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Interview for a PhD position at a German university
I am interviewing over Skype, for a research position at German university. So far my interviewer and I communicated via email, and he sounded formal but pleasant.
I have no clue how interviews are conducted at German universities. Is it subject-based or do they just want to know the student's skills and motivations?
Also, since i am interviewing for a position in machine learning, should i expect questions about the current trends and research?

All of these things are completely up to the interviewer. Especially in Germany, where the selection process is usually run directly by the professor hiring you.

I currently work in Germany, and have exactly the situation xLeitix mentions in his comments: I have positions which I am able to choose directly who I want to hire, independent of any admissions committee.
In such interviews, I want to have a sense of the student's technical prowess, as well as a sense of their motivation and interest in the position itself. Since such positions are usually directly associated with particular projects, I want to make sure that the candidate is reasonably qualified to tackle the specific project (rather than just being generally competent in the field).

I am just curious: how long do such interviews typically last, and how many students will you interview to fill each position?

Interviews with good candidates typically run 30 to 45 minutes, but can last up to an hour. When the candidate doesn't match up to the printed record, it can be much shorter (which is obviously not a good thing). In previous rounds of interviews, I've interviewed four to seven finalists, out of maybe 50 applicants.

I would say there is no general rule. You should ask the interviewer if you can prepare something - so you will get more information in which direction the interview will go. You can also directly ask about the length of the talk.
Typically I would except a talk about your past projects, i.e. your Master's thesis. Since this is a research PhD position in Germany it is very likely that it is part of a externally funded project. So questions about the project can be expected.
The main reason for the interview is that the interviewer wants to get a picture of you - on a scientific but also on a personal level. Typically there wont be a hiring committee, but you have to convince the professor that you are the right person for this position.

"So questions about the project can be expected." - this sounds a little misleading (or at least I am not sure how it is meant). I would have said that if anyone, the applicant would be expected ask questions about the project, as typically, the applicant has no information about the project yet (more realistically, the applicant is, at their entrance to the PhD stage, only just learning that such a thing as "projects that fund positions" exists), while the interviewer has all the information. Or did you mean the interviewer might ask questions related to the project topic?

To add to other ansers, an interview in Germany is often only a opptortunity for the applicant for becoming asked to finally visit the group a half/full day and for the employer to filter out interesting students, when too much good ones apply. In my field, physics, >100 applicants for good PhD positions will be normal. Maybe 3-4 will be invited to visit the group actually and then the professor or a committee makes the decision. If you're living in Germany, they will often simply invite you to make a presentation at the face.
It's a fast and important opportunity to check if you can fluently speak the language (at least English) or rule out eventual contradictions/gaps in your CV or ask some informal questions (scientific/engineering family, hobbies,...). But, from my experience phone interviews are not very common in Germany for STEM PhD positions, also not in non-academia job world.
I don't have so much experience how overseas applicants are treated here as we don't have many and master degree is often necessary (you didn't say how far away you're from this group), if interesting candidates are even invited to visit groups and traveling costs are paid (at least partly). But traveling within Europe via train to visit the group is common and costs paid. Mostly after 1-2 mails without a pre-phone-interview, because a well written CV is often enough to invite then 3-4 good applicants and fill the position. If you are applying for a very specialized topic from overseas where it's unlikely that there are many good candidates, then I would take this much more seriously and prepare really some text to present your master work in a short and pregnant way. Some interviewer will expect this or tell you explicitly, but in any case it is your fault to be not prepared :)
So I would check and was checked myself language proficiency, short descprition of master's work, relation/motivation to/for this PhD work and country, other applications I filed and what I plan to do after finishing PhD. You will maybe also face some hidden questions. There was one position I was interested in where it became known to me after interview and visiting the group (but finally not offered) that the professor searched somebody spending also some post-doc years at this group (a small young group that was just build up) and not ruling this out completely. Such questions some professors will ask you explicitly, some indirect, as it is hard nowadays to forecast your life 5-10 years. But showing the professor that I just wanted to do PhD in his group and city and then move on finally cost me this position.
Formally it's an interview of you, nonetheless you should also ask some questions at the end of the interview that are not mentioned in the job description (salary, teaching duties (language demands, master students), advisor, overall time frame, attending conferences, vacation...). It's not a good strategy to bombard employer in mails with such questions before it is not clear that they are really interested in you. Show that you're are thinking determined self-confident curious guy, a bit like a good flirt ;)


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Why do some fellowships require "leadership experience"?
The fellowship I'm about to apply requires me to express my past leadership experience in the personal statement. Why? I understand that leadership is a soft skill that everyone should have, but this is academia, not business. People in this environment put cooperating before leading. Of course, even in business, there is no group that work like in military, the person in low level still can suggest idea and change the leader/manager's mind. The role of the leader is inspire and amalgamate separate people to one united unit. But in academia, everyone should inspire themselves, and the science itself are the glue to attach people together, right? So why don't these fellowships require me to show my past cooperation, rather than leadership?

I think you have a severe misunderstanding what leadership means.

"The role of the leader is inspire and amalgamate separate people to one united unit" - well at least you know if academia ever becomes boring, you might just have a calling for management.

@xLeitix, I upvoted your comment, but I think there could be cultural issues here around different perceptions of leadership and teamwork around the world. It's not necessarily just down to OP him/her-self.

I think you have a quite substantial misunderstanding of how academia works. Leadership in academia is crucial: who is going to teach undergraduates, inspire and coach graduate students, hire postdocs, look for grants, lead teams of scientists? Somebody with leadership skills, perhaps?

"this is academia, not business. People in this environment put cooperating before leading". I am sorry to say this, but academia can be as (or even more) competitive than the private or public sectors of research. Academia can be highly competitive, professors and groups try to be the best to get research grants, etc. Having good leadership skill is important to succeed.

@famargar I've thought that those things are management skills, not leadership skills?

@BlaisB so is it because of the grants that make academia be competitive? I know that reputation is important, but does it play a crucial role?

Well obviously if everyone had equal access to the same funds, then competition would be lower. However, I feel it is in a way inherent to human nature, lots of people desire to be better than others, the same applies to academia. If Academia was so much about cooperation, you would see a lot more open source code (especially in numerical science) than you see now. Right now, a lot of groups keep their code "in-house" because they feel it gives them a competitive advantage. However this is slowly changing (see some awesome projects like dealii for example).

@Ooker the difference between a manager and a leader are in what drives them through the same everyday tasks. IMHO a leader is striving to reach a goal, a manager is somebody who sticks to his well-paid chair. Regarding competitiveness: I have 13 years experience in academia and 2 in industry. To my experience, academia is far more competitive. I would strongly suggest you develop leadership skills, and this is especially true for US academia.

The description of this particular fellowship includes the phrase:

Winners are chosen based on individual merit, including academic performance and preparation, intellectual capability, English proficiency, and the potential for contribution to scientific education and research in Vietnam.

"Leadership" means the ability to work with and through others. It is much harder than people think - a good leader is humble yet decisive, a good listener yet able to motivate; he can synthesize the thoughts of the group into a common goal and vision, use that vision to obtain resources and allocate them in a way that helps the group achieve its goals. Doing all that without appearing to be "the boss" is real leadership - something that comes with practice. Selling cookies to support your local charity is initiative; getting together with your friends to sell lots of cookies and build a new school, that's leadership. I have heard it said that

Leadership is what bridges the gap between responsibility and authority

Leadership lets you change the scale of your impact; and since this particular fellowship is explicitly created to find individuals who will have impact on scientific research and education in Vietnam, you need people who have both the academic skills and the skill to translate this into impact "on the system".
Demonstrated leadership experience is an opportunity for the selection committee to explore whether you will be able to make an impact - they are not looking for the next CEO, but you will be amazed how much difference a good leader can make in any collaborative environment.
In the US this trait is becoming so highly valued that some high schools have an explicit course "Leadership" on their curriculum - a chance for students to develop and practice these kinds of skills, often in the context of community projects.
It is obvious from the selection summary that intellectual ability, preparation etc. are most important - but I hope you can see that leadership as I tried to define it here has a place in this academic environment.

Precisely because we cooperate a lot, we need good leadership. A good leader is someone who can bring the best of everyone in the group. For example, encouraging everyone to voice their ideas, assessing which ones have actual value, but without making the group pursue all the wild geese. A good leader should also be able to recognise the strong points in the members of the team and assign tasks accordingly.
I accept that everyone here should be motivated, but it is important for the group to keep it up. No matter how eager I am, if my professor were to start giving me contradictory orders, unreasonable workloads, or dismissing my ideas without explaining why, I can tell you, I would not remain that motivated after four years. After all, I can be motivated to work "in the grand scheme of sciency things", but not necessarily in the particular group I am in.

+1 for "A good leader is someone who can bring the best of everyone in the group", not the best for only themself.

