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Are students who are asylees eligible for National Science Foundation (NSF) grants?
Are graduate students who are asylees pursuing a doctorate able to apply for funding from the National Science Foundation?
According to the proposal preparation and submission guidelines (part E):

Graduate students are not encouraged to submit research proposals, but should arrange to serve as research assistants to faculty members. Some NSF divisions accept proposals for Doctoral Dissertation Research Grants when submitted by a faculty member on behalf of the graduate student.

The guideline also says that one category of applicants for funding are:

Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) - Two- and four-year IHEs (including community colleges) accredited in, and having a campus located in the US, acting on behalf of their faculty members.

Does this mean faculty can apply for NSF funding through their academic institution for a student who has been granted asylum but is not yet a permanent resident?

We're in no position to answer officially for the NSF, so you should contact the NSF to get an official answer.  However, it's quite common for non-resident alien students on F1 visas to be supported as research assistants on NSF grants, so I doubt that there would be any problem with an asylee being supported as an RA.  On the other hand, only US citizens and permanent residents are elligible for the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

@BrianBorchers, this would be a nice answer...

The OP seems to have a misunderstanding about how NSF funding works- faculty members don't generally write a proposal to support a particular student, but rather to support a research program that might involve hiring one or more RA's, who might not be US citizens or residents.  The GPRF is really the only way that a student can get funding to do a Ph.D., but it is limited to US citizens and permanent residents.

@BrianBorchers Indeed, my understanding of the NSF grant process was lacking. The comments here clarified the issue.

That's a great question to ask the NSF directly, but generally everything the NSF does distinguishes people only by the following categories:

Their position in their career. For example, some programs are only available to graduate students, to early career faculty, etc.
Their citizenship status. Some programs are only available to citizens and  permanent residents, but not others.

I have never seen a distinction based on the exact non-citizen (non-permanent resident) status. That would mean that it doesn't matter whether you are a student residing legally in the US because you have an F-1 visa, are an asylee, or are in the country through any other legal means.
(I will say that just because I haven't ever seen such a distinction doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But I suspect the NSF doesn't care about these things.)

Your reference to “citizenship status” is misleading. As far as I know, no NSF funding opportunity is available to citizens but not to permanent residents. If you know of such an opportunity, please post a link to it, otherwise I think it would be good if you edit your answer to avoid creating a (very probably) false impression that NSF treats permanent residents differently from citizens.

The asylum issue would in principle come up only when the student tries to get employment through the university, as they would need a visa that allows them to work as an RA.

@DanRomik -- I don't know any, I was just hedging my bets.


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Publishing with/without advisor as new Master student
I am a new master student in a ranked university. The academic program I have been admitted involves doing a Master and then continuing for a PhD (after fulfilling adequate academic requirements). As an undergrad, I published some papers as first author, and I am very familiar with the whole process, to the point where I can get papers accepted on my own. Now, I have some ideas lying around which I could quickly turn into papers.
However, as a first-year master student, I was told that I am not expected to do research (due to the tough courses). I also don't get a fixed advisor until I start the PhD part of the program. So I could just publish on my own. I don't want to sound arrogant, but I am very familiar with the topics and the literature of my current paper ideas, and have no real need for feedback in order to get them accepted on a good journal. I am not sure about the possible disadvantages later on. Here are my possible choices:

Publish on my own, with university affiliation.
Contact a professor (potential advisor later on), ask for feedback, and probably publish with him as coauthor.
Wait until I begin the PhD, and then start pumping the papers.

What is the most sensible choice?

Not expected to, or expected not to? Presumably it's the first, which means they want you to prioritize the courses, but there's no reason not to get a head start on research if you have spare time.

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Can administrative work benefit a PostDoc?
Imagine a relatively new Postdoc. She joined a new group (3-5 PhDs, 1 Prof.) and due to 'special circumstances' (Prof. too busy and mostly unavailable) is now responsible for all the PhD and Master/Bachelor students, as well as teaching obligations.
The Prof. believes highly in the Postdoc and has given her control over most of the administrative things that needs to be done, e.g. signing documents, hiring new people, choosing research topics, etc. There is a lot of freedom.
The Postdoc believes that these tasks are a good test to find out if she is interested in being a Prof. one day because they give first hand experience.
Question: The administrative tasks are taking too much of her time, there is hardly any time left for research. Will this administrative work be seen positively by a selection committee in the future, and can it replace "publishing very high quality research papers" to some extent?

Learning to work with and through others is good prep. I would hope that her work with the PhDs and students on research directions would result in multiple papers. Most might well have the PhDs as first authors, but she should be able to get a few with her as first author as well.

I'm confused as to whether you include student supervision and teaching under the term "administrative work". Supervision of PhD students definitely helps your career, as it leads to papers and, well, PhD student supervision experience. BSc and MSc supervision experience can help, but usually less so than PhD students.

I find the hypothetical language to be distracting and not useful to asking the question.

On the hiring committees I've sat on, we valued administrative experience even for those straight out of grad school. It will depend on the institution, the specific people on the hiring committee, and what else is on your CV. It's very subjective, but more experience in everything is generally better. Of course, research is the most important thing, generally, somewhat paradoxically, even for teaching institutions in many cases.

No, administrative work will not 'replace "publishing very high quality research papers"'.
From my experience in biomedical sciences (I understand from your posting history you are in natural sciences), newly hired independent investigators are expected to have a clear history of publishing novel, exciting research manuscripts. These should be first or last author publications.
Selection committees receive huge numbers of applications, and there is no objective way to quantitate the types of administrative responsibilities you describe. Therefore, you should strive to balance these responsibilities with the primary goal of publishing your own research papers.
Of course, it's easy for me to say that you need to do less administrative work. I would recommend trying to gently bring up this problem with your advisor. One potential way to frame the discussion would be, "I really appreciate you giving me the freedom and responsibility to hire folks and choose our research direction. At the same time, I worry the time this takes is limiting my ability to focus on the research. I wonder if you have any ideas on how I might get some assistance with these responsibilities."

I would presume the potential benefits to be primarily in what the postdoc learns about the job, and not about how others evaluate the postdoc's competence.
That is, it is very helpful to the post doc to learn about the underlying academic systems like managing finances and employee management. However, helpful as they may be, these things are not going to be valued on a resume.
Choosing research topics seems very strange to include on a list of "administrative" tasks, though: that's a task quite central to any research program, not administrative at all. And while "doing paperwork for hiring" is not going to be useful on a resume, a record of successful mentoring of students and staff certainly can be.
It is still most important for research-focused jobs (such as tenure-track positions at research universities) to have successful individual research progress, and if these other tasks are preventing any research progress that seems like a substantial problem.
I would also be a little wary of the gender roles in this situation, as there are common stories of women specifically being assigned or taking on a more administrative role, to the eventual detriment of their career. See for example Monroe, K., Ozyurt, S., Wrigley, T., & Alexander, A. (2008). Gender equality in academia: Bad news from the trenches, and some possible solutions. Perspectives on politics, 6(2), 215-233.

Great point about gender roles.

The gender for the post was picked randomly without recourse to the factual situation.

@quantacad that is not a great idea - there is an easy way to just use gender neutral language (use they instead of he or him) because there are gender specific issues that might factor in to this question and by "pretending" that the person in question is female, you influence the answers.

Research administrator here from an R1 university (in the US).  I've worked with labs in pre- and post-award for 13 years.  Here's what I can tell you about working with researchers who learn admin tasks (like proposal writing, finance work, contracting, etc.).  If the postdoc's intention is to be a PI -- there is no "PI School".  This is an academic's only chance to learn these things before that work is "assigned".  Once it's assigned, administrators assume you will know how to do things.  This is not the case for postdocs and students.  In my experience working with hundreds of my peers, we have some pity on the fact they are asked to do things they are not responsible for and will be elated that they take an interest in our work.  We know that most groups cannot afford lab managers, and some PIs do expect postdocs to help shoulder this burden.  In my experience, this is very normal in large labs, and in particular the natural sciences.
My advice for any postdoc or student is to learn how the basic components of the research actually work.  You don't have to become friends with the administrators in your department, but it can have tremendous benefits.  When I worked in a Chemistry department, I would have students come and bring me tea and ask me to help get them out of jam by ordering supplies on rush.  They came to me when the dry ice didn't arrive on time.  When the copier jammed, they knew I was the one to help.  How to tell if the fax went through?  Ask me.  When they wanted to put in fellowship proposals, they came to me and I taught them how to pace their work.  I taught them as much as I could about how my world works, and when I left that job, I received an outpouring of departing words and gifts primarily from students.  I have never forgotten them, even though I left that job 8 years ago.
The main complaint I have about researchers I've worked with is that they tend to assume "admin work" is a waste of time.  It's an attitude that is pretty insulting to me and my peers, who dedicate our lives to this work.  Ideally, this should be a partnership.  I'm here to support the research, help me help you.  If you want your supplies to arrive on time, please don't come to me at 4:45pm on a Friday and expect me to put it through the system.  Be thoughtful and plan ahead.  Know who the approvers are and be kind to them.  Our most effective students and postdocs do better in their research because they know the staff and get more out of the experience.  It's an investment.
I'm working with a postdoc on a K99 application right now, and I take the time to make sure they are more likely to get that award--I am going out of my way for this person because they take the proposal process seriously and do their part, respecting deadlines.  The central office deadline is Friday, but I'm going to ask to get her an extension until Tuesday.  I do that because of her performance with administrative tasks.  I am trying to get another postdoc to file their IRB paperwork, and it has been an extremely difficult process.  The attitude of that postdoc is that all of this work is my work, and so I am not going to put myself out to help him.  He is jeopardizing his own research by not digging into the paperwork as I asked, continuing to delay approvals on his research.
When I get assigned a junior PI, I can tell immediately if they have "it".  When they pay attention to admin policies, work with me, their proposals get funded.  The ones who always put "admin" off until the end, like an afterthought, usually lack project management skills.  In the end, university research requires strong project management skills.  You need to learn who your stakeholders are and manage them.  I entirely agree that there will be nothing on your resume that shows one's awesome administrative skills.  However, in my experience, those who are most effective in their research are the same ones who come to me with problems and the understanding that I spend my time on a solution.  It's the partnership with administration that makes them effective.
All this being said -- if the postdoc's work is actually slipping -- they can't keep up with the basic research, there is a problem.  Make sure the administrative work is being done effectively -- find good staff members in the department and ask for help. Learn the policies and procedures to avoid wasting time.  If it's still too much, then yes, it's time to lower the amount of burden.

