school has been rough, and I have been pretty depressed for most of the time there. Right now, I am leaning towards not wanting to continue my education, but my parents are strongly opposed.
Why I don't think I need college
One of the main factors that is pushing me away from school is the fact that I already spend plenty of time working on my own software projects. On my own, I have gained extensive knowledge and experience with web application development, using platforms that are far too new to have a undergraduate class that teaches them. These are platforms used in real workplaces and production software, and I would not gain these skills in school.
Second, I have lost a lot of faith in my school after seeing so much incompetency from people who are meant to be educating me. The professors outsource a majority of their work to their TA's, who I feel I know more than. My Computer Science class is really just an entourage of TA's parroting the words of the professor, with embarrassingly little of their own understanding.
Another big reason is that for 10 weeks this summer, I will be travelling to Silicon Valley to take part in a 'startup accelerator program'. This is a program where already-established tech entrepreneurs and investors help people who are new to the game with building their product and starting their company. At the end of the 10 weeks, investors decide how much they want to put into each company, in exchange for some equity. Of the companies that go through these kinds of programs, a very high amount succeed. I feel that if the developers I am working with and I do well here (no, it is not guaranteed that we will make money), college is pointless for me.
What college is like for me now
College has been hard for me. Not because I am not capable of understanding the material, and not because I don't have enough time to get all my work done. I have been suffering in my classes because instead of going to class or finishing assignments, I work on my own projects.
Of course, if I forced myself to put time and effort into this work, I would achieve satisfactorily. However, that is much easier said than done.
In order to start caring about school, I would need to drop all my other software side-projects (or at least greatly limit the time I spend on them). Essentially, this is a choice, and right now I will always pick my own projects over school.
Do I really need school?
After all that I have seen about the limited job market (even for degree-holders) and all that I have experienced in school, I am really questioning whether I need to stay in school. Convince me whether or not I really need a BS, or any other advice you can give about the subject.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and answer this. I normally feel bad taking time away from other people for my own benefit, but this is a major life-decision, and I cannot properly come to consensus on my own.

I don't think you need to go to school to get an education.  I think your main problem is not "Do I really need school?" but "How do I convince my parents I don't need school?"

You also need to ask yourself where you want to end up with your computer science education.  If you want to just be building apps to start a company then school may not be important.  But if you want to move up into research level positions or in jobs that are more complex than just builidng apps a degree will help you get there faster.

This question and the excellent answers are likely to be of use to many others, and editing the title question will probably make it easier to find this through search engines and such. I was myself planning to ignore the question based on the subjective tone of the current question, and am very happy that I decided to read on.
I think something like "Useful criteria for choosing between a computer science degree and working on own start-up" would be accurate and inviting.
Sorry to bother you @eykanal but as we don't have moderators could you perhaps edit the question?

This question is perfect for this SE new site: area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/49571/teachers-school if you find it useful you can follow it and help us in making it more popular

Something to consider is that taking the time to learn CS at a deeper level will probably eventually make your own open source/personal projects better.  So you might consider it like an investment--there is some delay before you will see it pay off in terms that you care about.

I know from all too personal experience that it the easiest thing in the world to say "I could totally ace these assignments if I tried, but I can't be bothered to try." Talk is cheap. You may be different, but when I said stuff like that I was completely deluding myself.
You may be being too hard on your profs and TAs. CS departments generally don't cover specific development platforms in their classes because platforms come and go, sometimes in a shockingly short period of time. A good CS department is going to try to educate you in the foundations of CS and software engineering. Stuff that is not in the tech headlines now, but is more likely to still be relevant 10 years from now. Still, it may be that they aren't very good, in which case the solution is not necessarily to drop out, but to find a better department.
That said, if you aren't applying yourself in school, and aren't getting much out of it, then you probably should't be in school. However, if you are not going to be in school, you still have to move forward with your life. You can't just hop on the bus back home and let your parents support you. The accelerator sounds great, but it's a roll of the dice, so you need a backup plan. The obvious choices are joining the military and finding a job. I've never been in the military so I can't advise you about that. If you find a job that pays all your expenses, then your parents may be upset, but they can't really stop you. They probably will be less upset with you if you have a job in hand as you announce that you are leaving school. If you can't find a job that will support you, then that's a pretty critical piece of information, and it means you've either got to suck it up in school or join the military.
My suggestion would be to completely put aside your personal projects for the rest of the year. Focus on your schoolwork, and prove you aren't just blowing smoke, when you say you could excel at it. Prove it. At the end of the school year, start looking for a job. If you find a job that will pay all your living expenses, or if your accelerator works out, then take a leave of absence. If you prosper in your job or startup, great. If it doesn't work out or seems like a dead end you can go back to school. If you really want to pursue your projects as an entrepreneur, then live on Ramen, save every penny, and bankroll yourself for a couple of years.