Scientific breakthroughs are rarely achieved by a single scientist, but by a research team. It is important that the team leader can identify relevant research questions and direct the group members' work to use suitable approaches to solve them. Often, the breakthrough results are associated more to the group leader than to any group member, even though the group members may have done 80 to 99 % of the actual research work.
Fellowship funders try to look into the future of your career. You will only stay in academia after the PhD or maybe Postdoc level if you have the ability to lead a research group. That is, apart from rare exceptions, you will only be able to associate big scientific results with your name if you have leadership abilities. And these results are what funders try to support in the end.

While research is your primary goal, a secondary goal of universities is to produce people that can "lead."
This is first done as a teacher in a classroom. But ultimately, universities will want their researchers to be able to "consult" for government or corporations, where leadership skills are necessary.
After all, a university is a "beacon" in society.

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Will taking the math GRE subject test be a plus point for admission in MS/PhD in computer science?
i am undergraduate in computer science looking for admission to MS/Phd in computer science at U.S universities. I know there is no subject test for computer science anymore. In that case, will taking the math GRE subject test be a plus point to my profile?

The fact that the CS GRE no longer exists strongly suggests that standardized testing is not a major factor in CS graduate admissions. Taking an off-topic GRE subject test likely won't make a difference if the rest of the profile doesn't make a strong enough case.

It would be easy enough to ask any department to which you are considering applying whether they would give consideration to math subject exam GRE scores.  They shouldn't penalize you for asking (and at any rate it would be worse to send the scores without asking first).
However, I am inclined to agree with @aeismail: the fact that they formerly had GRE subject exams in CS and no longer do must say something about what at least many of the departments are looking for.
Perhaps I should mention that I was involved in making the math subject GRE exam a required part of the application to the PhD program in my department...but my department is a mathematics department.  Still, after four years of doing graduate admissions I have some experience that seems relevant: in doing admissions one really wants to "compare apples to apples" whenever possible.  For instance this meant getting everyone's understanding that after making the math subject exam a requirement we really would seriously downgrade any application that didn't include it.  The reason for this is that when the exam is optional, a lot of students take it but don't send the scores if they are not strong enough.  This is obviously unfair to the student who turns in a lower percentile score: they are being penalized for their honesty and for following the rules.  I think similar considerations apply in the other direction: presumably very few or no other applicants to CS PhD programs are submitting this score.  So if you turn in a pretty good math subject exam score, what is the committee supposed to make of it?  How do they compare it with everyone else's application?
Considerations like the above make me think it is unlikely that you will be told that your scores will be considered as part of the application.  But there is no need to take my word for it: ask them, see what they say, and if you can, come back and tell us about it.

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Use of data that may contain future ethical complications
Suppose that you are afforded an opportunity to examine data that was, on the surface at least, collected legally and ethically, but that may contain hidden ethical dilemmas. What precautions, if any, should you take when working with this data?
Two examples that came to mind for me were data collected from a social media site and DNA/genetic data obtained by a genomics company that is supposed to trace your genetic ancestry. These data sources are covered by a consent waiver that gives the service provider certain permissions to use, distribute, and monetize your data. To use those services, a patron is required to sign a waiver/terms of use agreement. A person's data is only collected with their "consent," albeit at times a blind consent.
If I was a geneticist, suppose, and obtained via appropriate means genetic data for a population of interest that had submitted their saliva/DNA to one of these genomics companies, what would be some ethical issues I would need to consider? The subject consented to giving their data, but many times did not necessarily give informed consent. In this example, could it still be unethical to do research on data that was likely obtained from people who just quickly passed through the consent agreements and signed blindly?
This issue is even more relevant in cases of social media data. Most users likely had no idea their data was even being collected because the did not read the user agreement they consented to. Would it be unethical to then use data collected from this social media site, even though it was legally obtained?

Interesting question! I think it'd be appropriate to obtain IRB approval before using such data - even if it has been anonymized to some extent - and many IRB policies do require informed consent.

My naive sense is that it would depend, strongly, on what you intend to do with it and whether that is in line with the reason it was collected in the first place. In particular, do you intend to use it as is fully anonymized, or do you (near the other end of the scale) intend to correlate it with other data, making anonymous usage impossible? Perhaps you need advice for the specific case from an ethicist, not just an IRB.

This is an interesting question, but I’m unsure if it’s on topic because it seems like more of a discussion prompt than a question with a particular answer.

It's unlikely that your institutional IRB would give prior approval to the genetic  research (or even the social network research) because of the lack of informed consent.  Starting to do the research without IRB approval would make things much worse.

This may prove interesting : https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)17619-8/fulltext and this one : https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-ethics-of-using-medical-data-from-nazi-experiments

As sort of a side note, be very careful about using any data from human subjects without IRB approval; even if you think you don't need such approval, your institution may require that IRB is in fact the formal way that projects are deemed to not require approval, even if such a requirement goes above and beyond relevant legality.

I am sure this happens more often than we care to admit. For me, it's case-by-case. I closely equate this to human experiments in the past. All we hear about was how people were lied to "for the greater good." But I am sure there other cases where some disclosure was given. So, we cannot see both instances as "just as evil."  I am sure that it all started from a very innocent perspective of saving human lives. Moving forward, I am sure there are many ethical practices today that will become unethical in the future.

To follow what I wrote about human experiments, keep in mind that Albert Hofmann experimented LSD on himself after the initial accidental ingestion and discovering its psychedelic effects. Was it/is it unethical to experiment on oneself? There might be nothing unethical to hurt oneself, but what if your judgment is affected by the effects of some drug? This is a very deep philosophical topic.

Suppose that you are afforded an opportunity to examine data that was,
  on the surface at least, collected legally and ethically, but that may
  contain hidden ethical dilemmas. What precautions, if any, should you
  take when working with this data?

There is no simple way to answer this kind of general question, but thankfully most institutions in the academic world are equipped with ethics committees whose job is exactly to answer such questions. They provide general guidelines and can be asked specific questions, their role is to guide researchers through potentially difficult questions and to set the boundaries. Depending on the specifics of your case, they might for instance ask you to take additional steps to protect individuals privacy, or even tell you that the study that you are considering is not ethically acceptable. Their expertise gives you legal and moral clarity in an area where you are not the expert.
On a related note, in large research projects it is usually a requirement to plan for this kind of ethics expertise and oversight.

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What behaviors (desirable or not) are encouraged by an incentive system based on publication throughput?
What (researcher's) behaviors (desirable or not) are encouraged by an incentive system based on publication throughput?
Considering this as a research problem, I propose to list all the potential strategies that a researcher can apply to "game" various academic systems and to increase one's recognition by such systems, starting in this question with academic systems which evaluation is based on the number of academic publications. Later objectives could be to design mechanisms to detect and measure tendencies to follow such strategies, and to identify other set of strategies potentially used to maximize one's number of citations, or more interestingly one's h-index and i10-index, but those later objectives are not part of the discussion here.
To make the discussion cleaner, I propose to remove all moral judgments about the strategies, and to merely list all that could be applied by an academic sociopath in order to maximize his/her success. The  goal is not to encourage such behaviors (obviously?), nor to criticize institutions which embrace some of those strategies, but rather to identify clearly the consequences (desirable or not) of an incentive system based on publication throughput.
Feel free to add other strategies in your own answer below, or to edit my own  answer below, collaborative Q/A style.

If the asker knows the answer to the question, a blog is a more appropriate medium of expression. I downvote.

@Ketan Your downvote is misplaced. Stack Exchange explicitly encourages self-answering.

Maybe I am being too simplistic, but isn't the only way to publish more?

@strongbad: my understanding is that "publishing more" and "increasing one's number of publications" are mostly the same. So the question is about strategies to publish more. One way is obviously to produce more research results, which should translate into more publications, but are there strategies to improve the number of publications resulting from a given amount of results, or a givent amount of time dedicated to producing them?

@ketan: a blog is the appropriate medium to express private opinions. This question is aimed at collaborating toward an answer to a given, important in my opinion, question...

If you want to increase your academic recognition, focusing on your number of publications is utterly counterproductive.  A small number of high-impact publications is not just more desirable in principle than piles of salami-sliced incremental papers that nobody reads, it's more a significantly more successful strategy in practice.

@JeffE, I know (my publication record should tell anyone that I am definitely not maximizing my number of publications). Yet  many institutions have incentives toward maximizing publication throughput: e.g. Chilean universities pay research AND salary money for each separate publication, require "at least two publications in international conference" for each PhD students, Chilean funding institutions require "at least one publication per year", etc... The answer to the question above would show them what they are pushing for with such incentives. I will edit the question accordingly.

To everyone: this is not the horrible question that it may first appear to be.  I first read it as the OP trying to game the system.  Rather, I think he's trying to record the absurd conclusion that current employment conditions in some parts of the world imply.

@PeteL.Clark : Would you like to edit the question yourself so that to remove any ambiguity? I think it is pretty unambiguous as it is (I did describe from the beginning that such strategies would be used by an "academic sociopath"), but English is not my first language. The sole fact that people could interpret my question as an attempt to game the system makes me worried about academia in general :( (Thanks for the vote of confidence!)