Assuming the postdoc is interested in assuming an academic career, the postdoc should be in a mad rush to do whatever is necessary to help them land that first assistant professorship.
If the experience before the postdoc does not demonstrate any supervisory experiences, then it might be helpful if some of that happened during the postdoc.  If the postdoc is looking for a pure teaching position, it might be helpful to take on more than "some"
However, the big question mark in faculty recruiting is "is the applicant's research sufficient to drive a career?"  This would mean that that vast majority of the applicants time should go toward research and publication.
The situation has the feel of a "bait and switch" to me.  If the investigator was looking for a lab manager, they should have hired a lab manager.
All that said, a quote often misattributed to Einstein says "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity".  The postdoc might well consider whether the "Special Circumstances" might be a platform to negotiate for more money, commensurate with the responsibilities, or even a permanent position, depending upon how "Special" the Special Circumstances are.

Having served on and chaired many biology and biomedical sciences faculty search committees at R1 universities, I would say the answer is absolutely not. Committees typically have to go through a very large number of candidates to produce a small short list of people to be interviewed. Nobody has time to wade through the descriptions of supposed administrative activities while we construct this short list.  We scrutinize publications, grant history, (or at least grant potential), and the candidate's statement on what problems they plan to pursue if they are given an independent position. We also look at the letters of recommendation. Then we look at any teaching history, and their statement of teaching interests. But for sure the first thing we do on the CV is go straight to the publication list.  It's good to have an idea how to run a lab. But if you don't have a competitive publication track record you will never get your foot in the door. So you need to make sure that these extra responsibilities are not hindering your productivity. I would also suggest based on what you're saying that your postdoctoral advisor is not helping you by having you do a lot of things that he or she should be doing.  To me it seems almost abusive.

Let me offer a slightly different perspective on the issue. For the record: I am a mathematician but I am well-familiar with hiring/promotion practices in lab sciences.

If a postdoc is planning to apply for tenure-track jobs in academia or to have a career as a self-supported (through grants) researcher in academia, then, as others have said, no administrative experience will serve as a substitute for a strong publication record. However, this happens quite often that lab's PI dumps administrative duties onto their postdocs (and even on their students), to the detriment of postdoc's future academic career. This should not be happening, but it does.

However, there are other research jobs in academia, where people are hired and promoted based on parameters other than publications (and where publications are not even required!). These are typically "specialist" jobs in labs. Some (of course, not all!) of the specialists are hired for their administrative skills after completing their postdocs (I have seeing enough of such hires through my oversight work). If, for whatever reason, a postdoc is planning to apply for such a position (for instance, as a way to solve a "2-body problem" or because they were told by their PI that such a job will be available in their lab while getting a more regular academic position will be difficult if not impossible), then having relevant administrative skills will be the key (and some of the specialists are hired with very few or no publications). Why would a PI want to hire a PhD with a postdoctoral experience to do administrative work instead of hiring somebody with just an MA/MS degree is another question (and I can offer some insight here as well), but some of them do.

I've been on hiring committees when hiring pure mathematicians/data scientists at an R1 Ph.D. granting university.  Short answers:
1: "Will this administrative work be seen positively by a selection committee in the future?"  Sure.  It's nice to see someone at an early age proving that the they are competent/willing to do admin work.  But it's understood that time and opportunities to do this at the postdoc stage in one's career is limited!
2:  "can it replace "publishing very high quality research papers" to some extent?"  HELL NO!  Without high quality research we frankly don't even look at candidates. Why would we? Your job first and foremost is research! It also would look really weird to carry a lot of admin roles without prioritizing research at this level.

Speaking from the experience of someone who has sat on a tenure track hiring committee at an R1, there is two types of administrative work that can be beneficial to put on your resume (from the list of things you describe in your post): writing grants and mentoring students. Everything else will not count toward your goal. I do agree with others that your number one priority should be high quality research - both in terms of impact and venue.

The answer is no. Especially for the first post doc. Some things, like choosing a research topic, do not constitute admin work, though.

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Is there any guidance on how to properly cite when using the alphabetic style from BiBLaTeX?
I am looking for some specifications on how to use the alphabetic style for citing properly. I know that there are different solutions and that this is highly related to personal preference or specific requirements. But maybe there is some common way to do it. Consider the following three examples:

[...] was already shown in 1998 by Johnson et al. [JHS98] to demonstrate the specific deployment.
[...] was already shown in 1998 by Johnson et al. to demonstrate the specific deployment [JHS98].
[...] was already shown in 1998 by [JHS98] to demonstrate the specific deployment.

Which one would you consider the most standard or most used way?

The conventions differ somewhat across fields. So, please state your field in a tag. I have a feeling that mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists don't have a problem with (3), while I've been taught that (3) is an abuse of notation: "The sentence should read fine and make perfectly sense if you omit the brackets of citation".

@OlegLobachev This is one of the few things where it seems that math and theoretical CS do things differently (at least judging from comments by JeffE on this site).

Numbers 1. and 2. sound perfectly fine to me and are a matter of your personal style. 3. sounds a little unpolished to me and an editor or copy editor might smooth it to one of 1. or 2.

I recommend (2), followed by (1) then (3), but my answer is subjective. The citation breaks the flow in (1) and (3), and I consider (3) bad form because the sentence doesn't make sense when the citation is removed.

Why is it bad if a sentence stops making sense after a part of it has been removed?

@TobiasKildetoft It doesn't, in general. It should for the case of a citation; I was trying to introduce a heuristic. Put another way, "by [JHS98]" is an abuse.

I have heard that many times, but at the same time I work in a field where this is definitely not the rule, so I am trying to understand why citations are considered so different from any other part of the sentence in many (if not most) fields.

@TobiasKildetoft Do you never consider such examples abuse? (I certainly concede that rules should be broken, e.g., using "e.g., [1,2,3]" or "By [1], we have..." But, I believe it's a good rule in general.)

I don't see why I should consider it abuse. It is similar to the use of placeholders for other types of objects like theorems or equations, which definitely need to be able to take an active part in a sentence to make things flow properly. Similarly, one can much more easily refer to the precise way in which a reference is used when allowing it to take part, like "by an argument similar to the proof of [1, Thm. 2]."

But, you can rephrase your example without losing any precision.

I don't see how to do that without making the sentence a lot harder to read.

by a similar argument posed by  [1, Thm 2] or by a similar argument posed by  [1, Proof of Thm 2]

Until there are six authors with very long names...

Would you consider it bad form when using (2) but without the year in text? Like: [...] was already shown by Johnson et al. to demonstrate the specific deployment [JHS98].

@FedericoPoloni Six authors is easier than three or four (depending on your style guide), because you can use et al

@conste I generally favour omitting the year


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Publishing into journals as an independent undergraduate researcher
I'm an undergraduate student looking to publish 2 papers in materials physics on novel research. I've lead the project on my own as an independent research, but have worked with the departments and faculty to gain access to several of my universities labs to conduct the research. I have no clear supervisor or adviser for the project though, and have a few questions regarding the submission of papers to journals as an undergraduate.

Would I be discriminated against due to the lack of qualifications
Is it appropriate for an undergraduate student to submit a manuscript to a journal.
What journals have low to no cost for manuscripts, the project is self funded and I doubt I'll be able to financially support the extraordinary fees I've seen from some journals.

