text:
Is it reasonable for a professor to ask students to stay 30-45 minutes past scheduled class time every week?
I'm currently in a class in my major that meets for 50 minutes 3 times a week. Meanwhile, I'm a member of a campus club, unrelated to my major, which meets right after this class one day.
My professor has decided that he should have the students stay an extra 30-45 minutes after class on the day of the meetings so that he can continue to teach.
I'm the only one in the class who has voted against this, which makes me uncomfortable, because I'm what's forcing the class to have a faster pace.
Am I right in being outraged? Is it not the professor's job to teach the necessary course material in the time allotted, as opposed to having students stay late for no credit? Should I cave in and just not go to the club meetings? They're not important for my major, and I'm not an officer, but I immensely enjoy them.
Edit: I've been asked in the comments why my professor is doing this.  It has to do with the pacing of the course--if we had to stick to 50 minutes 3 times a week, then the pace would have to be much faster.

Which country is this? There is likely to be cultural differences.

I guess I'm going to be the contrary opinion here. I don't think your professor's request is reasonable at all. Class time is scheduled the way it is so that people can plan the rest of their lives around the schedule. In this case, nobody but you seems to have anything from 12:50 on, but that shouldn't encourage the prof to monopolize that time.
Some may think your extracurricular activity is trivial or that you should skip it, but that math club could easily have been another class or your job. The professor is in a position of power, and he should respect his position by not trying to compel you to work outside the system because it's convenient to him. Several of your peers may actually appreciate that you're the lone hold out even if they won't ever admit it.
I would have no problem with the prof offering extra sessions where no required material was covered. This could be extra practice working example problems or a Q&A session to clear up anything confusing from class. That being said, I think professors should be held to teaching the required stuff in the allotted time.

Excellent answer. The only point I'd add is that if a lecturer needs 30-45 minutes of extra time every week, perhaps she should find a way to schedule more class time for the subject in the long run!

The only thing that I would add is that if a lecturer needs 30-45 minutes of extra time every week, they should teach less stuff.

@aeismail, my experience is that US profs don't get a choice. Almost every college course is schedule for 3 hours per week of class time. There are a handful of 2, 4, and 5 hour courses, but moving something from 3 to 4 hours per week would be a major undertaking. It cannot be done one semester at the whim of a single professor. As JeffE alludes to, there's more or less some required course content for most classes in a department, and the prof better be able to get through it in the standard time.

@JeffE Or schedule more class time and increase accordingly the credits gained for the course. There's a limit to how far you can sensibly quantize a subject. If classical mechanics requires 36 hours of lectures to teach but there are only 24 hours scheduled, it might be better to just make the course worth more credits, rather than cut material that might have to be shoehorned in somewhere else. Though as Bill Barth just commented, depending on the university / country sometimes you just can't do this.

@Moriarty, I'd say that in the US, to first order, this is never done. For required courses, there's an expected syllabus with a small amount of leeway, and you just have to fit your material in that. A new course might have some options, but the default is 3 hours per week for 14 weeks.

@BillBarth Fair point. My undergrad university (in New Zealand) had some seriously weird course loads. One year at a normal workload gave you 120 credits. Education was a particularly odd one (some courses were worth 17.5 credits, others 10, or 18, or ...). The credit system has since been standardized throughout the university, but maybe there are places where such flexibility is still common.

I will add that it's already a 4-credit course with 1 credit being a 3 hour lab session.

@Moriarty ...and the reason it's never done is that instructors rarely have the freedom to define how many credits their classes will be worth, which, at least at my university, (loosely) determines the number of contact hours. If you want approval for a one-term 5- or 6-hour course, you have to convince a whole stack of committees, all the way up the administrative ladder. Yes, it's possible, but it requires a fight, and most importantly, it requires advance notice to the studenfs.

Interestingly, at my last institution (private, US), as a matter of policy instructors and TAs were discouraged even from holding optional extra sessions (e.g. special review sessions before exams, etc).  The rationale was that it was unfair to those students who could not attend because of other commitments.

This is a strange situation: three out of the four answers so far express what is in my experience a very nonstandard view.  Admittedly Bill Barth's answer is by far the most highly upvoted.  But I think it is worth recording another opinion.
First, as for so many questions on this site, context matters.  It sounds to me like the OP is an undergraduate at a North American college or university.  My answer will apply to that.
At a university (and at all but the smallest colleges), scheduling classes is a major production.  It is done at least a semester and often a year (or more) in advance, and a lot of time and effort go into crafting a schedule which makes the best possible use of limited resources: classrooms, peak hours, people's time, and so forth.  Moreover the total amount of class time is also fixed in advance and has an official status as the number of credit hours for the course.  The number of credit hours is meant to be correlated to the amount of material covered.  In practice this means little in an absolute sense and one course can certainly be much more or less ambitious than another, but carries a meaning across different sections of the same course and within the course offerings of a given department.