+30 for "accelerator = roll of dice". Arguably, only 1 in 100 startups succeed. Keep the statistics in mind.

If only 1 in 100 startups succeed, all you'll need to do is start 100 of them.

@zzzzBov: Yeah, that's how probability works.

@NateEldredge, I was using more than a little hyperbole.

@zzzzBov - But that is how investors in startups work. They invest in many, knowing they will only get a few hits.

@BenNorris, right but that strategy only works if you have bags of money (preferably other people's money) laying around which you have no more profitable use for during the next ten years. It doesn't work very well if you're putting your rent and ramen on your Master Card.

What I was trying to get across is the idea that it's ok to fail; it's ok to make mistakes; it's ok to get things wrong. It's through failure that we learn.

This question on programmers SE might be interesting:http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/128263/years-experience-over-unfinished-degree. Bottom line there, just finish the degree.

I thought this was very wise advice with the notable exception of "The obvious choices are joining the military and finding a job."  Why on earth would joining the military be an obvious choice for a young person interested in software development??

@PeteL.Clark joining the military has nothing particularly to do with software development. I only mention it because the the OP still has to make his way in the world even if he can't find a job in software development. He wants out of school, unemployment in the US is still quite high for folks without a degree, so military service is an option.

Charles: Surely the OP is aware of the existence of the US Military.  I don't think the best advice gives an enumeration of all possible options, but if we were to go that way the OP has more options than you suggest.  He did not say that his parents would not be willing to support him; he said they were "strongly opposed" to his dropping out of college.  If my child wanted to drop out of college I too would be strongly opposed, but if he insisted I would certainly try to support him for awhile rather than have him enlist in the military!  Also he could perhaps crash on a friend's couch, etc.

In my opinion, for an intellectually driven young adult with some emotional stability issues, enlisting in the military is just about the worst thing that he could do.  Let's not forget that it is wartime: he could find himself in Afghanistan.  I find this throwaway remark strange as the rest of your post gives exactly the right advice: he should stay in school.  Further, he should spend a semester nailing his coursework whether it seems trivial to him or not.  If at the end of that semester he has all A's and still feels like he isn't learning much, he should transfer to a better school.

@PeteL.Clark As a combat veteran of two armies and three wars who has finally been able to do what I had originally set out to do 20 years ago and start my own software company, I have to say there are far worse things a young person who is still trying to figure themselves out can do than join the military. You'll not find an ex-infantryman in the world who will look back on his time in service and say "I didn't learn anything about the world, myself or how groups of people work while in the military, and those experiences are irrelevant to me today."

I also highly recommend internships/co-op during the summer time off. That is stuff that employers truly care about.

I am most of the way through my freshman year.... Going away to school has been rough, and I have been pretty depressed for most of the time there.

This strikes me as the most important part of your question.  I strongly encourage you to find help with your depression before you make a decision.  Talk with your faculty mentors, with friends, and with family.  Take advantage of your university's student counseling services.  Transitioning into adulthood is hard, whether you do it in school or out; you don't have do it alone.

+10000 for seeking professional help for depression.

Not really sure if you can decouple the emotion and being in university. If quitting could help in solving the emotion, doesn't that beat professional help? Shouldn't pro help just tell you to "suck it up or leave"?