I understand the paper can be posted on ArXiv or ResearchGate, but that nullifies the legitimacy of it being called a publication. The professors I've spoken to have suggested the paper could be submitted to well ranked journals, and wish to have it published in a well respected journal.  Frankly I'm just unsure how I should approach submitting my manuscripts as an undergraduate.

No. 2) Yes. 3) This is a "shopping question" (off topic). My advice is to ask your professor what journal you can submit to, and discuss the fees with them.

Even if you haven't had a clear advisor, you should ask at least one of the professors you have been involved with to help you with the publication process. They are the one that can answer these questions for your specific work: we can't help with your specific work here, only answer questions that are more broadly applicable to other people.

Editors don't normally look at your "qualifications" when evaluating a paper. It is actually unprofessional. The work should stand on its own.
You don't need degrees, or specifically advanced degrees to submit. Again, the work...
The costs are a different matter. I can't know the policies of all journals, but for some, at least (I hope it is still true), the following applies. First try to charge the funding agency of the research. Second, to charge the submitter's institution if available. Third (maybe second), charge the submitter. Fourth, if no one pays, absorb the costs internally.
I'm especially not certain of the fourth point, but it used to be true for some reputable journals.
My advice would be to submit the paper to the most appropriate journal, ignoring costs. But also ask your department if, in the eventuality that it is accepted, they would pay. If they say no, submit anyway.
Deal with the issue of getting a personal bill only when it arrives. Possibly just by saying it is impossible for you to absorb the cost as an unsponsored researcher. If they then refuse to publish it, you have at least benefitted from some review of your ideas.
Journals normally expect that researchers have some funding and that the funding includes covering page fees for the resulting research. Funding agencies benefit from being mentioned in the papers produced. But that doesn't apply to you and journals may still be able to make exceptions "for the greater good."

Costs shouldn't be a matter. Just submit to a subscription journal. There're plenty of researchers from developing countries who simply cannot afford to publish open access; that doesn't stop them from getting published entirely.

It is important to define what “work” means. It is not the written paper which is a 20 pages PDF file. “Work” means, the group interaction with professionals. That are the numbers of e-mails send back and forth, and the number of personal talks the undergraduate was involved. Or to be more specific: if somebody has written a nobel-prize ready paper alone and was not involved in any group activity it will never get published.

1) No, not specifically because you are an undergrad. Often peer-review is conducted on anonymized papers. Your lack of experience might play against you but you should by all means try.
2) Yes it happens, although usually it is with support from more established researchers.
3) It's a pity that thanks to the "open access" hype, people now wonder how they can afford to publish papers. Just pick a subscription-based journal that will publish at no cost to you.

About #1, I think in most fields double- blinded peer review is the exception, not the norm.

@Allure thanks for you comment, I have edited accordingly.

Since this question is about material physics, from my experience in physics reviews aren't double blind, only the reviewer is unknown. Often I may be able to find the full paper by searching its name in arxiv before accepting or rejecting it.

With regard to the cost issue, you should probably research what precisely those fees you mention are charged for. At least for the fields I publish in, many if not most reputable journals have a path to publish at zero cost to the authors, providing you:

Don't want colour plates in the paper version of your article
Keep the submission below a certain length
Accept very bad terms regarding open access (i.e never, or with a very long embargo)
Don't use any of the optional, fee-driven methods to increase exposure.

Number 3 in particular is an example of an airline style method of charging. Public funding bodies tend to demand open access on publications, but then provide the money to pay the publishers to allow it.

I think #3 is too strong. Most publishers are fine if the author distributes preprints.

@Allure Preprints are not the published paper, and if not in open access give no mechanism for others to confirm their legitimacy and accuracy. Fairly frequently they don't meet funder requirements either, which need the published version archived in repositories.

I haven't heard of a preprint that's substantially different from the published paper. If substantial changes were included during copyediting etc, then surely the authors can also update the preprint. Also, if a funder is involved, then they should have provided the funds to make a paper open access, so the author never has to pay the costs.

@Allure That sounds like you're talking about what I know as post prints (i.e. author post acceptance) if you're talking about copy-editing. There's a fairly sharp drop-off in how acceptable publishers view distribution around this point.


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Suggesting Reviewers: How to find institutional affiliations
Many journals recommend that authors suggest potential reviewers. They also often require the institutional affiliation to be listed. However, many researchers who have published in relevant, high-level journals do not necessarily have this information public and some are not affiliated with an institution at all.
How should I proceed in these situations?

If they don't have active websites, do you really want them as reviewers? Hint: Reviewers should be easily reachable :)

Show me a university that does not publicly list its faculty.  I claim no such institution exists.

@DavidKetcheson they certainly do exist, although they tend to be quite obscure. For example, An Hui Normal University - I grant I didn't search thoroughly, but when I poked around the website just now I didn't find any list of faculty.

@scaaahu but can you find a list of faculty?

@Allure In Chinese, yes, e.g. faculty of Physics and Electronic Information http://physics.ahnu.edu.cn/5536/view . In English, I am afraid not.

@Allure On their English web page http://www2.ahnu.edu.cn/english/ , they provide contact us button http://www.ahnu.edu.cn/3217/view which gives out their webmaster email address, you can use that address to ask a particular faculty member's address. This is the only way for non-Chinese speaking people to find out how to contact them, I think. My point is that you can find them if you want to.

@scaaahu very impressive. Curious: how'd you get there from their English webpage? Which links did you click?

@Allure Actually, I think using Baidu is much easier than using Google when searching for info in China. You go to Baidu, enter Anhui normal university, you'll find a lot info about that school in English and Chinese. Google tried very hard to get into China, never succeeded. I think this is part of what Trump is trying to do.

@Allure I used Baidu and found a web page https://www.researchgate.net/institution/Anhui_Normal_University/members which has 375 members. I don't know if it has the thing you look for.

@scaaahu great, I will try that next time instead of trying to click around the institution's website.

How do you know of these potential reviewers in the first place?
If you know them personally, then you probably also know which institution they're in. If you don't know them personally but have read their papers which are intimately related to yours, then you can look at the first page of their papers to see their affiliation. If you read of them from books, you can still look at the title pages which should list their affiliation.
If they don't have affiliations, then simply write "unaffiliated".


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What counts as an academic affiliation for arXiv?
Is it just being enrolled at a university with a recognized school email address?

arXiv states (step 2 of registration):

Claimed affiliation should be current in the conventional sense: e.g., physical presence, funding, email address, mention on institutional web pages, etc.

arXiv's notion of conventional sense seems peculiar. They omit perhaps the most common conventional notion of affiliation: employee. Other common notions -- e.g., those involving some written agreement -- are also omitted. (Perhaps arXiv want ties beyond employment or perhaps this was an oversight.)

My question is whether you need all of those qualifications. For example, if I have an email, a physical presence, and a mention on the institutional web page, but no funding, is this acceptable? Does the statement imply needing all of the qualifications, or some?

@TejasRao It's unclear what funding means in this instance. It could mean salary, but funding is a peculiar choice of synonym, so perhaps it means grant associated with the affiliation. Given that many researchers -- including most PhD students -- don't have funding, you can assume that it isn't required. More generally, you don't need to satisfy all of those criterion. Thus, a part-time researcher without physical presence, but with an email address and mention on institutional web pages, would be considered as affiliation.


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Archiving homework answers from a class
I have taken a math class and answered homework questions from a text (FOAG by Ravi Vakil). Vakil himself stated it was ok to publish answers to questions from his text (although he would prefer that people did not).
My question is, would this somehow be a break of procedure for the CLASS I was taking? I.E. would it be academically frowned upon to publish answers to homework questions from a class online, with those questions being from an exterior textbook?

Why would you do this anyways?

@BryanKrause: when I was a student, the student union had collections of excercises and answers and they were always looking for more well-executed solutions. Professors not only knew this, they told us doing these excercises would be a very good way to learn. They also mentioned that looking prematurely at the solution would likely compromise what we'd learn from the excercise, but that as adults it is our own choice how to prepare for the exams. So the answer back then would have been to give back/help to enhance a resource that helped us. Excercises were typically volountary with no marks.

@cbeleitesunhappywithSX Sure, I can think of reasons to do it, but I wanted to know what OP's reason is to help determine if this is kind of an XY problem.

If you created the solutions, then, ethically, there is nothing wrong with making them public. If you take a class that has specific rules, however, you need to agree to those rules. But that is a different matter.
You do some students a disservice by publishing answers, in my view. Reading a solution to a problem is a much different educational process than producing it yourself. Education isn't primarily about "answers" but the process that lets the student generate the answers.
But, ethically, you can publish your own work, even if it was "sparked" by something you read as an exercise in a book.
But, for your CLASS, you need to consult the professor and see if there are any published rules.
Note that when a professor is asked for help on an exercise, they do their best job if they give the student some minimal hint that gets them past any misconception or block that they might have, but still permits creativity in the student. Giving them a solution blocks that avenue of creativity. Think about that and how you contribute to the educational process by publishing.
For some books (some of mine, for example) the exercises are much more important than the text itself. If a student can do all of the exercises with only minimal help (other than the text) then they will have a deep knowledge of the material. If they they do none of them then their knowledge is very superficial.