This is a terrible question, because it presumes that publications are the goal of science, as opposed to an indicator of actual meaningful intellectual contribution.
Therefore, I will provide a solution that proves the metrics are meaningless per se:

Generate a sequence of N meaningless papers using Sci-Gen.
Have each of the meaningless papers cite K of the other meaningless papers in the sequence.
Identify a set of crap journals that do not perform meaningful peer review with the aid of Beall's list.
Publish the meaningless papers in series in the crap journals, thereby obtaining an i10-index of N and an H-index of K (assuming N>=K>=10).

If self-citations are excluded, then enlist (or fake) a colleague to do the same and cite each other's meaningless papers rather than one's own.  If Journal Impact Factor matters, then sequence the papers over three years.
Citation metrics are the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.

I love your algorithm! Note that the question does NOT presume "that publications are the goal of science", on the contrary: the goal is stated as "to identify clearly the consequences (desirable or not) of an incentive system based on publication throughput". Your algorithm would contribute to a list of strategies encouraged by an incentive system based on one's h-index and i10-index. I fully agree with your metaphore on Plato's cave.

I am very tempted to try to drive a stake through the heart of publication metrics in this manner.

So, a metric is meaningless because there is noise?

@JiK The metrics can be easily gamed, meaning that any meaningful judgement based on them is not really based on the metric, but on something not so readily quantified, i.e., scientific contribution.

If Academia was a game, and if the winning rule was to maximize one's number of publications (which I don't think it is, but which the administrators of some institutions seem to believe), I think that the following strategies would make sense:

Focus on Research :: Abandon all attempts to personal life (and good teaching) and dedicate your life to research. You might manage to produce more publications than fellow researchers who have a personal life and/or spend a large proportion of their time teaching, but never more than fellow researchers applying a combination of the following strategies.
Focus on low hanging fruits :: Choose a finite set of conferences. While attending or when the proceedings are published, review it quickly to mark publications overlapping with your sphere of expertise. Assign a limited time-length (e.g. two days or two weeks) to each problem, and see if you can produce some quick results on it. Spend more time on it ONLY if you have had results within the allotted time, otherwise move to the next topic. Aim to delegate the writing of the results to a junior colleague or to a student in order to optimize your time. Notice how attacking a "long-standing open problem" will NOT help you to maximize your publication throughput.
Minimal Publishable Unit :: adjust the content of a submission to the minimum required, so that to maximize the number of publications. NEVER join two conference papers into a single journal publication, even when they largely overlap, as this would reduce your number of journal publications. Aim to publish the journal version of each conference article as soon as possible so that, if the results of your next conference publication overlaps with the last, the journal version is reviewed BEFORE the second conference publication is submitted.
Self-Plagiarism :: when a partial result of independent interest can be used in various more important results, avoid creating an easy to reference lemma in one publication and to refer to this lemma in the others, but rather reproduce its proof in each of the parallel submissions, in order to make each submission look more technical and lengthy. Aim to submit the various results in parallel so that to further justify this multiplication with the excuse to make each submission independent from the other. Aim to write minor variants of the result in each submission in order to further confuse the situation.
Publishing Clusters :: collaborate with a finite set of x colleagues of your field who have had in recent years at least y yearly publications per year at a given level agreed upon. Agree on a number z (less than y) of research themes per year that each of the members of the cluster is to propose to the whole cluster, to research them and describe their results on their own, and to submit it to the whole cluster for proof-reading. Aim to increase by a term of roughly zx publications (minus potential rejections) your number of publications per year. Aim to participate in at least two distinct clusters in order to confuse things, and optimally to y distinct clusters, contributing exactly one publication to each cluster. As your career advances, rotate clusters to further confuse things, at the cost of a more complex management. Participate in various clusters at various levels of publications to further confuse things.
Pyramidal Scheme :: Maximize the number of doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculties in your laboratory or research group. Minimize your involvement in each project, but insure co-authorship of each report/publication. Focus on acquiring funding to attract and recruit more people. Pay attention to your people's need in term of future careers only when they are relevant to attracting more people and to maximizing your output. When you reach the maximal size at one level, apply to the next level.
Falsify experimental results :: Producing fake results, presented in a difficult to reproduce fashion, in a field where experiments are costly and lengthy, will give you an edge over fellow researchers who labor to gather the funds to perform those same experiments, and make them waste time trying to reproduce your experiments. Aim to recruit junior researchers and/or students and to push them in non-explicit ways (or at least not in writing, only orally) to fake their results so that you can put the blame back on them if/when discovered.

Focusing on the research and low hanging fruit is not cheating as the tag in the question seems to be suggesting.

@ketan: I removed the tag #cheating given that you find it misleading: the theme of cheating is related but not central to this question. Note that the contribution to human knowledge of incentives encouraging scientists to "focus on research" or on "low hanging fruits" is debatable (but that this debate is, once again, out of the scope of this question).

@ketan: note that beyond "Falsify Experimental Results", it is not clear of the other strategies are universally considered as "cheating": for instance, the "pyramidal scheme" seems a good description of laboratory work in Chemistry and Biology, and maybe of the general structure of research institutes in Germany.

@Jeremy A few points: (1) faking results is a high risk strategy in that it could end an academic's career; (2) there are a range of bodies that allocate rewards (e.g., grant bodies, promotional bodies; societies; etc.): these bodies typically use a different mix of priorities - some emphasise quantity, but others focus more on true quality (actual reading of papers; grant proposals; top papers) or imperfect proxies for quality (e.g.,  impact factor, citations, etc.). In summary, some of these strategies would work for some audiences, but not others.

@JeromyAnglim: I am not advocating faking results, and I am not recommending the other strategies (so it does not matter in which communities people could get away with them). I am just arguing that incentives based on publication throughput  are pushing people toward such strategies. The recent scandals about faking data in biology and physics might be the top of the iceberg in this regard.

There is one behavior that is encouraged: vociferously advocate to change the mainstream publishing model to cater the needs of authors to publish more stuff instead of providing the readership with quality, curated scientific content. Subscription-base journals, editorial rejection and scrupulous peer review have to be made obsolete because they only prevent scholars form lengthening their publication list.

Encouraged by whom? Or do you mean which should be encouraged?

@Jeremy encouraged by "an incentive system based on publication throughput" as per your question. In my opinion it certainly should not be encouraged, it's a regrettable consequence, but you said you were not interested in opinions.

oh, ok. I guess I should be more specific. I was aiming for researcher's behaviors rather than publisher's behaviors. I will amend the question accordingly, sorry for not being clear :/

@Jeremy I have adapted my answer according to your comment.

quite nice, I had not thought about this :) It differs from the other strategies in that this particular strategy does not aim to advantage the individual researcher (e.g. the hypothetical "sociopath" researcher trying to game the system) but rather to advantage the whole community.

@Jeremy yes, it's swarm-sociopathy.


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What texts describe a desired behavior when a personal conflict could affect a professional decision?
In Academia, is there any legal text or chart commenting about the desired behavior when a personal conflict could affect a set of professional decision?
A rough example of such chart would be a text stating that "we, academics signing this chart, engage ourselves to avoid as much as possible to let our personal tastes to influence our professional decisions, or to delegate the decisions to others if we are not certain to be able to ignore our personal tastes.". Such a chart, published by an association of academics and adopted by some universities and/or academics, would not SOLVE all instances of such problems, but would at the very least express the collective will to discourage such instances. (In the same way that a chart signed by students that they won't copy on others nor share their solution does not solve all cheating instances, but clarifies what is considered acceptable or not.)
By "professional decision", I mean a decision that you take on behalf of an institution or group of person, for which your job is to make the best decision for this institution. By "personal taste", I mean anything which applies when taking decisions for one's personal life.
A neutral example would be a secretary having to make the "professional decision" of what food to order to department's celebration, and letting his "personal taste" influence his choice rather than his approximate knowledge of the tastes of the attendance.
Extreme examples would be of senior faculty members using their political position to punish or reward junior members according to their personal values, independently of their professional opinion.

Broader context:
It is only human to be biased against someone with whom one had some conflicts, and only civilized to try to overcome this bias in the context of professional decisions (where one represents the choices of a community, as opposed to personal choices such as with whom you share a meal). One can think of some (uncivilized?) cultures where one does not expect anyone to even attempt to fight this bias, and of some (civilized?) cultures where letting this bias affect professional decisions (e.g. community related) would be frowned upon and considered as an abuse of power or bullying.
It used to be my opinion that academia was civilized and that most academics agreed to such an unwritten rule. It is my experience in my current setting that not only do occurrences of such conflict seem more frequent than in my previous settings, they are also considered normal there, and far from frowned upon, most often considered as "business as usual" or worse, a display of intelligence and strength. I assume that such an attitude could exist in other cultures, from other third world countries to even the US. I am wondering if Academia, which forms an international culture of its own, already has or could have a chart to curb such behavior to a more productive/collaborative/civilized one.
Note that I am not asking if some people in Academia abuse the power that their responsibilities yield (there will be in most communities), nor am I asking for general opinions about specific countries, culture and research areas. Rather I am asking if there are some reference texts which describes the desired behavior in such situation.