@Lodewijk No, professional help should not just say "Suck it up"! That's not help; that's just bullying. Maybe the depression is tied to being a student, and maybe it isn't. That's one of the questions a competent counselor can help you figure out.

Competent is just the word and the problem with these sort of things. It's good advice, but finding someone competent seems unlikely to me. Maybe it's not, it's just how I perceive it atm.

finding someone competent seems unlikely to me — I guess I've had better luck than you. (Sorry to hear that.)  Certainly finding a good counselor requires some legwork, but I would be very surprised if finding one around WSU was impossible (esp. with U. Idaho less than 10 miles away).

I worked as a software engineer for a number of years before I decided to pursue a full-time BS in CS.  Getting a degree is one of the best decisions I ever made.
Given that it sounds like you already have a fair grasp on the principles of programming, it's not surprising that you haven't learned much in your first year. But that will quickly change! More advanced classes like Artificial Intelligence, Formal Language Theory, and Datastructures & Algorithms are very interesting.  In retrospect, the things I learned in those classes would have been immensely useful in both my side projects and my previous professional work as a software engineer.  They're also the types of things that would be incredibly hard to teach one's self outside of a classroom setting.
Also, remember that your professors are experts in very deep and specific areas in their sub-disciplines.  They're about as interested in teaching intro.-level CS classes as you are in taking them.  But once you start taking more advanced classes, you'll notice a much greater interest from the professors because they're teaching the state-of-the-art on the area in which they're specifically interested and expert.
As others have already noted, it also depends on what type of job you ultimately want.  If you want to start your own company and you already have all of the skills you need to do that, then a degree might be a waste of time.  If your dream is to work at a company like Google or Facebook, though, that will definitely not be the case.  I interviewed at a number of companies—including Google—after I graduated, and I can tell you that I would have never passed the technical interviews without what I learned at University.
Therefore, I'd say give it at least another year.  Talk to your academic advisors first and explain your situation.  Talk to some professors who are teaching more advanced classes and see if you can get them to waive the prerequisites so you can take them earlier.  Alternatively, universities often let you audit classes (i.e., sit in on the lectures for little or no credit without having to do the homework or take the exams).  I'd recommend sitting in on some of the more advanced classes to get a taste of the light at the end of the tunnel.

Another thing to consider--while a startup might be interesting to OP now, later in life he might prefer the stability of somewhere like a Facebook or Google.  Although I am intelligent and an experienced programmer, I can tell when I interview at places like that that I'm being asked questions that "speak the language" of those that have CS degrees.

This is my favorite answer. Distinguishing the difference between freshman level courses and upper level courses is really important.

(From my iPhone, please excuse typos)
It appears from my position that getting a BS is becoming more important as time goes on.  Many large/midsized companies won't even look at candidates without a degree.  (I have been around over 30 years working in startups to multinationals.)
It could be that you aren't mature enough yet for college.  Maturity can manifest itself in many ways.   One in particular is the idea that something long and difficult is not needed.  This kind of rationalization needs to be studied long and hard before acting on it.
I would suggest staying in school and getting that degree.  If you decide otherwise, then get a leave of absence from school for one year.  This saves your place without having to reapply.  You should also check a number of companies to determine their entrance criteria.   You will see that the industry is maturing and that your competition is jumping through the hoops in order to sustain their careers.
Finally, do as others have suggested, put the side projects away and start getting a good deal of As on tests/homework to be sure that you aren't just competent in CS.
Good luck and keep the faith.

+1 for "Maturity can manifest itself in many ways. One in particular is the idea that something long and difficult is not needed." I like the way that was worded.

Should I stay in school?