Note, however, that while you can publish your own solutions, you probably cannot publish the questions themselves without a copyright violation.


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Are all Elsevier journals legitimate
I have seen a lot of negative reviews and even boycotts of some Elsevier journals. I do not want to jeopardize the future of my academic career by publishing in illegitimate journals. Am I correct in assuming that the journals on Elsevier are considered "legit" but just "very pricey," and this is the source of the negative reviews? Would it be safe to publish on any journal of Elsevier?

They are generally legitimate (there may be exceptions). Some people have issues with the copyright and access policies.

You can't assume that a journal is respectable just because it is operated by a large publisher like Elsevier or Springer. You have to treat journals on a case by case basis. For an Elsevier horror story, you could look at the affair of Mohamed El Naschie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_El_Naschie

Usually, the more a journal is exclusive the more it publishes rubbish. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5826185/

They're generally legitimate. The negative reviews and boycotts aren't about the quality of the journal, but are because of Elsevier's alleged high prices (see The Cost of Knowledge). Elsevier publishes some of the best journals in some fields, e.g. The Lancet and Cell.
Having said that Elsevier gives their editorial boards some leeway on what to do with their journals, and to my knowledge up until recently that included not conducting peer review if they don't think it's necessary or appropriate. This journal Medical Hypotheses was an example. That journal published a paper denying that AIDS is caused by HIV, there was a backlash, and Elsevier replaced the editor-in-chief. Although you should be fine in general if you publish with Elsevier, to be sure, you'll have to research the journal in question.

As someone who personally boycotts Elsevier, yes, this is correct. I don't generally have questions about, say, the legitimacy of peer review; I'll cite work published in Elsevier journals, and won't hold publishing with them against someone when reviewing a CV. I just refuse to publish in or review for their journals (with very few exceptions).

There may be some reputable Elsevier journals, but some of them are certainly not legitimate. As an example, Toxicology Reports publishes work by the the editor-in-chief in a special issue organized by the editor-in-chief overseen editorially by the editor-in-chief (passed off to his buddy when the issue was raised) in which they take the data in the VAERS database as actually representing effects due to the vaccine as opposed to correlated in time with the injection and have the audacity to suggest that the actual real incidence of reactions attributed to the vaccines are a factor of 10 higher, then say they are making "conservative" estimates.

Clarivate has a list of journals that have been punished for excessive self-citation.  Several are published by Elsevier.  However, all the biggest publishers have journals that have been punished.
No publisher is completely reliable.
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/06/29/major-indexing-service-sounds-alarm-on-self-citations-by-nearly-50-journals/
A single case of corruption can even span multiple publishers.
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/03/09/citation-cartel-or-editor-gone-rogue/
https://retractionwatch.com/2017/03/03/citation-boosting-episode-leads-editors-resignations-university-investigation/

Actually, Elsevier is not at all a credible and reliable publishing house. If you are known to the Editors or you are paying them, you will be able to publish, or else keep things about that your work is not worth publishing. It is not even beneficial to publish your paper in this publishing house. The students are influenced by their IF. But I would like to tell you truth that they have a self-citation of more than 60% in all their journals, which ultimately, provides you with a fake IF. Think wisely and choose wisely.

While there is a lot of room to criticize Elsevier, they've been in academic publishing for almost 150 years. Their journals include Cell, Neuron, and the Lancet: top journals in cellular/molecular biology, neuroscience, and medicine, the field equivalents of journals like Nature and Science. Scopus is an Elsevier product. Most criticism of Elsevier can be leveled equally at all the other major academic publishers. Calling Elsevier, in general, "not credible and reliable" is clear hyperbole.


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How to find the published version of a preprint
When reading through a preprint article (which are often the most accessible versions of articles), I for various reasons want to determine whether there has been an officially published version of the article: for example for (1) a more official source to cite, (2) a more edited and cleaned up version of the preprint.
Often, I run into difficulties when searching for an officially published version: (1) the title may have changed slightly or dramatically, (2) an additional co-author may have been added, etc.
Question: What method should be used to find the (or whether there is a) published version of a preprint. Is the DOI helpful? If so, how is it used?

Why not just ask the author?

For arXiv, see https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/158413/17254

Beware that sometimes it is the preprint version that is better and more up-to-date than the journal version. Updating a preprint is easy, updating a journal article is hard.

You can sometimes find it in the article's metadata (to be accessed via the preprint's DOI).
An example:

There is this pre-print at SocArXiv with the DOI 10.31235/osf.io/umt58
Access the metadata (in CrossRef's API) with the DOI https://api.crossref.org/works/10.31235/osf.io/umt58
Find the field relation, then is-preprint-of, then id, which tells you that the preprint is a preprint of 10.1177/01655515211040654

Screenshot:

At SocArXiv, you can find the same information at the preprint's page in the right margin; here's a screenshot:

The same is true with all the other preprint servers at OSF (MetaArXiv, MediArXiv, AfricArXiv, etc.)
At ArXiv, you can find the published DOI in the "Related DOI" field; here is an example from https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.07141:

Note that this "linking" of preprint DOIs to the peer-reviewed publications' DOIs only works if it is done manually by the authors (or if an automatic metadata extraction, as ArXiv does, succeeded in finding the links); cf. How to add DOI to the published version of an article in arXiv?.

This probably depends on the field and the preprint service. For example, medrxiv and biorxiv assign a DOI to the initial preprint  and maintain it for subsequent versions. (They also discourage preprint submission to other services.) When you search by DOI or open a preprint link, the service  would show a  link to the latest version. Shortly after the preprint appears online in a journal, the service will display a link to the publication. In other cases, e.g.,  personal websites, the authors would hopefully deposit the latest version. Also, Google Scholar  usually has all the versions.
An issue that I've had is that preprint title, content, statistical results, etc,  can change between versions. So  what you refer to in an early version may be different or absent in later versions, particularly in a journal publication with many edits.


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How to find Elsevier journal-specific average publishing time
Through this link, https://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences-and-engineering/mathematics/journals/fast-publication, one sees the publishing times for selected Elsevier journals, given by Elsevier itself. My question is whether there are averaging times listed for more/all of Elsevier journals, and if so, where to find them. (for example, the Journal of Number Theory)

Why is this important? I don't understand. An average is just an average, not a prediction in any individual case.

If the journal shows submitted/accepted dates on the articles, you could peruse a few issues and see for yourself.

You can try this: https://journalfinder.elsevier.com.
When you add your paper title and abstract, it gives a list of journals, which includes the 'Review speed' as well. I assume with you paper title and paper abstract, the journal that you're looking for should be in the suggested list.
Here is the snapshot of one example, in which I put a simple title and abstract for a paper. You can see the results at the bottom of the page and I have put the 'review speed' in the red rectangles:

I hope it helps.


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What to do if you don't know the terms you don't know?
If in a (mathematics) research paper, you cannot seem to find the term to describe something even after much digging and questioning, is it safe to assume that a word for it does not exist?
This question becomes even more confounding the more simple the concept. For example, I cannot seem to find a common term describing the first index in a sequence that a number divides (the index it is a primitive factor of).
If this assumption is not a safe one, how should I proceed? With one of the few things stalling the self-archiving of a paper being the ambiguity over a term, do I simply assume that there is not a common term and create my own at the risk of seeming like an ignoramus? Is there any other course of action that may be taken, any general approach that other researches have taken?

Well, no, that assumption isn't exactly safe, but at that point you've probably at least ascertained that there is no commonly used term for that concept in your field.

I can't understand your example of "the first index in a sequence that a number divides". A sequence is $a_0, a_1, a_2, \dots$; its indices are $0, 1, 2, dots$; so the first index in a sequence that $n$ divides is exactly $n$, and the definition seems moot (for instance, it doesn't depend on the sequence).

Math.SE and MO exist! ;)

@user496634 and others, there is a question on Math.se about this already, if you want to help with the specific problem.

@FedericoPoloni Since you started the indexing of the sequence with 0, the first index that n divides is 0.

A fairly common "solution" to the problem is to invent you own terminology and see whether it gets adopted. For example, an abstract simplicial complex satisfying Gromov's "no Delta condition" is known a "flag complex", but it's exactly the same thing as what Girard named a "coherence space" and it's also called a "clique complex".

It's a common problem, not only in mathematics but in all fields of research. Oftentimes, we feel that there should be a term to describe a specific concept or method, but we sure don't know what it is or how to find it if it exists. Scouring the literature for a term we don't know is very difficult, if not impossible, as long as we don't have at least a direction to look for.
Basically, the best thing to do in that case is to do due diligence (e.g., ask colleagues in a suitable field, look over papers that you suspect may have used this concept or method, check some text books), but if that ends up being unfruitful you can either coin your own term or not use a specific term at all. For the former, an academic's favorite cop-out phrase ("to the best of our knowledge ...") may come in handy.
The good news is that, if an established term actually exists, you may very easily be pointed towards it during peer review.