Are you only seeking texts which reference this issue within academia or in any professional setting? There are certainly ethical codes for teachers which include doing anything which is not in the best interest of the students is to be avoided if at all possible.

@earthling: I am interested in texts about senior researchers using their power to bully junior researcher into acting in ways which benefit the former. I know of no such text, so I am curious about other texts about similar issues in distinct contexts, of which teachers bullying their student would weakly belong too, but could serve as a first inspiration to draw a more adequate text to propose.

While I am not aware of any formal universal code (there's not much formal universal anything in academia), the generally accepted scientific ethics is that a person with a known conflict of interest should not be involved in reviewing another's scientific work or proposal.
Most scientific organizations where this might apply have explicit policies to this end.  For example:

Grant reviewers for the US National Science Foundation are not allowed to be submitters to that same call for proposals, and must recuse themselves (i.e., leave the room) when there is discussion of any recent collaborator, co-author, or person from their institution.
Journals typically ask authors to name people with known conflicts of interest who should not be asked to review.  Reviewers are also asked to declare conflicts of interest and recuse themselves, and editors are (occasionally) responsive to well-founded complaints of prejudice.
Conferences similarly ask reviewers to exclude themselves from any papers they have a conflict for, and prevent reviewers from seeing information about any paper they have a conflict of interest for.
Double-blind reviewing of any of these is intended to mitigate the effects of personal conflict, though it is often possible to identify an author anyway due to their topic and approach.

There is no responsibility to collaborate with a person you have a conflict with though, nor to ensure civil interactions at conferences, etc.
All of these systems are quite flawed, of course, and there are a lot of ways that personal conflict does leak into decisions, especially since in many cases it is difficult to distinguish from legitimate intellectual disagreement.

You have the first aspect of bullet one backwards. Of course you can submit to any NSF RFP because you won't know if you are a reviewer until after the RFP deadline has passed. Now if you submit, you won't be asked to review for that opportunity, but that's OK.

You're right: my sentence was unclear; I've fixed it.

@jakebeal: the context of my question is not the judgement of whether a particular decision was due to a personal conflict or to "legitimate intellectual disagreement": most often than not, a decision is based on a mix of both, and deciding the proportion is a problem concerning psychology rather than law or ethics.  I am sorry if I am not clear, but I am aiming for another context, about the collective intent that one should try to ignore personal conflicts or tasts when taking decisions on behalf of others. It might be obvious to most, but I met various people in Academia to whom it isn't


text:
Do PhD programs care about the personalities of applicants?
Can a very extroverted person, for example, be more favored than a very quiet person? Or is this not ethical? Can someone who is psychopathic be barred from admission?

Is there anybody who can give an educated answer for Europe-based Universities? Seems most answers are about US admissions. I'm already in a PhD programme so I don't care that much, but it would be interesting to read :)

Yes, decisions based at least partially on personality do occur.  It's not clear to me what the legal technicalities are - for example, depending on your country there may be laws regarding things like discrimination against the mentally ill - but in practice an admissions committee can do whatever it likes, and nobody will be able to prove there was any illegal discrimination.
The way it typically works is that having a particularly pleasant or agreeable personality won't help you, but having an unpleasant personality may hurt you.  If you seem likely to be difficult to get along with, rude, disruptive, uncooperative, or otherwise problematic, then that will generally be held against you.  (This may be judged based on your personal statement, letters of recommendation, etc.)  It won't necessarily doom your chances: some committee members just won't care, and others may be willing to excuse bad behavior if you are sufficiently talented.  However, on average it will hurt your chances, sometimes substantially.

Personalities can count, because nobody wants to be an environment with lots of boorish colleagues. It's just not very fun.
However, in most cases—at least in the US—admissions are done without interviews. Therefore, the only way the personality of the candidate comes through is through what's written in the application. Either the personal statement or the letters of reference might reveal some details about the personality of the applicant. Usually, though, this is negative; I don't put much stock in letters of reference saying "so-and-so has a pleasant personality," since that is almost a de rigeur statement. (Something exceptional that goes into considerable detail, however, is different.)
When you have an interview, however, it's hard to hide your personality for very long. It can make a difference—but generally only if you're a candidate "on the bubble," or if your personality is so polarizing that nobody wants to bother with you, regardless of how nice you are. On the converse, though, I don't think a super-nice personality is enough to get someone on the bubble in.

interviews are common in biological sciences at least


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Funding problem - salary scale - CNRS
I am here to discuss about a funding problem I am having and I heard a lot of post-docs had before, but I couldn't find any testimony or tips.
My problem is the following and it is very simple. I got lucky to obtain my own funding from a funding agency, the name of which I can't reveal at this time. Of course I was thrilled and few days after the beginning of my contract the funding agency told me the money has been transfer to my institute. Then, I got my first pay check and I had the unpleasant surprise to notice a difference of ~2000euros (before taxes) between what the funding agency was supposed to give me and what the institute was giving me.
Obviously I was surprised and when I asked for reasons it seems the institute has some salary scale and they put me on those scale instead of giving me the money from the funding agency. And obviously they are keeping the rest for themselves.
However, this isn't true for all post-doctoral fellowships. Another post-doc in the same institute with a Marie-Curie fellowship isn't on those salary scale. Right now my PI (which support me 100%) and I are still in the middle of the discussion and I am looking for person that have a similar problem to help me find my way out of this trap.
The institute I am fighting with is the French institute: CNRS. I have nothing against them, but I think our work is hard enough to do research, get funding without also needing to fight for the money we are owed.

Edit posted as answer:
I haven't discuss yet with the funding agency because I am still hoping that the institue will re-evaluate the situation.
What I have understood is that a agreement has been signed between the funding agency and the CNRS that allow the CNRS to pay me based on the salary scale. However I'd never been aware of such agreement. And obviously such agreement will only benefit the CNRS that will keep 48,000€ (24month x 2,000€) in the transaction.
In addition, as I said this agreement only include some fellowship but not all of them such as the Marie-Curie fellowship. But I have no idea why.

Have you discussed the situation with anyone at the funding agency?

In my experience (in Germany and the Netherlands) the personnel department puts you at the lowest scale they can get away with. Only after you complain, will they move you up. Many don't complain, saving the university money.

Was the money tied in any way to the university (e.g. the external agency agreed to your proposal on the strengths of the group you are working in)?  If you accepted an offer directly with the funding agency, it's not your university's right to change the already-agreed offer.  But if you obtained funding for your group, the university may well be able to take a slice.

This really sounds like the problem is your institution, not CNRS. Yes, CNRS pays you, but only after the institution's administrative staff tell them that you exist, what your job is, and how much you are to be paid. There should be at least one person at your lab whose job this is. Find that person and talk to them. This is definitely not normal at CNRS and I've never heard of anything like that before. If this doesn't work, go to the funding agency directly.

It's certainly the case wtih US federal funding that a person working on a grant can only be paid at their regular rate from the grant, whatever the amount of the grant is.   I'd be surprised if any funding agency in any country was willing to allow anything other than this.

I'm not sure if it's relevant but I also got funding for my PostDoc in France (in a CNRS institute) from a foreign agency. However, in my case, the funding was transferred directly to me and not to the institute. Is there any chance to explore  such an option?

I talked to some people at my lab about this. I'm tempted to post it as an answer but I'm not authoritative about this, and everything I'm about to tell you is from a 3rd person perspective. If you want me to post it as an answer, let me know.
The short version is that CNRS does this. If you have a postdoc fellowship/grant and you come to a CNRS lab, your lab/CNRS will put you on the payscale equivalent to your peers. It may be possible for some wiggle room, but that is during contract negotiations, not after. CNRS is indeed taking the remaining money.

I'm told that this is one of many reasons why CNRS labs in general have trouble recruiting foreign talent. This does not apply for non-CNRS French institutions (e.g. CEA). Contact your funding agency, certainly, but they probably already know about it and may have an agreement with CNRS already. If this happened to me I'd be livid, so I understand your frustration OP. Contact everyone you can, and update us on whether you can fix this. This is, IMO, the issue with when scientific institutions are led by administration, and not the other way around. Good luck, OP.

Are you sure that CNRS keeps the difference? I only know it for other european countries (CZ and AT), but there is a total salary, from which the institution has to pay some taxes and social insurance for you. The remaining part then shows up as gross salary on your statement, from which you as employee have to pay taxes and social insurance. This difference can be quite significant.

omg, that is too low salary for post doc!!

What did you end up doing?