Am I right in being outraged?

Outraged is a strong word, but the OP is right to disapprove of the practice and perfectly within their rights to object to it. I do not find the professor's request reasonable.  In fact I find it very surprising that in an entire class of students, only one other student has an extra 30-45 minutes in their schedule on Friday afternoons at 1 pm: this is typically "peak class time". (I wonder if there is some missing context here: e.g. maybe the other students form a cohort who are all taking the same courses scheduled at the same time.  That makes some difference, but not enough to change my answer.)
The OP has made their schedule for the entire semester in advance and has signed up for the class assuming that it will meet at a certain time, which was fixed by the registrar in advance.  They have a legitimate conflict with staying an extra 30-45 minutes.  This conflict is academic in nature and it involves students other than those taking the professor's course.  (In my experience with academic culture, it is obnoxious to try to get someone else's academic event rescheduled because you want to change the schedule of your own academic event.  It is in the nature of a university that all of its participants are engaged in multiple events.  We schedule things well in advance precisely to avoid conflicts like this.)  However, even without a specific academic conflict the OP should feel free to veto the request: if e.g. they have made a schedule where they leave campus at 1 pm, that would be reason enough to object.

Is it not the professor's job to teach the necessary course material in the time allotted, as opposed to having students stay late for no credit?

Yes, it is!  I agree precisely.  Something is not adding up here: the course is a standard, required one for the major, so it has presumably been given many times before by other instructors and there is a de facto standard expectation for its content, as detailed in e.g. an official course description.  Of course the instructor of a course should have some leeway in the choice of topics and even the intensity of the course....but not complete leeway.  This instructor is proposing to increase the class time by about 25%: why is this necessary?  If he is covering 25% more material than is standard, that's potentially problematic.  If he takes 25% more time to cover the material than is standard, that is also problematic.  Again some context is lacking, but as described the instructor seems to be having some serious problems "coloring between the lines".  The OP should not have to adjust their schedule on account of this.
I honestly think that almost any higher up university official—the department head, the registrar, a dean—would be chagrined to hear about what the instructor is proposing.  At least that's the case in the university culture I'm familiar with.  If the OP has a faculty contact (in any department) they are comfortable talking informally with, I would recommend broaching the issue and seeing what the faculty member has to say.

An example of what "missing context" might make this seem less unreasonable (though still problematic to the OP): if e.g. a number of class sessions had to be canceled unexpectedly due to some special circumstances, and the professor is trying to make up missed time.

@ff524 makes a good point. In the South, we tend to shut the whole city down if it snows, and I have certainly had makeup sessions for snow/ice days. But that doesn't appear to be the situation here. I've certainly had profs (usually junior) get excited about the material and try to cram some additional advanced topics in over what's usually taught, but I've never had one try to add time and slow down the pacing so that they could cover the traditional material and a more leisurely pace.

A good reason to link the time table software to the lights and locks, so the lights go off at the end of the time the room has been booked for.

Courses and their timings will usually be organised so that students having to attend to multiple related courses can attend to all of them. Of course only the official time is organised that way, unofficial time can't be organised.
So what if some maths professor decides that his course on Friday from 11am to 11:50am should be an hour longer? Now the professor running the circuits class would be outraged if everyone comes late to his course.

How does this answer the question?

@TobiasKildetoft: it answers it by posing a rhetorical question, the anticipated answer to which demonstrates that the circuit professor's behavior would be intolerable if repeated by others. What do you need to consider this a complete answer, a direct citation of the categorical imperative? ;-)

Every student pays tuition. My tuition is decided by the classes I take. Therefore, how I see it, I pay my teachers to teach me. This is their job. They are held to a certain standard. If a Professor is covering new material, scheduling tests, or giving out mandatory homework (that you might have an online turn-in deadline for, etc) in this 30-45 minutes after class has ended, you should absolutely be outraged.Perhaps discuss with your professor directly during office hours and explain why it isn't okay with you. I wouldn't have a problem emailing the head of his department, or whomever appropriate, about it either. Careful in starting a grudge-match with your professor though. And remember that your class room isn't a democracy. Majority doesn't rule when it comes to other students having no classes or obligations in the time after that class. If he's hosting study periods everyday after class that way, I'd just ask a friend for any helpful notes. Rehashing the material is good, even if you do have to miss it. Now it's just two study groups conflicting. But if he's introducing new materials, that's not okay.

This question demonstrates that neither the students nor the instructor are familiar with scheduling regs at virtually every University in the US (and it sounds like the questioner is from a US school).
The professor does not have the authority to schedule classes beyond the allotted time.   If the faculty member feels students need more time to digest the material, and is willing to stay longer, and the room is open, then the extra time MUST be

Optional, with no new material presented
remedial/review to help students digest the material that was covered 'too quickly' in class

My take on the whole thing is that professor is very understanding of students difficulty with the material and is making themselves available out of concern for student learning.
What the students and this student in particular wish to due once rules are followed is a personal choice.