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Possessive case when there are post nominal letters
If a person's name comes with post nominal letters, e.g., John Smith PhD or Mary Green MD, which of the following is the correct/better way of forming the possessive?
(A): John Smith PhD's student; Mary Green MD's clcinc
(B): student of John Smith PhD; clinic of Mary Green MD
To me, style (A) sounds unnatural. So which is recommended?

This would be better on the English Language Learners Stack...

Two related questions on that stack are Parenthesis and apostrophes, and If a noun is followed by brackets, where should the apostrophe be placed to show possession?. The overall answer in those questions is to try rephrasing in ways that avoid awkward constructions like (A) altogether.


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Is it appropriate to ask a professor for both a PhD position and reference letter?
I'll be applying for PhD positions in the UK in the coming fall and have only a small pool (5-6 professors) whom I can sensibly ask for reference letters from. Some of these professors are in a field quite close to my research interests, so I'm also considering asking to do a PhD with them.
Is it appropriate to ask a professor for both a PhD position as well as reference letters for PhD applications to other professors (in the same or other institutions)?

Yes, this is very common and unlikely to cause any issues. If the professor does object, working for that professor could be a red flag!


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In the U.S., is it appropriate for math professors to ask students to rewrite their messy (poorly handwritten) homework to be graded?
Many students write their math homework assignments in a messy, barely readable way. When I was a student TA/grader, I didn't have the right to ask them to rewrite them. But as a math instructor, I wonder if it is appropriate for me to ask those who write their homework poorly to rewrite it, otherwise it won't be graded (even writing it in the syllabus)? I am also planning to show them some examples of nicely written homework. As a more exaggerated question, are professors in United States even allowed to do so?

"Was I was a student TA/grader, I didn't have a right to ask them to rewrite them." << Who says you didn't have that right? And what did you do instead? Did you mark them as an unforgiving zero because you couldn't read their answers?

If it's messy and you can't read it, you can't grade it. As a student, I'd much rather you ask me to rewrite than grade it wrong.

For my undergraduate (US, math) classes, I always put in my syllabus that illegible work will be counted as incorrect, and I make sure my graders are aware of that.  For graduate classes I have required homework to be typed -- those students should be learning to use TeX or similar anyway.

Wait, people aren't accepting these anymore?

I do not want to post an answer because the question is clearly marked US, but I cannot help to feel that the students today are completely cushioned. They will apply for a job and if what they send is handwritten and unreadable, nobody will ask them to resent the CV - it will go directly to the trash. I would prefer to get a 0 during a test and learn to write or type, than to discover that nobody is going to pamper me once I leave school.

Yes.
In most other fields, university and college instructors often require that students type their work, and submit a typed, spellchecked, referenced, and otherwise professionally written document.  Students are expected to be able to use technology in order to produce work.  This is a norm, and instructors will return work to students if it does not meet this expectation.  This is entirely permissible (this kind of policy generally falls under the umbrella of "academic freedom").
In mathematics, we typically cannot require that students type their work (at least, not in lower-division classes which are attended primarily by non-majors)—the equation editors in packages like MS Word or Google Docs are somewhat arcane (and produce poorly typeset mathematics, anyway), and TeX/LaTeX are more difficult to learn and are not taught at an earlier level (hence we can't rely on students knowing how to use these tools).  This means that we usually have to accept hand-written work in mathematics.[1]
That does not mean, however, that we must accept work that is not professional.  Aside from the pragmatic aspects of grading work which is sloppy (which are probably the most important reasons to return illegible work), the work that a student produces reflects upon them.  When they choose to present illegible, sloppy work, they are presenting themselves unprofessionally.  Part of the college experience is learning to present oneself well to others.
The only caveat I would make is that there are certain disabilities (e.g. dyspraxia) which can make it difficult for a student to turn in neat handwritten work.  However, in the US, accommodations for such disabilities usually need to come from your "Office of Accessibility and Inclusion" (or the local equivalent thereof).

[1] And, to be fair, I would expect the same to be true in other notation heavy fields, such as physics or chemistry.

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I require typed homework in my classes.  This requirement is traceable back to a program level learning outcome that says that students will be able to communicate mathematics in a professional fashion.
I’ve had students question this requirement, but they can’t reasonably claim that they’ll be able to produce hand written reports in a professional setting.
At a technical level, I tell students that MS Word and Google Docs (they have Google Apps accounts as their campus email) both have reasonably usable equation editors.  I encourage grad school bound students to learn LaTeX.

This is probably better for upper level math majors than the general run of math students. Most of them don't aspire to be professional mathematicians.

At what level are you teaching?  I introduce my calculus students to LaTeX via Overleaf, but I don't require them to use it.  I would probably feel differently about upper division classes, however.

It's amazing how much math you can express with access to a Greek alphabet and a paint program.

I mostly teach Junior/Senior/Grad level courses, but I'd use the same rule in a freshmen/sophomore level course now.

@Buffy Learning the unusual features of Word, including the equation editor, is helpful for a wide variety of careers.

What you are "allowed" to do is somewhat of a local question, but there aren't a lot of restraints on tenured faculty. Student feedback can be taken into account in tenure decisions, however.
But, if you are clear that homework must be readable to be gradable then something like the following might be workable. I employed it for this and other reasons. I'll tailor the description a bit to your case but it is an example of generalized regrading. My field was CS.
When a student turns in work, it is graded and commented. The comments are important. If it is unreadable, it might get a grade of zero.
For any reason, if the student is unsatisfied with their grade, they may redo it and resubmit it for regrading. However, the old work must be submitted along with the new, in a folder naming the student. The regrading won't allow "full marks" on the new work, but (my standard) 90% of the gap between the initial grade and full marks. So, if the original grade was 60% (lost 40) they can earn back all but 4 points.
I realize that this doesn't scale, but it was possible for me to grade around 30 students very efficiently, since I had the original grade and comments. I also required that students highlight the changes from the original so that I didn't need a full analysis of the new work.
One caveat, however, is that you might need to limit the number of regrades. I only needed to do so when an individual was in danger of getting behind because they weren't spending sufficient time on new work, but there was no fixed limit. Usually only zero-two retries were needed for students to get a grade they were satisfied with and I was satisfied with their learning.
Using techniques like this, I was seen by the students as "tough but fair". I didn't find it burdensome at the scale I had.
Another caveat is that you need to convince students not to be sloppy with their first attempt. This occasionally required a bit of counseling.
An advantage of this scheme was that I never got complaints about my grading. They just brought the work up to my standards.
For more on my grading scheme see this answer to an older question.

Wait... in CS are there any "handwritten" homework at all? My question is only about their handwriting, not the correctness...

That is why I tailored it. You can also, but yes, handwritten work is possible.

@NoOne CS has more maths and special notations than you might think.

If homework is actually unreadable then it is appropriate to give a zero grade for that particular question and continue to grade the rest of the paper.
If it doesn't meet your arbitrary standard of neatness but can be understood then it is completely inappropriate to ask and likely to be discriminatory. You will be penalising students who are legitimately trying their best. You will be choosing to satisfy your personal biases over assessing and improving their mathematical skills. And your students will have every legitimate grounds to detest you.

As a personal anecdote, about a teacher who came close to stopping me perusing mathematics any further, when I was studying A-levels (16-18) he gave back the first bit of homework he said "you and I are not going to get on". I had got every question right, and the only comments he'd put on the work were about messy presentation.
Week after week I'd hand in work with every question or almost every question correct, trying my level best to present as well as I could, and the only comments I ever got back were on the presentation. Eventually I just gave up trying and handed in my work sloppily and quickly done. Fortunately at that point he realised I had been trying and never commented on my presentation again. Eventually we got on well, and I went on to study Maths at university. I wonder sometimes whether he learned anything from the experience. P
Now, I have dyslexia and (then undiagnosed) ADHD and I'm sure some would like to dismiss any consequences of their policies as the responsibility of disability rules but there are a great many people who never get diagnosed - particularly people who are otherwise bright and capable. Your policy will hurt people who are good at maths and trying their best.

Why would a standard of neatness be arbitrary?

@Ben any standard other than "readable" is arbitrary.

How much student work have you graded, @JackAidley?  How much time are you willing to spend attempting to decipher one student's work?  And no, the phrase "readable" is also an arbitrary line.  Student work typically falls into a spectrum from completely illegible to typeset.  There is only so much time that one can devote to trying to read work that is sloppy and disorganized.  If a student has a genuine problem which prevents them from producing neat work, they should either (a) approach the accessibility office to get an accommodation, or (b) learn to type their work.

It was wrong for that teacher to turn your not meeting his expectations from an opportunity into a conflict.

As a TA (material science), I always told the students that if I could not read the critical steps but the results were somewhat right, I would take up to 10% off - because becoming an engineer includes (or it should include) learning how to neatly share your ideas.
If the entire homework was complete but unreadable (happened only 2 times in 3 years), I took 60% off. Enough to scare them, but not enough to screw them.
Edit: obviously, that was discussed with the professor at the beginning of the term, and the students were warned about it.