You find yourself in a tricky situation.  Universities often try to establish equity among grantees, regardless of whether a funding source could in theory pay higher or lower salary.  The way I've seen others deal with this is through a preemptive negotiation with the university. The scales tip in their favor, because you'll probably apply anyway, but I've seen some wiggle room on salary.  But after the fact would seem unlikely. Worth a shot. But, if the granting agency in good faith believes you are making X compensation but you get Y, they might not be happy about it. If you ask your granting coordinator whether you should inform the agency if the discrepancy, it might get some attention.

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


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Can a literature review be a "master's thesis"?
I have selected a single question for my master's thesis, within my field of Foreign Language Teaching. Most papers I have read contain just short literature reviews providing some background for a research study that occupied most of the writer's time. I think I could understand my question better if I focusing all of my effort on creating a 100-200 page literature review, examining and critiquing all existing literature on the subject, rather than on trying to come up with some new results.
Can a master's thesis be comprised of just a literature review? Do journals publish literature reviews on their own?

What is your area of study?

You're asking two different questions here.

Yes, you can publish a high-quality literature review in some, but not all, journals. However, many journals also solicit such reviews rather than take them automatically, and many will have length restrictions associated with them. So check with the journal before you start working!
As for a master's thesis, that depends a lot on the requirements of your field. In the humanities, you would probably have to do some searches for primary references, but a large-scale literature review is an important part of such a work. In the sciences and engineering, however, you are much less likely to be able to submit such a thesis. The usual standards there require more original work than can typically be accomplished with a literature review.

A literature review with well-defined research questions that provides a synthesis of high-quality literature is considered very useful research. Generally, such reviews present a taxonomy of the domain, summarize the contributions and furnish them in an abstract manner from different aspects involved.
A good quality review gets many citations, and it provides a very useful stepping stone for new researchers in a given area.
Thus, it can certainly be considered as an MS thesis.

But it depends, of course, on what an advisor or a university will permit.

Though there are different contexts and meanings of the word, often when people say "research" they mean "original research". Reviews are certainly useful to the research process, but may not be considered themselves research.


text:
Can one publish ideas well before one has evidence proving the ideas work?
I am rather disappointed by the existing research in my area of interest. There is a big disconnect between the solutions practitioners need and what researchers look at.

I have read everything available on the subject in e-journals.
I have many ideas which I believe can solve some small problems in my field.
I also have ideas for paradigms (or major expansions of existing paradigms) which I believe can help the researchers and practitioners look at the problems in a different light.
I am not in a PhD program, so I lack the advice, time, resources, and know-how for setting up controlled experiments to validate these ideas, so I can only address them as thought experiments or identify the nearest related experiments not directly testing my ideas.

Can I publish short here-is-an-idea paper (e.g. “Proposed Solution for X” or “(new) Model for Y”) well before having any means of providing some proof?

What do you mean by "e-journals"? Can you give specific examples that you are referring to in your field?

By e-journals, I mean the articles available in Ebsco.

Do bear in mind that there are some very applied fields where journals simply don't carry the state of the art, because that information is so commercially viable. So what's your area of interest? I'm absolutely fascinated to learn about an area of interest which is so small that it's humanly possible to have read everything available on the subject in journals, but not to have written on or formally studied that area.

Sounds like you need a blog.

@curiousdannii Blogs filled with ideas that the authors think are game changers are more than abundant, and I don't think any of them help.

Note too that publishing is disclosure, and (at least in the US) starts the clock running on patentability.

"read everything available on the subject in journals" obviously, I don't read each one word-by-word, but I did what I'm assuming most scholars do...skimmed and focused on the important parts, which often involved simply reading the abstract and conclusion to know that the answer I seek is not found within the data. When did I say I haven't formally studied the area?

Generally, no.
Insights are a dime a dozen. Insights with evidence are how science (social and natural) proceed.
Proceeding through your bullets:

You mention e-journals. Have you read the "literature" in traditional journals/books/whatever the field's standard is? There's a lot of good reason to be suspicious of e-journals, so you may not have a full view of the field.
Belief in ideas doesn't make them true(r). Sorry.
Is there a reason that you think that these expansions of paradigms haven't been considered? Are you sure that they really have never occurred before?
Perhaps that's the argument for obtaining a Ph.D. or research master's --- to demonstrate that ideas have empirical heft.

If you really want to make a difference, you will have to offer evidence that your ideas work or have worked, beyond the logic you offer.

+1 for insights are a dime a dozen. Insight suggests that the world is flat and the earth is not turning. This is why people believed those concepts to be true for thousands of years.

Why should I be suspicious of e-journals? I found them in Ebsco and they are listed as "peer reviewed".

Sure, one can publish ideas before properly evaluating their value. But it depends. Your area of research might be different from mine, but I have written "position papers" papers in the past where the main purpose is to generate discussion. Then you usually have to go to the conference and workshop your ideas with other participants.
So if there really is a big disconnect between practitioners and researchers, do some groundwork, maybe interview those practitioners so that you can back up your claims when you meet the researchers. Then propose improvements to current research so that you can work on your ideas and study them properly. You may also find help and advice and co-authors for the future.

In order for a work to be scholarly, the content has to be reviewed by a group of experts in your field, tested by those peers for accuracy and then you have to find someone who is willing to publish your work. You don't have to have proof of your findings for them to be published, but the work wouldn't be considered a scholarly document. Just remember that theories aren't just ideas, but concepts that have been tried and tested to be logical and accurate. Whatever you do, make sure that your experiments can be repeated and that you get the same "Proposed Solution for X" every time. Remember that every revolution begins in the mind of one man, and that your "proposed solution" might possibly be the right one, with or without proof.

+1: "Just remember that theories aren't just ideas" - hypotheses are ideas! I get very frustrated by the confusion over these terms in the popular media... :-)

"tested by those peers for accuracy" do you mean, before I should publish my ideas, I should find peers and have them test it out?

Running your ideas by others in your field before publishing would certainly be a good idea. They could give you some early indication of whether this is well know, already refuted, "not even wrong", not testable, or actually interesting. I suspect you want to know that before you start putting your reputation on the line.

Actually, I would think that it's not really a matter of looking like you don't know what you're talking about, but more so of making sure that the material published in the community actually benefits the scientific (or literary :D) community.


text:
How to reduce student plagiarism?
During the last term, I recorded at least 50 cases of student plagiarism. The most common cases were students copying and pasting paragraphs verbatim from various Web sites, assembling them together, and calling it their essay.
I took what I thought were sufficient steps to inform students of what was not allowed:

I posted the rules in the syllabus, on the course Web site, and listed relevant rules in the instructions for larger projects.
I issued spoken warnings in class regularly, occasionally showed some examples of such submissions, and also showed students some of the steps I took to catch the plagiarism.

I also set what I thought were strict enough consequences so that students know it is better to do nothing at all than to cheat:

20% grade loss (from their entire grade) per infraction, no matter the value of the assignment (most assignments were only worth ~5%).

Note, these are policies I established from the very first day of the class, and carried through the whole term. Yet, even in the final weeks, I continued to catch copied work and failed a lot of students.
What further steps can I take to reduce this problem?

Just a curiosity: where are you teaching?

I think, too, that what you do is fine. The problem is more of the poor time management or similar factors on the side of the students. If you want to have less fail students, maybe you should focus on that part.

I teach writing courses, focusing on very basic college writing skills, and the problems mostly occurred in the large sections (40-100 students). Yes, I had cases of students who submitted plagiarized papers after being caught once.

You have my sympathies: 50 cases per semester sounds unusually, distressingly high.  As with other commenters, I think you should just stick to what you are already doing.  If you routinely fail (sufficiently repeated and/or egregious) plagiarists, then the word will get out and over time I suspect you'll have many fewer cases.  Unless these students are so out of their depth that they cannot hope to pass the course honestly, cheating when you know it has caused many other students to fail is really irrational behavior.  Students are not so irrational, in my experience...

This is exactly why my standard consequence for a second offense, no matter how minor, is an F in the class.

My standard consequence is an F for the 1st offense.  I explain the policy in the beginning of the semester: "This is your warning, we're not going to have the 'I didn't know discussion' later." Also I make it clear that I am their greatest resource in avoiding problems.  "If you have any questions, you're not sure what's plagiarism, you don't know how to properly cite, that's what I'm here for!" It might sound draconian but I've had near 0 rates since adapting this policy. Also, might want to look again at your percentages. Sounds like I can plagiarize twice in your class and get a C.

Will it be against any laws in your country if a tsudent is caught red-handed plagiarism?