No
You're a big boy now and can make your own decisions. As condescending as that sounds, it's the simple truth. If you get a job and find a place to live, you will be just like the majority of people in the world who don't have a college degree, but are self sufficient.
American high schools tend to bully students into applying to college because it's The Right Thing To Do™, whether or not you have any interest in learning something that can actually be taught at college. We have a serious lack of skilled labor, and learning to weld is better done as an internship/apprenticeship than as an Associates where you only focus on the theory of welders.
Programming can be the same; having a mentor instead of a professor can get you on track to making money sooner, without the large bills associated with a 4-year program. Long term, however, your salary will probably be lower than someone who has a college degree.
But don't quit either
If your parents are encouraging you to continue college, and are helping you through it financially they should be receptive to the idea of you taking a moment to step back from academia to reassess your abilities, life goals, and options. If they're not helping you through it financially, then they don't have the right to decide how you spend your money (beyond paying for rent if you're living with them).
To most graduating highschoolers, I recommend taking some time off from learning. One year flipping burgers turns out to be a really strong motivator to get back into academia, and also gives a sense of perspective that most college freshman tend to lack.
If you decide yes, I need a degree you should then focus on finding a college that suits your personality. Don't just go for the big college because they have expensive new equipment; if you can connect with an experienced professor early on in your academic career, you will find yourself on stronger footing. If you don't like your classes, professors and TAs, continuing your college education at that particular school only serves to give away free money.
Unless you want to
If you decide no, I don't need a degree you should then focus on building up your skill set while you still have a strong family safety-net. Join a company that's working on stuff that you find interesting. You might need to start as a part-time unpaid intern working 60 hours a week between a job that pays and a job that teaches. Either way, success isn't easy.
If it costs $20,000/year for 4 years to earn a BS, you're spending $80,000, assuming you complete the degree in 4 years. If you've got the drive, you could start a small business with a small portion of those funds.
And remember that failure is always an option. It's ok to fail. You don't learn from getting things right, you learn from getting them wrong.

Protip: schools abroad are MUCH cheaper and you may even get a grant!

TL;DR:
If you want to learn things you would never be exposed to otherwise
and actually have some grokness without strings attached:
    Stay in school, but deliberately seek difficult courses on old-fashioned
    topics such as compiler design, operating systems, electrical engineering
    media fabrication (actually way cool), graph theory, set theory, etc.
Elif you just want a paycheck for the next few years working in some cool
framework or other flavor-of-the-week:
    Drop out *in good standing* and get a job in some startup company with
    the prior knowledge that it will fail, and if it doesn't a little
    success will transform the place you liked into a place you don't, and
    if not then you will eventually go from solving trivial problems you do
    know how to solve to solving non-trivial problems you lack the grokpower
    to tackle because you neglected to pay your intellectual dues.
Else:
    Change major, because this stuff just isn't for you, and I can't bear to
    knowingly recommend that someone of obvious intelligence relegate
    themselves to being another member in the Mole Man Army.