I wonder whether the opposite is true for students in medical school? -- If their handwriting is such that one could predict that, in the future after they become practicing medical doctors, things like their signature, prescription names, and instructions for using the prescription could not be read, then they get 10% additional points.

(+1) because becoming an engineer includes (or it should include) learning how to neatly share your ideas -- Not just "neatly", but more generally "clearly", which includes eliminating potential sources of ambiguity (Oh, I didn't notice that you were not using metric units) and being able to argue for (i.e. support) a superior result (more cost-effective, lower failure rate, more robust approach, etc.).

In my (physics) classes, the students are advised (in writing) that submitting poorly written or presented material may result in inaccurate evaluation of said material.
Note that contrary to others, I require my students to submit assignment in person and handwritten on paper: this reduces the risk of copy-pasting from the web or hiring a third party to complete the assignment on behalf of a student.

Put your rules in writing, including rules about looking at the work of others and send a copy to your chair. If he's happy then you're allowed.
Even if you are required to accept handwritten work, it wouldn't hurt to tell them the advantages of using, e.g., LaTeX. That can save them time as well as reducing the burden on you.

If you can’t read it I wouldn’t see the problem of having them re-write it. I think it’d be better to let them know at the beginning of the school year let them know that they’re work needs to be legible.

My field isn't math, but I more or less required all of my students to type everything that isn't done in class in front of me, not only so that it would be legible, so that it could be submitted remotely if required.
In the real world, most documents in industry and academia are typed up, so it's good practice for them to submit assignments in type form. Consider it a good opportunity for them to practice formatting documents, as well as in using the software.
Outside of the practicalities, it's always appropriate for an educator to ensure that the material submitted to them can be correctly graded, it would be unfair to mark someone down who got the correct answer but was unable to articulate it due to messy script. The key is simply to be sensitive about it, and to ensure that they have access to the facilities to type up the document before making a big thing out of it.

Try to give students the benefit of the doubt and act not as if they know what to do and refuse to do it, and instead that they don't know what to do.
My impression is that US high school math students are trained on strategies for multiple choice questions, and what's necessary to write in free response exam questions that will earn them full marks. (Once I asked a student why they consistently wrote → instead of = on a paper. They said they were taught that misusing an equals sign could lead to losing points, but there were no such rules about →. So their teacher told them to just use →.) I don't get the impression that they've been graded on the quality of their written homework, and that college is the first time they are asked to do such things.
So I tell them near the beginning of the course that clear presentation of written work is one of the learning objectives of the course. I try to give them examples of good and bad student work. I use a rubric that accounts for organization, legibility, complete sentences, etc., and make sure they see the rubric before they turn in their first problem set. And when a handful of students are inevitably surprised by their low scores, I point out all of these things that I have done and maintain that these are my expectations.
If you're in charge of the grading policies for your course, you could do some of these things, and also allow for the first few assignments to be rewritten.


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Why are high pass rates for courses considered acceptable in the US?
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist the temptation to use this somewhat provoking title.)
This recent question motivated me to finally ask the following, somewhat dual, question which I've been wondering about for quite some time. My experience is mainly in maths, bit I am interested in the situation in other subjects, too.
Background. I've been teaching maths classes at German universities for several years; the situation over here tends to be as follows:

German undergraduates have to decide about their major before entering the undergraduate program.

There is a single exam at the end of each course which decides about the overall grade. Students who fail can typically take a second exam some weeks later in the same semester.

For first year undergraduates in maths, the failure rate tends to be somewhere between 30% and 60%. It's more or less comparable for related subjects such as physics.

The exams of those students who fail, do in most cases clearly show that those students did not understand central concepts of the course.

My (subjective and possibly wrong) impression of the situation at many places in the US:

Such high failure rates of courses would be deemed inacceptable and thus, failure rates there are much lower.

Course grades are not determined solely by exams; instead, graded homework often counts considerable weight towards the overall grade.

Question.
As the high failure rates that I am used to are, in my experience, mainly due the failing students' insufficient understanding of the contents of the course, I am wondering how the purportedly low failure rates in the US are possible. To put it more concisely:
Why are high pass rates considered acceptable for university courses in the US?
Potential reasons.
I can think of with several potential reasons. I am unable, though, to check how valid they are since I lack personal experience in the US.

My premise is false: Failure rates in the US are not significantly lower than in Germany, in general.

First year courses in Germany should rather be compared to, say, third year courses in the US, since this is, if I understand correctly, where most maths students in the US start to work with proofs to some extent. If this alone was the major part of the explanation though, I would expect failure rates in the US to be particularly high in third year courses.

A large number of US universities are just much better in teaching their students a good understanding of the course contents.

The average understanding of students in the US is not higher compared to Germany, but universities simply let them pass anyway.

The US approach to choose a major only when several years into the program, has some kind of early "matching effect": students gradually narrow down the subjects in which they take courses, which results in a good fit between students and subjects before the more advanced courses start. (While this "matching" is rather designed as "filtering" in Germany, via high failure rates in first year courses.)

Quite high tuition fees in the US are an economical incentive for students to focus on courses which are reasonably within their capabilities, while this is not so much the case in Germany due to the mainly tax funded university system.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

In the majority of American universities, the standards are indeed much lower than in German universities.  I can mention several factors contributing to this phenomenon.

Bachelors degrees are not thought of as vocational degrees or degrees in a subject.  They are rather a mark to be considered 'well-educated' in some sense, and the idea of having a specialization is to force every graduate to study some subject in greater depth, not to actually train them for work in the subject.  Less than half of the studies required for a mathematics degree are actually in mathematics.  Most graduates, even at top schools, will go on to careers that don't have anything specific to do with their studies.  If you look at top executives at US corporations, you will find that most of them have a bachelors degree in English or Political Science or Psychology or Chemistry, and an MBA.  Most of the students earning a degree in Mathematics here are actually earning a double degree in Education and go on to become high school math teachers.  Most of the remainder end up in jobs that don't really require a college degree, such as being a manager at a supermarket.  Only a few go on to jobs that require mathematics to some extent, and even then they rarely end up using anything more complicated than calculus or introductory statistics (without needing to know proofs).  Up to rounding error, none of our students go on to graduate school.

US universities are much more streamed than German ones.  Roughly every student at Harvard or Princeton is among the top 0.5% of US high school graduates.  Stanford students are all within the top 2%, and UC--Berkeley or University of Michigan students are all within the top 7% or so.  My university, the University of Idaho, is the best university in a predominantly rural state, and, up to rounding error, none of our students are from the top 10% in the country, and few are from the top 25%.  (High school education is relatively poor in our state, so top 10% in the country probably means top 7% in our state.)  All the better students go to more highly-ranked universities elsewhere.  Given only about 50% of students go to university (both in the US and Germany), this means most of our students are from the bottom 50% of the university-attending population.  If we had German standards and high school performance was a perfect indicator (which it isn't, but it isn't meaningless either), then few of our students would pass.  (As it is, I think less than a quarter of our graduating students could pass a first-year class in Germany.)

The general ideology in the US is that anyone can learn anything, at least up through the level of a bachelor's degree.  It is generally believed that anyone who worked reasonably hard (and not unreasonably hard) should be able to earn a bachelor's degree in any subject.  This is in part because most of the US (including people who have university degrees) believe that learning only involves memorizing facts.

Universities are funded to a large extent based on how good a job they do of graduating students.  If our university graduated fewer students, the politicians would perceive us as a failure (see (3)) and greatly cut the funding to the university.  Students (who pay about half the costs of the university) would also stop coming.  Given what I wrote in (2), if our university applied German standards, it would effectively cease to exist.

Different departments at a university are in competition with each other to lower standards.  Over the long term, departments are allocated funding based on how many students they have.  Students choose their department one or two years into their studies, and can switch fairly easily.  Especially at lower-ranked universities, many students choose their department based on how easy it is.  You see what happens.

There may also be reasons to suspect that US universities do a better job at teaching than German ones that don't imply German instructors are doing anything wrong.  Even average US universities spend more per student on instruction than German universities, with most of the money going to having smaller classes.  The top universities easily spend twice as much per student, or even more, as German universities.

So what would be an adequate comparison of german B.Sc and M.Sc in the US? Your answer makes it sound that german B.Sc are much more difficult and leave someone with a much better understanding of the specific subject

@SirHawrk: If I understand Alexander Woo's answer correctly, the word "majority" in the first sentence is quite important - it is my understanding that this does not apply to the better schools in the US. In this context, there is also another aspect which I might not have taken sufficiently into account when asking the question: When speaking of a "university", many Germans (including me) probably think of what is called "Universität" in German. There are about one hundred of them (most of them public) in Germany, and they all offer a quite comparable degree of qualification. [...]

[...] There is also a second branch of tertiary education in Germany which consists of so-called "Fachhochschulen"; they are designed to offer vocational training rather than theoretical academic training. In English, they are typically referred to as "Universities of Applied Sciences" (for the lack of a more appropriate translation). They also grant bachelor's and master's degrees, but the type of qualification that such a degree certifies is typically considered by be quite different compared to the degrees granted by "Universitäten".