I sit on my departments academic misconduct committee and see a huge number of cases and have looked at a number of statistics. We use TurnItIn at my university and allow students top precheck there work to obtain both a similarity score and a detailed report of which parts of their paper are likely copied. About half our students use this precheck feature, but they seem to ignore the output since the similarity index on the precheck are generally not that different from the similarity score on the final copy. In other words telling students exactly what is copied does not decrease plagiarism. We have a pretty light penalty for a first offence of plagiarism, but the penalty for a second offence is much more severe. Having previous offences does not reduce the probability of committing plagiarism on future assignments, so we do not think that the severity of the penalty matters. We have concluded that the students who plagiarise just do not care and that there is nothing that can be done to discourage them.
Looking at the sources students copy from, we do not think the specificity of the assignment would reduce the number of incidents. What we notice is that some types of assignments (e.g, take home essays) are much more likely to contain plagiarism than others (e.g., exam essays) and that plagiarism is much more likely to occur during the first year. We therefore limit the number of assignments with high rates of plagiarism during the first year.

@shane thankfully no. If you divide the assignment base on number of previous academic offences you get a huge stack for people with zero offences, and a tiny stack of people with two offences. What I mean is that N percent of each stack, not N assignments, contains plagiarism. Does that make sense?

While both of the existing answers have the same basic answers as me, I will add mine simply because I don't have time to make it short enough to fit into a comment.
As Shane wrote, design assignments that are hard to plagiarize and fail all students who plagiarize.
I do both of theses but still have a problem with students plagiarizing. I fail all who plagiarize but they have a chance to resubmit one time (school policy). If it were up to me, I would fail then without a chance to resubmit, but it is not up to me.
In the end, some students do not take the issue of plagiarism seriously. These are the students whom you need to awaken and finally seeing that they will not graduate until they write their own assignments will eventually awaken them.
I have had students (more than one) who end up taking one of my modules three years in a row (because they keep failing for plagiarizing). Eventually, they all get it and do their own work (or they change schools). The students who get caught and open up to me usually have the same reason: They waited until the last minute and did not have time to complete the work, so they took a shortcut.
I have even had students who clearly spend hours modifying the work of someone else just to avoid detection. I constantly wonder why they would not simply spend those hours doing the actual work. I don't always get a response when I ask the student.
First semester students are usually worse than more senior ones but it does seem that some students think that even though one teacher is tough, they still try it (and sometimes succeed) with other teachers. A more coordinated school-wide effort would seem to help with this, although I have been unsuccessful in making my colleagues as concerned as I am on the topic.

To reduce plagiarism I would increase the penalty to "failure" for any instance of plagiarism.  This policy might make students react emotionally and therefore might seem difficult to do.  Therefore, I would add to your "let them know in advance" policies a few statements (eg in the syllabus) to show the problem context, as "Last semester 50 students failed the class due to plagiarism," and "the purpose of the policy is to protect the value of the university's degree. If the school gets a reputation as a cheaters' school, the value of our degree may drop to that of a low tier school."

Plagiarism is violation of administrative policy enforceable by a forfeit of benefits. Students are all adults and should know about plagiarism from their former schooling prior to attending the university.

First case: Warning and educational session explaining intellectual dishonesty
Second case: Exmatriculation/expulsion.

We as society need such specialists and often we pay our taxes for their education. Tolerating plagiarism allows students to graduate from the university with an art of criminal thinking. Exmatriculation is in this case just a prophylaxis of more substantial and society-harmful crime.

I used to work in a college when desktop computing was in its infancy.
it was inevitable that a class of 30 students would come up with similar papers if they all used the same research sources.
I failed 27 out of thirty papers submitted in the first week because they were all copied from Microsoft Encarta, which was available in the college library. I knew that the article had been copied and pasted as I had a print of it on my desk which I had used to prepare the module with.  After a class protest against my actions I reviewed my actions and failed the other 3 as they had copied the article but at least had the good sense to re-word it so it wasn't quite so obvious.  Sadly, none of the students had acquired any knowledge of the material.

This is a very hard decision to make if you are alone with the problem.
It is my experience that teaching institutions tend to gloat about having a hard line / zero tolerance policy towards cheating (plagiarism is cheating, at least once the students have been told so), while being rather soft on cheaters when it comes to actually taking action.
I would therefore recommend that you actually ask your bosses (department heads and the like) what they recommend. Do make sure they are not encouraging you to waste your time (by taking action against cheaters only to see your actions canceled by some committee). If your institution actually enforces a hard line policy, go with it. If it is rather permissive, well, you cannot do much more than go with it too... :(

Just a couple of things to add, having been the plagiarism czarina at my school for a number of years.
1)  The university should have a campus-wide policy so that students in different sections of the same course don't receive widely differing consequences.
2)  It's written into the California Education Code that teachers cannot grade punitively, so failing a student for plagiarism was out.  We could give the student a zero on that paper only, and figure that zero into their final grade.
3)  We sent particularly egregious cases to the Student Discipline Officer, who as the President's designee could be punitive or whatever she felt appropriate.
4)  Many students come to college not understanding how to cite sources correctly.  They need to be taught.
5)  Change your assignments every semester and as one responder said, write questions in such a way that students will not be able to easily cut and paste.

The thing that has worked best for me is to explain that citation and accompanying references show me, the instructor, that the student has actually done work instead of just jotting down whatever comes immediately to mind, and that I reward work.
That and assigning a grade of zero on the first instance with a warning that a repetition will result in referral to the student conduct office.

Depends on the number of your students and a little bit of work from your end. I did teach a programming class with 100 students. I did the following:

Created 20 topics and with a little bit of guideline for each.
In a class, asked students to write their names and I put them in a hat. Then asked a student to come to the board and pick names from the hat. So we randomly created 20 groups of 5.
Monitored their work every week to see who is doing what in the group.
The last 2 weeks of the course and during the presentation of their work, I asked each person individually in a group what they have done and if the rest of the group agree with that.

Almost all students came through. The best thing was created this interactive process, I was happy because they were gradually building up and learning and solving their problems ,and they were very happy because they felt they got what they deserved.

The university I attended and teach at has the same plagiarism policy and I've only ever heard of 3 cases occurring during my time learning and instructing.
The policy is that if you are caught plagiarizing you fail the course and can be taken to court. Legal charges depends on who they are stealing from and if that person wants to press charges. Of the 3 cases I have seen never has anyone pressed charges.
In terms of what you can do to reduce plagiarizing there's various methods that depends on what your university allows you to enforce. First, I would fail a student immediately if it's copy & paste. If it's a student who clearly just doesn't know how to cite things correctly (example: "famous quote in paper" no acknowledgement as to who said it).
You seem like you put a good amount of effort into telling your students the consequences for plagiarism but I don't think losing 20% will deter a lot of people form at least doing it once. 80% is a passing grade though simple path would say if they assignment is less than 20% if your final grade, just don't do it rather than copying it from somewhere else.
You mentioned that you teach a writing course? In my writing courses we had to have a peer proofread our rough drafts before moving onto the final paper. If you do something similar then you may want to encourage having students review a digital copy of the assignment and have the peer run it through copyscape or even inform the students to run their own assignments through copyscape.


text:
Is there a comprehensive system for identifying course objectives?
When planning my courses, I usually try to establish a variety of objectives, beyond the primary objective described in the course description, and layer many minor objectives into the lessons. Courses for freshmen tend to have more objectives, as they are often learning about the requirements of being a student at college.
As an example, in a course called "History of New Orleans", I would focus on these objectives:

content (e.g. know major events in New Orleans' history)
cultural understanding (e.g. develop affinity/understanding of the perspective of different peoples in New Orleans)
vocabulary (e.g. academic meta-vocabulary, terms specific to the content)
research skills (e.g. assessing bias in sources, writing a works cited)
practice with technological tools to assist (e.g. software for accessing historical records)
group work skills (e.g. effectively combining work)
academic behavior (e.g. learn that plagiarism is not welcome in college)

I have seen tools such as Bloom's Taxonomy, however, that seems too narrowly focused on the course topic and does not seem to broadly cover many of the skills I've listed above. I want to find some table/system/taxonomy to help me to identify and organize the objectives.
Is there a system to assist course instructors in selecting course objectives?

Perhaps the closest thing to a system would be the objectives that were developed for the full curriculum?
An example from my area. In biology, a recent call encourages universities to be less focused on subdisciplines and more on core concepts and competencies. After many meetings, biologists settled on these:
Core concepts: evolution, structure and function, information flow, energy pathways, systems.
Competencies: application of the scientific method, quantitative reasoning, modeling and simulation, interdisciplinary connections, effective communication.
If I were writing out my learning objectives for the lecture on photosynthesis, I might list that photosynthesis fits into structure/function and energy pathways core concepts, and I would be motivated to include a discussion of a classic experiment so students can practice the scientific method and some calculations for students to apply quantitative reasoning.
I would imagine that history (or any other discipline) likely has a similar  list of important concepts plus important skills they want their students to have.

authors: Дмитрий Моисеев


text:
How to engage in discussion after a presentation on an unfamiliar topic?
Sometimes I am in a conference presentation or seminar which there are only a handful of audiences, and after the presentation the atmosphere simply urges the audiences to ask questions or the presenter will be embarrassed. I do want to contribute to a meaningful discussion, but the problem is that I am unfamiliar with the topic, and after listening to the presentation, I can only understand the background briefly. I cannot formulate a good question after the presentation.
You may wonder why I attend a presentation which the topic I am unfamiliar with, and sometimes it is driven by curiosity, and sometimes it is compulsory (like invited speakers from my supervisor etc). I know it may be possible to formulate a good question by reading the publication of the speaker beforehand, I have tried it actually but the efforts to understand an unfamiliar topic seems too much, and it may not worth it especially I cannot come up with a good question afterwards.
I don't want to be looking stupid after a presentation, but also don't want to start a discussion which is not quite meaningful just because nobody raises a question. Is there any way to help one to start a good discussion for a topic which I am unfamiliar with after a presentation?