There are some interesting responses here; I can only tell you what I have experienced myself. What follows is a huge digression, but one that will hopefully illustrate the fact that you can't know the future, opportunity is entirely random, and old-fashioned hard work (often academic in nature) is the only way to satisfy the "preparedness" part of the luck/genius equation.
I got involved in phreaking and computers when I was quite young, wrote quite a bit of useful software as a kid, never did homework but aced all my tests in school, did well in sports by hiding my inner geek from the rest of the team, etc. I was (and still am) obsessed with the idea of eventually starting my own computing services (hardware, software, everything) company. I studied a lot on my own on subjects not taught in my school and my grades (ironically) sometimes suffered from it. An emotional/social rift opened between me and the idea of school, me viewing it as worthless, the system viewing me as a misfit. Probably not entirely different from you, though the threads of the tapestry no doubt differ.
Recognizing this wasn't a sustainable situation I requested that my father send me to a military school so I could be forced into a regimented program. I wound up attending a great military high school where the high school classes were taught by the same faculty as the college classes and learned a great deal about myself, the world, and the nature of opportunity. I also learned just how amazing great educators can be -- a lesson that didn't stick until a decade of reflection had passed. I also decided to not attend college against the advice of my mentors and advisers. My parents, however, let me do whatever I thought best.
My family is a bit plain: if I fail they won't help me because I've proven that I was a bad egg; if I succeed, however, I will be celebrated and given responsibility. I thought this terribly cold when I was younger, but have come to realize this is how the successful parts of the world work, except in the real world there is a strong chance nobody will subsidize your food or shelter (and if someone does it is usually a sign of an impending systemic failure). Though this has seen me in a few tight situations I have to say it has taught me a lot, and if my siblings and our general family relationship are any indication, it seems to work amazingly well.
I didn't land an awesome programming job after turning down university acceptance letters. I got interested in the larger world and spent almost the next two decades traveling, teaching (yeah, weird), or in this or that military (most recently involved in the whole GWOT thing, first in the Army, then in a few different contract organizations). My ultimate goal of running a computing company was always in the back of my mind, but the time was never right and I was so involved in other things it just seemed like a different world.
Until I got out. Now I have started that company, things are finally beginning to pick up (after a long dry stretch, survivable mostly because of the community surrounding my ex-military relationships), and I can see a tiny bit of light at the end of this long, extremely difficult, lonely tunnel.
Which brings me back to school and my not having been exposed to much of it. Because I didn't go to school I didn't even know there were canonical references to a huge set of problem spaces. I didn't know how freaking important it was to learn the precise differences between analog and digital data before trying to solve a really expensive customer problem that requires a customized hardware solution (and before you think that is a simple difference, go study up on it). I didn't really understand that the hyped frameworks are basically giant cake-sacks of leaky abstractions which fail the moment a new real-world requirement is thrown at them (usually something innocuous, like a customer saying "in the next version, we really need screen X to show Y" -- and of course you, not realizing how scary a statement that is, simply say "sure!"). I had no idea how prolific operating systems are, or how fleeting their lives in the market. I didn't understand exactly how software is the thing that lets us emulate different machines within other hardware machines, and why that nugget of esoteric knowledge is so incredibly central to everything I will likely be doing for the next few decades of my life (and I say "life", not "career", deliberately). I hadn't even matured enough as a programmer to develop a healthy baseline disdain for all programming languages.
But I also realize now, after having interviewed and hired people, that most schools simply do not teach the things that need to be taught, and most people are simply too dull to grok the things I need them to grok and would have failed out of the courses I wish they had attended. And that sucks.
So looking at it from the other side of the table, I would urge you to not go on a 20-year action adventure as I did (unless that's your thing; I have no regrets) but not simply "stay in school" for the sake of getting some worthless paper that conveys nothing about your actual potential to a prospective employer such as myself. Instead I would urge you to seek out the hardest, most difficult low-level and high-level courses you can find that deal with computing. This may require that you achieve decent grades in some courses now to be eligible for the interesting stuff later, which may simply be the universe giving you a lesson in humility and due-paying (hint: it is easier to control your own expectations about life than to control the outcome of each phase of it).
You'll never "finish" in this field, so what you should seek is a strong foundation in leading concepts and underlying principles. You'll do a lot of learning/discovery by composing new ideas from seemingly unrelated concepts you've picked up by way of association with stellar people in your studies, but long after the base ideas were acquired. Being in a good comp-sci or engineering department is one of a very few ways of guaranteeing that you will constantly be exposed to such people. I view this as one of the most important elements of official schooling, and something online education will probably never be able to replicate (and hence I view resumes full of online degrees with suspicion; actually, I have my minions black out those lines before I get the resume if they think the rest of it is worthy).
But all of this is dependent on your goals, of course, which is why I wrote the if-elif-else clause above. I might be misjudging you, but I can easily imagine myself writing a very similar question two decades ago on Usenet, and wish someone would have written this sort of post out then (come to think of it, I may have had just such a conversation back then, and disregarded the advice as I was so wont to do).

This is basically my story too. I've heard it a thousand times. College is "boot camp" for real life, and folks like us need it.

Great answer. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I had to look up the definition of "grok."

@MadJack Bah, I think that term is probably a bit archaic today. I probably should refrain from using any terms that have an entry in the Jargon File.