Yes. And, at least a few decades ago, at my Univ in the U.S., in terms of various departments "competing" by demanding less and less: quite a few students ended up as math majors because their GPA was too low to be admitted into the engineering program... due to bad grades in math classes. :)

Point 3 - are you suggesting the U.S. ideology is that anyone should be able to get a B.A./B.S. in physics or engineering? I was fine with the requirements for Computer Engineering but struggled and dropped out of a second year Electrical Engineering course (it was an elective for CpE but required for EE). I just find it hard to believe that most people think nearly everyone is capable of getting a B.S. in most of the hard sciences.

@CramerTV It depends on who you ask, and what the subject is. I would not consider a pre-med or pre-law program anywhere near as easy as, say, a BS in computer science, and engineering programs are often more rigorous than say, a degree in literature or music, but I would readily say that all of them are far easier here in the US than the equivalents in Germany given what I’ve heard from my German friends and relatives. Whether that means everyone can get one or not is another story. That said, this perception (and to some extent reality) is part of why US companies put so much focus on...

experience instead of degrees, and you end up with so many industries where the only practical way to get a decent job out of college/university in the US is to either go for a masters degree or do an internship as an undergraduate and leverage that as job experience on your resumé. Of course, this could be helped by having more focused study, but it’s also a matter of degrees in the US often focusing more on theory than practical skills required for a job in the field (see for example how many CS courses in the US historically have not covered basic skills like using version control software)

@JochenGlueck: We have Fachhochschule students but (partly for ideological reasons - see point 3) pretend to teach them a Universitat curriculum.

@CramerTV: The US thinks everyone is capable of doing the job of President.  Egalitarianism in the US extends to a belief in roughly equal abilities (though not equal inclinations or equal character).

For #1, you should probably distinguish liberal arts from science and engineering. There aren't many jobs for which a Literature degree is a useful prerequisite, but Computer Science is definitely vocational.

Primarily your reason number 4. In the US, universities are profit centers. Even those that are public feel economic pressure to compete in the same ballpark. American universities are not about education (though some of that presumably happens sometimes, in an attempt to compete in the marketplace). It's business: $$$$.

If you mean top (0.5%/2%/10%/etc.) by their ranking in their high school class, you should say so; there's no instrinsic or canonical way to compare students against one another.

The point 3 seems quite empty to me. Pretty sure Germany also consider that "everyone can learn anything" and I guess that's why their universities are free. Also, I guess no national higher education system will claim that you need to study unreasonably hard to get a bachelor's degree (sure, there are some universities whose course work is "challenging" and where students need to go the extra mile to get their degree, but not at the national level).

The top answer to the linked question states:

Studying is essentially free in Germany...in many fields...there is no admission cut-off...or only a very lenient one.

The situation in the US is inverted: most reputable universities have relatively strict admissions requirements (the top schools have very strict requirements), and stronger applicants tend to attend more competitive schools. The resulting student body profile in the US is therefore much more homogeneous than in Germany: picture a bell curve with a fairly narrow width, plus a few outliers. The expectation is that students in the center of this bell curve should be challenged: the average student must work hard to get a B, and will really struggle to get an A. But if the average student is at risk of failing, the course's difficulty is likely not aligned with the college's admissions requirements.
This is one reason why school reputations matter so much in the US. All degrees are not equal; rather, more competitive schools have stronger students and therefore offer more challenging courses (and vice versa). As stated in the comments, this can lead to almost-meaningless degrees, such as math degree holders who can't write a simple proof or calculate an eigenvalue. Thus, we should be careful what we mean by "pass rate"; a student in the US who "passes" college and gets a degree may still not be competitive for certain jobs or graduate schools.
A related factor is that students need to pass most of their courses on the first attempt. Retaking failed classes is expensive for the student; further, competitive schools will actual expel students who fail too many classes.
These factors can produce a vicious cycle: students expect to pass (often they expect an A), and universities expect most students to pass (many of them with As). Instructors can feel some pressure to go along with this, in that it is easy to give an easy course and pass all the students, while it is much harder and less pleasant to give a very difficult course and fail many students (even if the "very difficult" course is actually quite reasonable).
Finally, note that the above discussion applies to reputable schools with meaningful admissions requirements. But many other colleges (including, but not limited to, "community colleges") effectively have open admissions (without even any equivalent of the Abitur). There are over 5000 schools in this category, so it is difficult to make generalizations; some of these offer a good education, or at least a pathway to begin a good education. But my impression is that most such colleges have classes with very minimal requirements (e.g., show up once a week, participate in class, do a group project, and write a one-page essay) and yet still have very high failure rates.

"Reputable" and "open admissions" aren't disjoint.

Ah, yes, the version in my head was very clear about saying that some of the less competitive schools offer a very good education, or at least offer a pathway to begin a very good education, but sadly that didn't make it into the text. Added a clause to the answer, thanks.

both for economic reasons, and because schools will actual expel students who fail to meet certain minimum standards — how is it in the interest of a tuition-funded school to expel students?  It would seem that students who keep enrolling for years without progress are a commercial benefit to the school.

To supplement the second to last paragraph: at my institution, teaching responsibilities are built on the backs of graduate students and lecturers, whose job opportunities are directly tied to student evaluations. Higher grades and pass rates are more significant predictors (anecdotally) of positive evaluations than effective teaching leading to grade inflation that then sets the new expectations for the next semester (what you address). The magnitude of the phenomenon varies by department and is less apparent for tenured faculty who aren’t tied to student evaluations in the same way.

I think failure rates are higher at places with open-admission, certainly graduation rates are lower.

@gerrit: Almost all schools in the US pay some portion of their expenses from a combination of government funding and investment income from investing large donations.  Tuition only covers slightly more than half of instructional expenses at my university.

@gerrit I believe as-written with an "and", the economic reasons refers to the student. For the school, I think there are a lot of complicated reasons for performance-based expulsion: a "stick" to motivate students, to improve the learning environment for other students, to provide space for a more successful student to improve graduation numbers, to make a case for the school's high rigor.

^ Good timing, was about to say exactly this. Retaking failed classes is expensive for the student, and reputable schools would rather fill a spot with a new, potentially-successful student rather than allowing an unsuccessful student to continue being unsuccessful. Less competitive schools may indeed allow any student to stay as long as they pay tuition, but competitive schools typically have a fixed number of spots.

@gerrit, top-tier schools such as Harvard or MIT have no shortage of people trying to get in -- every year, far more students apply than can be accepted.  By expelling under-performing students, they maintain their reputation as a top-tier school and maintain that supply of students applying.  Sure, someplace like the University of Podunk benefits financially from perpetual students, but those aren't the schools that expel students for under-performing.

@gerrit: On top of the other points others have made - it's in an university's interest to appear to have a high graduating with a degree -> job in the field ratio, and keeping that aligned with respect to current people in the university taking courses. If a large portion of people are routinely remedialing courses, that mainly makes the average student loan debt for that university skyrocket without changing the graduation -> job ratio in a positive way. By expelling failing students, new students keep enrolling because percentages still look good overall.

@AlexanderThe1st That interest should also keep grade inflation in check, then (if grades impact job opportunities at all).

@gerrit: Grades may or may not impact the job opportunities - getting enough passing grades in enough courses to get a degree to graduate, does impact job opportunities. At least in my experience, companies that hire rarely worry about specific grades, and about you have a degree at all.

@cag51 Where are your failure rates for community colleges coming from? I know that some community college statistics are misleading, for example x% of students get a degree within y years, it's easy to think that 100-x% of students probably fail...but a lot of community college students are employed full time and only have the time/money to take 1-2 courses per semester, so they may be passing their classes fine but still not graduate for a very long time. (Vs. traditional college where they will kick you out if you don't graduate within a certain amount of time.)

TLDR In Germany, it is a matter of when the selection is done.
It may be worthwhile pointing out that this is the norm in maths and physics in Germany, it is not in other subjects. For example, to study psychology or biology you need a very good school grade (NC) but you don't expect to fail courses during your bachelors studies. This also goes for the grades while only an exceptional student will consistently achieve 1 in physics, a good student can expect to finish their bachelors with a 1.5 in biology. My experiences are based in Berlin but I have heard similar from other parts of Germany.
This corresponds to the situation as you have described it in the USA and therefore I think that it is based on the admissions.
Whereas in maths or physics the students are 'filtered out' by exams, this is done by entrance grade for other subjects, which corresponds much more to the USA system.

What you describe is similar to the situation in Poland, or at least what I remember form back when I was a student: it was pretty tough to get a spot at the journalism department at my university, quite tough to get into the law school, and trivial to get into the math department (number of applicants was ~11 per one spot in journalism and ~0.5 per one spot in math). Then in math, more than half of the students would fail the mandatory first-year courses (some dropping out, some reapplying), whereas from what I've heard back then, failing first year law school or journalism was pretty rare.