Is there any way to help one to start a good discussion for a topic which I am unfamiliar with after a presentation? — As you become more aware of the problems folks in your field are solving, if you are curious enough, "good" questions should come about organically; this takes time and depends on the individual. Don't worry about looking stupid for not asking a question; as Honest Abe said, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."

If you attend a talk with your main goal being able to ask a good question afterwards, you are doing something wrong.

In some fields, there are questions that can be asked after almost any talk.  If you want to be provocative, you can ask almost any theoretical computer scientist "Does your algorithm work well in practice?" and almost any non-theoretical computer scientist "Does your technique have any theoretical guarantees?"

@JeffE I took the liberty of stealing your CS examples and include them into my answer. I hope that is OK.

In general I agree to what @user46345 and the others said: If you do not have a good question (and no good reason to ask one anyway) it is better to be quiet.
However, sometimes it is important to ask a question. Two examples that come to my mind are:

You are the discussant of the talk (and you had no opportunity to read the paper before the talk or the speaker already answered all your questions in his talk).
You have a very shy audience that whats to ask questions but no one wants to be the first one to ask.

But there are probably others.
The best thing to do would be to read the paper first and think about a question related to it. If that is not possible there are still some other options to use:

If you haven't understood something during the talk: ask about that.
It is not your field of expertise, so no one expects you to know
everything about it.
In most fields a very common type of question is about applications. In economics this could be "What are the policy implications
of your results?". @JeffE has the following examples for (theoretical) computer science "Does your algorithm work well in practice?" and for non-theoretical computer scientists "Does your technique have any theoretical guarantees?".
"Sensitivity analysis type questions": Is the assumption A crucial?
How would your result change if you change assumption B? They still
require some knowledge of the subject but not as much.

These questions can be used as backup as long as you still have some knowledge about the topic of the talk and you have paid attention (asking something the speaker explained 10 minutes earlier makes you look really stupid). However, it is usually better to avoid asking questions than forcing you to ask one.

You don't need to feel pressured to participate in a discussion that you are not familiar with. If it is a subject that you feel strongly about and are familiar with, I am sure a question would come to you; if, OTOH, you are not familiar and were there just because you were invited, and had not time to get acquainted with the subject discussed prior to the presentation, it is best to stay quiet. Do not force it, as it will be obvious and you will end up looking not-very-smart. Leave questions to those who know what to ask, and if they ask nothing, it is not your duty to save the day.
Another thing to keep in mind is that it all depends on the type of presentation/discussion. If it is a less formal one, asking a personal, but interesting question will both engage the speaker and the audience. For instance "What was the hardest part of the project?"
Again, it helps if you inform yourself prior to the presentation - do not just walk in there without knowing nothing about the subject discussed or the presenter, if you want to participate. Asking a question unprepared can even lead to some awkward situations, e.g. asking an actor how he feels about working with some actress who just happens to be his wife whom he is divorcing right now and she is suing him for millions...


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Two lecturers, one course, one class
This is my first question here, so please correct me if I'm wrong in my way of asking.
My question is suggested directly by the title. In my college institution, for each subject, half of the semester is handled by one lecturer, and the next half by another one. The reasoning is that each lecturer needs to have near equal teaching responsibility. If one lecturer only is applied, there might be some lecturers who have lower or higher workloads than others.
Another reasoning is that this way we can minimize the bias that can happen with just one lecturer. If a lecturer has bias over some students but the other does not, it will somehow even out, rather than just this first lecturer handles the whole semester.
Some negative effects are there of course, but how do you think the negative or positive effects are affecting the learning and teaching experience? My heart says the negatives are just too much.

What negatives are there in this situation? You haven't mentioned any.

OK. I have put some in the comments for the answer.

Your question does not contain a question. Can you please add what you want to know? Note that "what do you think about this?" tends to not be a good question for the Stack Exchange format.

Double post: https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/14269/one-course-subject-one-class-two-lecturers . Please do not post to two SE websites at once; wait for one site to deal with the question and, if those are not satisfactory, post to the other with link to the previous question.

I would propose to re-phrase the question to clarify the issues involved. E.g. teaching load as a motivation makes little sense to me, but complementary approaches to one topic are of great benefit for the students and we are doing it in many lectures with very good feedback.

Ok then. I just voted to delete it as I have also posted on other SE website. Thanks for telling me the rules..

This happens often, lecturer A does micro economics then lecturer B does macro economics.
As students you may prefer A over B but they also like to work towards their strengths...
As long as they cover the material and the assessments are appropriate then 2 lecturers or 1 is not an issue.
You don’t give any negatives but I have mentioned some perceived issues.

Hmm ok. I thought the negatives are obvious but alright. One example is as you mentioned. For another example, sometimes just for the sake of having 2 lecturers (well, by considering the positives of course), we put aside the matter of lecturer's competency and let a lecturer, who has very less experience on a subject, teach the subject. Sure, this lecturer can learn first, but wouldn't the result be better if he/she has experience, like have taken the subject when in college and got good grade before? Another negative is that since the material per semester is continuous, (cont'd)

(continuation) a lecturer hopes to see the progress of students understanding. Isn't it harder to do this with two lecturers? Change happens after mid term by the way.

Don’t put critical information in comments -edit your question with that info - people don’t trawl through comments trying to piece together your question...


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Hypothesis incorrectly stated and submitted
I realise after submitting my dissertation lask week that I posed my hypothesis in the wrong manner.
I posed them as

I believe that X will not be a predictor of Y

I subsequently went on with results which returned a p value of 0.01 and subsequently said we reject the null throughout my discussion.
It may be simply viewed as a typo. Am I likely to suffer greatly as a result of this mistake. I proceed with my methods, data analysis and discussion as if the hypotheses are proposed in the correct manner and given the overall premise of the dissertation and explanation of the result, it's quite clear what I am trying to achieve I believe.
Am I likely to simply be failed as a result of this error?
Any help greatly appreciated as I'm very as this has been submitted  and I am extremely worried

I'm hoping to be correct here, but this depends partially on personalities. Since you found the error, you should immediately inform everyone involved of the error and offer to supply a corrected version immediately. If people are reasonable they should act reasonably, of course. If you wait, and someone else notices it, you will have difficulties.
Getting things absolutely backwards is likely more common than you imagine. Also, when you write and then proofread your own writing, you are very likely to see what you want to see, what you think you wrote, rather than what you actually wrote. Most reasonable people will recognize that, have a bit of a chuckle and move on.
But you have to be the one to raise the flag.
You raise this issue on a week end. If at all possible, don't wait for the new week to inform at least your professor.

One of the reasons that books have editors and journals assign reviewers is to catch these kind of errors of inattention. Sometimes an advisor will perform that function for a student, but not always.

Hi, thanks for the response. I previously had a formatting issue they allowed me to correct so I simply come across as careless at this stage which made me apprehensive to say anything. However, I decided to mail my course director and make him aware of my error. Our course although MSc dealt sparingly with hypothesis testing so I'm hoping he understands, do you think if he simply rejects my offer to correct that it will be failed?

"If you wait, and someone else notices it, you will have difficulties." - I think this may be too strong. The OP may have difficulties. I think it's far more likely that graders will chuckle and read on. Quite probably, they typos like this regularly. After all, as you write, "Getting things absolutely backwards is likely more common than you imagine." So: by all means inform people (even if you already previously informed them of a formatting issue - yes, it's unfortunate, but better than not to inform them), but certainly don't worry about it inordinately.

Hi Stephen, thanks for that, it settles my mind a tad. I just hate coming across unprofessional but I simply have so much invested that I don't want this to be a difference maker. I emailed them and asked them to be aware as resubmission 3 days later is probably too much and not necessary. Thanks for the comments they're very much appreciated.


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Changing supervisor before starting the PhD - not selected
I approached a supervisor about a PhD application. At this university, you must have two supervisors, so after a meeting, he invited the other "supervisor" to discuss the topic.
Honestly, this new supervisor doesn't suit my topic. In fact, he proposed some topic changes that I am not happy to do. However, for the rush of the moment and the nervous, I said yes. After, I checked the credentials of the new supervisor. He just graduated last year and I would be his first PhD student.
I received the offer letter and this last supervisor was appointed as the main supervisor.  I received a scholarship from my government (not from the university), so no funding is attached to the supervisors or topic. I haven't "officially" started the PhD.
I will have a meeting soon and I was wondering how I could ask to change the main supervisor? I will argue that I want to focus on my original topic, but what to do if they say that I can change the topic, but with the same team?  Is it wrong that I would like to have a more "experienced" supervisor as the primary supervisor?
Thank you.