There are many answers already but I'll add one more for future generations looking for an answer to a very important question.
I've worked with a lot of people who either dropped out of university or never went so they could focus on working writing software. In general, they've done pretty well. Some have difficulties recently because they were bad at managing their money but they made A LOT because they were following their dream and worked 80 hours per week on their dream. This accumulated effort built into a very solid skill-set which was in very high demand from employers. Some started software companies, some just consulted. All ended up making a lot of money (not all of them kept it).
I think programming for the business world is a bit different from other academic pursuits. In my experience (having consulted to the very large, the very small, and everything in between), businesses really care about one thing: How can you make me money. Academics care about much more. So, if you want to write software for the business world and you don't see the benefit in university, then forget it. You can always go back.
All that said, an education is always a good idea. Of course, you don't have to get your education formally, it can be on your own, but a formal education is cared about by some...but in business, people generally care more about your ability to make them money.
If you want to be conservative/safe, then you should stick it out in school. However, since you're young, roll the dice and prepare to pick up the pieces in case it doesn't work out. Don't give up on your dreams. Dreams drive us to put in more effort and to learn more and that is where the fun is.

My 2cts, do note that I have a number of degrees, so I might be biased towards getting degrees :).
Getting a degree shows that;

You have acquired some technical skills (algorithms, software design, data structures), and skills how to learn new things. Ofcourse, you can get these outside an official school, but a degree shows that after a few years a (relatively) objective source (the school) says that you have these skills. Unless you have developed some groundbreaking piece of software that everyone knows, it is hard to convince a potential employer that you really can do what you say.
you can finish something you started. Getting a degree takes three years of work and perseverance, more if you go for an MSc or PhD.

Exactly I had the same feeling like you except in a 3rd world country. The school was bad, professors were not teaching properly and I also had a good income by doing freelance jobs. But when time passes and when you reach upper division courses you will want to stick to school. At least this was how it happened to me and now I want to continue with grad school to further get involved with the field.

Formal education is more and more overrated in the current fast-paced world.
And especially in IT, were they are less traditional and more meritocratic than virtually anywhere else. They care more for you experience that your academic degree (or lack of it). And more years doing coursework means less years gaining real experience (unless the courses are really great and  you can benefit from them).
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg may be only a few stellar examples. There are many programmers at any levels who dropped out because of their start-ups... or even regular jobs.
However, there are good and bad reasons for leaving studies (there was a list somewhere but someone clearly more competent than me). Good when you see that the university is stealing your valuable time from your job/start-up. When you currently have no, then it may be not the best idea.
Some random links:

Turn On, Code In, Drop Out: Tech Programmers Don’t Need College Diplomas
Higher Education Is Overrated; Skills Aren't

I think in general a degree is quite important, people like Zuckerberg and Gates are an exception on which I would not base a decision. Sounds a bit like: My grandpa became 85 smoking two packs a sigarets a day, why should I stop smoking.

@PaulHiemstra Actually, I know a few (smart) friends who never finished their degree, because of (very successful) programming career.

There are probably also a lot of people who are flipping hamburgers because of a lack of a degree. I think in general a degree is a good thing.

@PaulHiemstra And there is a lot of people with a degree, flipping hamburgers. My answer above was for "people in IT, already doing something" and may not apply to other situations (e.g. in science you need to have a degree, not matter how smart you are).

In spite of the large monetary and time cost of getting a college degree in CS,
I believe that it is still a good idea to get your degree.
The main reason (to me) that a college degree is valuable
is that in order to get a degree,
you must learn the critical skill of self-regulation.
Regardless of your future employment,
there will be times when your work is going to be boring,
but nevertheless the boring work needs to be completed
for you to move forward in your life.
Are you able to discipline yourself in order to do what needs to be done
rather than what you want to do?
Another useful workplace skill that you can develop during college is
how to organize your time,
how to work in teams,
and how to juggle multiple classes + projects + assignments.
Finally, another way to look at this decision is in terms of maximizing your minimum level of achievement.

If you achieve good grades at school or quit school now,
it may hurt your chances of getting a job at Google or Facebook in the future.
So you may regret this decision if your future desires/circumstances change.
Conversely, if you go to school,
you would find yourself slightly more qualified
(by being certified as having a degree)
than you would be without a degree.
Your worst job offer with a good degree is probably at least as good as
your worst job offer if you drop out of school now.

In the language of optimization,
getting a good degree is a more "robust" strategy.