There is a single exam at the end of each course which
decides about the overall grade.

The exams of those students who fail, do in most cases
clearly show that those students did not understand central
concepts of the course.

In the American universities that I'm familiar with, grading for most courses is more than just a single exam.  There is a final exam at the end of the course that makes up a considerable portion of the overall grade, but additional exams are given throughout the course.  In essence, the feedback cycles are much shorter.  If a student isn't understanding something critical, it will be obvious by poor results on early exams.  That gives them time to either make a renewed effort to learn the material and catch up, or to drop the course entirely.  Some particularly difficult "weed-out" courses can see almost half the students drop the course mid-way through the semester.  Without early feedback, many of these would translate into course failures and you'd see failure rates approaching the rates you quoted for German universities.
And since you mentioned first-year courses in particular: the first year of courses in American universities is tricky to use for these sorts of statistics.  Incoming students came from different high schools and have very different academic backgrounds.  First-year courses - especially in math - often have to do a lot of catch-up work to get all the students to the same level.  For example, in my engineering program, some students came from states where high school pre-calculus courses focused on linear algebra and trigonometry, while others came from states where pre-calculus focused on statistics.  Some of my early engineering courses had to include material that much of the class already knew (thus was easy for them), but was new to the rest of the class and was necessary for understanding the rest of the course material.  My first-year calculus course was essentially just a re-hash of my high school calculus course, but most of the class came from high schools where calculus wasn't even offered as an option.  Grades for these sorts of first-year courses will skewed since many people already know the material.

Good points. I wonder how common is dropping a course mid-semester in Germany. This is not officially counted as a failure in the US, but almost certainly would have been if the student were not allowed to drop it.

@dbkk: For the courses I was referring to in the question, dropping the course mid-semeseter is extremely common in Germany. A considerable number of students quickly notice that, for instance, studying mathematics at a university is very different from what they expected, and thus decide within a few weeks or months to quit the program. I don't have statistical data available, but I wouldn't be surprised if 30% or more drop a first semester course in, for instance, Linear Algebra 1. If we count them for the course failure rate, too, the overall failure rate becomes even much higher.

There are several posts proposing essentially cynical explanations, and several offering reasons why high pass rates might be acceptable. I'd like to offer a reason that suggests that a high pass rate is actively desirable.
Ask your self "what is the purpose of education"? One might imagine two answerd to this question. The first is that the an education gives you the skills required for a  job, and exams certify that you have reached some objective minimum standard required for a job or academia.
But an alternative to that is that the job of an educator is to help which ever student is in front of them achieve the most of their personal potential, whatever that might be. In this conception, what is the purpose of an assessemnt? To motivate the student, and give them feedback - help them to understand what they understand, and where they should be apply their effort. For such a metric to be useful, most student should be somewhere in the middle. If either everyone fails, or everyone gets As, then the metric is low information. A fail should suggest that the student will gain no benefit from the next class. The difficulty level of that class should be calibrated so that the most people derive the most benefit from it. A small number of failing students might suggest that bringing the next class down to a level that would benefit them would deny opportunity for the majority to achieve their potential, but if the failure rate is high, then probably more people could gain more benefit by bringing the level of the next class down so that more of the fail students could benefit from it.
In this conception their is no idea of an object set of standards that must be achieved in a degree. The downside is that having a degree dows not provide much information on the abilities of the student. The upside is that more people derive more personal development from the degree.

I upvoted since I find this to be an interesting perspective. In order to explain low failure rates from this perspective though, I think one needs to take an important issue into account: what you suggest can most likely only work if the level is competence of all students is within quite a narrow band at each institution. More precisely, you describe the following situation:  (i) passing course 1 should give the feedback that a student has reached a sufficient level of skills for course 2; (ii) most students who attend course 2 are supposed to benefit strongly from course 2; [...]

[...] (iii) the failure rate in course 1 should be low. If there is a large spread of the abilities of the students in course 1, those three requirements are not compatible: it follows from (iii) that the requirements to pass course 1 would need to be low compared to the median skill set in course 1; by (i) this implies that the level of course 2 needs to be lower than what the median skill set of the students who passed course 1 indicates; hence, many students won't benefit from course 2 (because it will be too easy for them), which contradcits (ii). [...]

[...] In Germany, this problem is solved by dropping requirement (iii). Do I understand you correctly that US colleges (at least the better ones) try to maintain all three requirements (i), (ii) and (iii) by ensuring that most of their students are similarly strong? [...]

[...] It is my understanding that this would certainly seem to fit the US system (and also fit many of the other answers and comments), since this seems to require (a) an emphasis on admission rules (to implement a lower bound on the skills of students who get admitted) and (b) a competetive university system with an emphasis on rankings (to automatically get an upper bound on the skills of students who applpy for a specific college).

I speak from a UK perspective, where I believe the situtation is similar, but not identical. First I don't agree with your premise that requiring the pass level for course 1 to be below median means the level 2 course needs to be aimed at below median students. It needs to be aimed at a level where students, say 1.5 standard deviations from median still gain some benefit, but probably not as much benefit as those who are median. But this is okay because the majority of students are around median, and as long as a student is better off there than  not, the sum total benefit is still positive.

At the top end... We usually assume that the top end students will stretch themselves of their own accord. In fact, the criteria for awarding top marks in any assessment usually include the specification that the student includes material in their exam/assessment that is well beyond what is taught in the class, perhaps from recommended further reading/exercises listed after each class. Students are, of course, always welcome to come discuss materials more advanced than those  taught in class in the teacher's office hours.

Thanks for you response! I completely agree with you that there's not too much to worry about at the top end. I also agree that the pass level of course 1 of course needs to somewhat lower than the target level of course 2 (I phrased my comments a bit too strict in an attempt to keep them from getting even longer). My point is mainly: There is some limit on how much "spread" is acceptable in course 2; to determine it, it does not suffice to only take the "marginal gain" into account that a sub-median student gets from attending [...]

[...] - one also has to take into account that this student might consume resources in course 2 that might otherwise be used by the other students in the course, as well as the opportunity cost for the student caused by taking course 2 instead of repeating course 1. If this "target spread" of course 2 has been set, the pass rate of course 1 is essentially determined by the ratio of the spreads in courses 2 und 1. [...]

[...] So we need to either restrict the spread in course 1, or to allow for lower pass rates. I'm under the impression that German universities tend to use the second option, while universities in the US, and maybe to a certain extent also in the UK, rather tend to use the first option.

If you follow this to it's logical conclusion, you might question why universities examine students at all, as opposed to simply providing them with the information to decide whether they'll benefit from a course (as is the case with most/all MOOPs). Also, the US and Germany both have successful knowledge based economies, suggesting that not having rigorously examined students isn't a problem? (either that, or in the US people with less rigorous degrees do the jobs of Germans with no degree?)

@Rich its more that just "would you benfit from a course", but rather how are you doing at the current course. Where do you need to focus. Also, when dne well, defining the requirements to pass an exam is a good way to articulate what it is you wish a student to learn.

This may not directly answer the question, but my perception has been that over the last decade US universities have begun to incorporate more holistic practices of evaluating students.
There has been a significant amount of education research indicating that exams are not the best measure of intelligence or mastery of a subject matter, and that this form of evaluation encourages memorization over mastery. With that in mind, it seems illogical and outdated to continue to rely on one or a few exams to filter through capable students. Consider that by using exams, Universities are limiting themselves to only a single type of student. I think this is one reason (in addition to those mentioned above), why it is acceptable in the US for so many students to pass.
At this time, in the United States, most students even at top universities are weeded out not by their exams or even their grades (especially for graduate study), but by what they have produced and achieved across multiple metrics.

That is an amazingly broad claim about exams (that regarding master of the subject matter; whether exams measure intelligence is irrelevant to the topic at hand.) I would love to see some citations, especially for fields like physics and math that are the target of the linked question re Germany.

@KevinArlin as I mentioned, these are findings in education research. In general, exams aren't seen as the best measure of a student's ability to produce good work, at all levels, particularly in progressive circles. Just as an example, consider how in the US it is becoming the norm to waive the need for GREs for grad admissions. If you are seeking papers to read on the subject, feel free to utilize the usual resources to do so. If you think that the findings related to education as a whole don't apply to physics and math, that's a different topic.

In addition to the various factors already discussed here, here is another point (tangentially mentioned in some of the other answers here, but not really emphasised).
In US universities, failing a course is considered a very serious matter.  In additional to the financial incentive to avoid paying for a course twice, a failed course will be noted on one's transcript, and having failed courses looks very bad.  (not to mention the negative effect that even one F will have on one's GPA.)
Most university courses in the US system have "drop deadlines" (sometimes quite generously set–i.e. quite late into the semester), and typically large numbers of students will drop out just before this deadline. So students who are not confident that they can pass the class, will often simply drop out to avoid the risk.
From my (limited) understanding of the German system, the taboo against failing courses is not as strong as in the US system, and it is more common in Germany for students take multiple attempts on the same class as a normal course of action.