Could you please specify the country or geographical area? The relevant procedures and expectations can vary a lot between different countries

Sorry, the PhD is in the UK. I will formally start in October this year. My PhD is not linked to a project of the supervisors.

Your wishes and concerns are valid, but your options are limited. You say you agreed, which was not your best choice. Of course you realize this, but maybe too late.
Unfortunately this is more of a personal relationship issue than one for rules. I know how bad it can be to have an inexperienced, ill-matched, advisor, especially if you aren't enthusiastic about the topic.
One option is to go elsewhere for your degree - an extreme solution that will cost you time and perhaps, money.
A possible solution, depending on personalities is to go back to the first professor, with whom you seem more comfortable, and lay out the situation, in essence begging to work under his/her direction instead. Don't open with the suggestion that you may need to withdraw if your request can't be granted and think about whether that is actually what you would want to do. But your possible withdrawal might be a last resort argument. It is a bit dangerous to use, however, if made in such a way that anyone, especially this professor, thinks less of you as a result.
One outcome of such a meeting might actually be that the professor can convince you of the correctness of the current situation (with the new advisor and problem), based on his/her reading of the state of the art. It is useful if you have a senior professor keeping a bit of a watch over you and a junior professor as the process unfolds, so maintaining a good working relationship is essential if you intend to continue.

Thank you for your answer. I forgot to mention that the scholarship from my government in linked to the university, but not to the topic-supervisor. Your advice to talk to the first professor was my option, but once again he send me a reply copying the "primary supervisor". So now the meeting is once again with the three of us.

People have told me that this is the correct time to ask the change, as my PhD will start in October, because I have heard that really to feel identify with the supervisor background project is really important.

@Matt, it is too late to correct, but I meant a face to face meeting, not just email. If you have a meeting, you want to avoid offending the person who may wind up with primary authority. But you can still bring up your interest in the original problem and listen to what they both have to say. But this three way meeting really needs to be in person. It is too easy to minimize your concerns (and passion) if you try to communicate remotely. And yes, you need to settle it before you start. Hard choices. Good luck.

Yes, this meeting will be on person. Originally I sent the email to ask for a meeting, it is not that I'm trying to do evrything by email. He add the new supervisor to the meeting (even my intentions were to only disscuss this with the first supervisor).   I really hope everything goes well. I will focus in the importance to keep my topic (that honestly requiere a different supervisor)... Hopefully, verything will be change to the best. Thank you!

One issue that you may not have considered is that this is an administrative and faculty development issue rather than one that directly affects your day-to-day research.
Remember that for faculty to secure a long-term position, one of the requirements is that they show an ability to mentor students through the PhD process. It is very difficult to do this if they are not officially assigned as the main advisor of PhD students. For a senior faculty member who is already in a permanent position, this is likely not as significant a concern.
Basically, I would just ask in this meeting what are the supervision duties they plan to have rather than what's "official."

Yes. I was meaning to add to my answer that the senior professor's intent may have been to mentor the junior professor in advising. If that is the case then it should resolve cleanly, other than the question of the research topic.

Thank you both for your comments. I totally understand the challenges that face young academics to earn a "permanent position". And that somehow in the future I would like to have the change to supervised students.
However, I feel that things haven't occurred en a very "transparent" way. I approach one supervisor because I feel that he could really support me, but I ended with some else, doing his topic (that I'm still having doubts).

As you mention, I need to clarify the roles of both of them. In my home country, a young supervisor starts as a secondary supervisor with the first PhD student and not as primary. But, if here they told me that they will be equally involved, I could be more relaxed.


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How much advanced notice is expected for faculty interviews?
I have a faculty interview for a Canadian university coming up some time in the next week. For this interview I have to prepare 2 lectures.
I still havent received the date, nor the lecture topics. So I havent even booked time off work yet.
How much advanced warning is expected for this sort of thing? I feel that I would need ample time to prepare and with working full time elsewhere, it might be right. Or maybe Im just overreacting and stressing out.

Probably too variable for a useful answer here. Are you  sure that you don't get to pick the topics?

@Buffy yes. They said they would get back to me on the presentation details.

Better if you ask, then.

This is really unusual and I expect that there's been a miscommuncation or someone has screwed up.  Surely they've already picked a date on their end and have either forgotten to tell you or something went wrong with the email.  Have you checked your spam folder?

@NoahSnyder, yeah I have. I actually emailed them a couple days ago with some questions but noone has responded yet.

Since time is a factor here, don't leave it to email.  Pick up the telephone and call someone (search committee chair, department head, etc).

They could be waiting on other candidates to finalize their plans before knowing when the remaining available days are. You should at least find out the topics in advance and be ready.Given that it's typically so one-sided (many applicants for few jobs) there's no telling how unreasonable they might be. You are of course always free to say "sorry I can't make it with such short notice", but I presume that's the last thing you want to do.

@ASimpleAlgorithm, that makes sense... It is unfortunate that they couldn't just schedule all of us later (in 2-3 weeks or something) to give ample time to prepare. Although it might not be the desirable to say "sorry can't make it", I will have to figure out if the time I have will allow me to make the right impression.

@NateEldredge, ugh, this is actually my old department and people are so hard to reach! I'll have to try again on Monday.

You may have missed an email somewhere or been subject to an HR snafu. We recently had one out of five people that we interviewed for a position miss an HR email that explained the timing and subject of their interview lecture meaning they weren't prepared for it when it came. Another time, someone just didn't show up, we assume, because details were missed. Check your spam folder and contact HR right away.

@GrotesqueSI, thanks, but I stated earlier that I checked my spam folder and contacted HR a few days ago.

It's totally reasonable for you to want to plan your schedule at least a week ahead.
Contact them and ask if they have the date yet, or if not, when they expect to have it.

And even if they don't know the date yet, they should be able to tell you the lecture topics.

Thanks Nate! Do you think it would be acceptable to ask for a different date (for example, a week later) if they take a while to schedule me in? I would really rather not last-minute the day-off request at work.

I believe that is completely reasonable

@Catsunami If your only concern is the last-minute request for leave, and there are no knock-on effects such as needing to arrange cover for teaching, make the last-minute request. Finding a time when everybody on the interview panel is free can be difficult.

@Catsunami: You can ask, but as David says, scheduling interviews is rather difficult for a search committee.  And they are usually under some pressure to complete the interview process quickly, since the longer they wait, the more likely their preferred candidates will receive and possibly accept other offers.  So if you ask for a later date, they may well say no.  Thus my advice would be to make every reasonable effort to attend the interview on the date they set, even if it is somewhat inconvenient or causes minor friction at your current job.

"How much advanced warning is expected for this sort of thing?"
The answer is that it varies between departments, schools, faculties, universities, countries, etc., and even between different recruitment rounds within the same department.
Although it is not helpful for the candidate to get this information very late, it is certainly not uncommon for interviews to delay decisions about dates, topics, instructions etc. to the last minute due to administrative reasons. For example, if the department is in a rush, or they have multiple posts, etc. The best way of course is to contact the department by email and ask.


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Research Methodology Books for beginners in Computer Science research
I am looking for Research Methodology textbooks in the field of Computer Science. Most books I came across are useful to social science, economics etc.
In our part of the world a person who wants to do research should study a course in research methodology. But most books in research methodology are from social science, economics perspective.
Would like to know some from technology/computer science/engineering perspective. Some must read books for general reading also would be good

It would be useful to narrow the scope to something more specific, computer science is a beast with many faces.

@MarcClaesen Indeed! You could fill a whole book on that subject.

Research methodologies are usually independent of your area. Often, the application of some methods and the examples used to describe them differ depending on the area. For example, empirical research is a methodology that can be applied whether you do research in CS, psychology, or physics. This methodology teaches you how to conduct experiments that are sound (by minimizing different threats to validity) and how to analyze the data in a statistical way (e.g., when to use which statistical test to accept a certain research hypothesis).
In medicine, you might conduct experiments to analyze the effects of some drugs whereas is CS, you would do some performance experiments to analyze the effects of some optimizations. The methods used in both areas are the same, the application might differ largely though.
Hence, it would not harm to study a text book from psychology / statistics, because the tools you learn there are also valuable for CS (e.g., knowing the difference between qualitative and quantitative research or descriptive and analytic). Furthermore, there is no CS-methodology (at least I am not aware of).

This book is "research methodology for computer science". It's a quick and easy read that clarifies many issues specific to the computer science field. The problem is that it is available only in Brazilian Portuguese, as far as I know.