Most of the answers I have seen here are assuming that the professor is saying he can't teach the material in the official time slot.
When I read the question it sounded like the professor was saying that he could teach this material in the normal manner but if the students had no commitments immediately afterward he could cover the material in more in depth.
For intsance:

In class coverage of textbook material
More example problems of the subject matter
Time to cover questions in class

If this is what the professor is doing then he is not being unreasonable in asking if the students have extra time. It shows he actually cares if his students are learning, which can't always be assumed in a college environment.
In this case I would suggest to the original poster that he see if he could arrange with the professor that he not cover any new material in the extra time period so he can be sure not to miss anything.
This would let anyone else in the class who might want to spend more time on the subject to take advantage of the extra instruction the professor is offering.

I would say, if your professor is reasonable, he will listen to you if you bring it up with him, say something like "hey, I have other commitments after this class, and I'm missing them due to this class staying way longer than was promised on paper. Could you try to fit material into the time slot you were given? Because while I'm missing a club, in the future, you may have students who have other classes, or a job. Please consider this." Try to avoid accusatory language, framing the situation in a way that paints the professor in a negative light. Accusations tend to make most people behave defensive or even hostile, so try to have a polite conversation about the issue you have with his schedule keeping (or lack thereof), I would bring this up via email first, and if he doesn't respond, then I'd bring it up in person. If he responds negatively, I might make a formal complaint, depending on the severity. If a negative response is not bad enough to warrant a complaint, I'd talk to him in person, and communicate  that you didn't appreciate the way he spoke to you over email, then go from there.

Welcome to SE!

Am I right in being outraged?

No, I don't think so. The professor offered to spend some of his personal time to teach you something more in depth. He offered it and you declined it and that's it.

Is it not the professor's job to teach the necessary course material
  in the time allotted, as opposed to having students stay late for no
  credit?

Just look at it in a different way: He is helping you to learn and therefore you are replacing learning at home with learning in class (with the help of the professor). I still think it is a great offer.

Should I cave in and just not go to math club meetings?

We can't (and shouldn't) evaluate how important your math club meetings are. If you think they are more important than the better learning for your and your fellow students, go to your math club.
On another note: isn't it possible to change the time of the math club by half an hour or so?

Some other event attended by people, most of whom are not taking the course, should be rescheduled because one professor can't stick to the schedule made by the registrar in advance and implicitly ratified by every student who signed up for the course?  This is not a very reasonable request.

If the professor wanted to hold additional time in which he covered relevant, useful material that was not actually part of what was expected to be covered in the course and would not be covered on tests or otherwise factored into the course's grading, then it would be a generous offer of the professor's personal time. However, the professor being unable to fit the material that is required for the course, as determined by the department faculty, into the allotted time and trying to require students to stay extra time because he can't teach it at the correct pace is a different matter.

Nobody's forcing you to stay in your seat. This is a university class, not prison. You are free to quietly pack up you material and walk out to attend to your other commitments.
You are responsible to cover the material you are missing. You can:

talk to other students in your class to go over the material (this is actually a great way for the other student to reinforce their learning)
see the professor during his regular office hours to go over the material
see if you can schedule time with your prof outside of his office hours.
learn it from the textbook on your own.

You don't have to make a big deal out of this situation. Just assert your rights to your professor's published time (office hours).

ok now, let's say the student is a type II diabetic in need of hemo-dialysis after his class. It's HIS responsibility to catch back on material covered OUTSIDE of the time the registrar gave? doesn't make ANY kind of sense....

I strongly disagree with the assertion that the student should be held responsible for items covered in this additional time. The student effectively signed a contract when he registered for the class with certain hours. The professor can't unilaterally change the terms now by adding additional times the student must attend or risk being penalized. If the instructor wants to review content in that time, fine. But new material shouldn't be introduced.

Students should not be held responsible for material that the professor unilaterally decided to cover outside of the time allotted to the class by the university. At least at the university where I'm currently a graduate student, that would be a violation of university policy. And at any university, it's a violation of common sense and of the understanding of what students are signing up for.


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When is the optimal time to resign before tenure?
I noticed in computer science, it is not that uncommon or stigmatized to see professors resign from their tenured position to go into industry. In fact, it occurred often enough that this was a point of anxiety for me back when I was applying to grad school.
However, less commonly, tenure-track assistant professors resign before applying for tenure either due to better opportunities in industry, or perhaps due to not liking academia. I suspect this scenario is less common due to some anxiety over being perceived as having failed to get tenure. And so professors try to push past the tenure goalpost before resigning.
Is this anxiety over being perceived as a washed up academic dropout warranted if you resign before tenure? Or does no one really care / it has zero effect on your career?
I am wondering if there is a 'socially acceptable' time to consider resigning.

I know multiple people that have quit at different points in their tenure track to go to industry (and in none of them the TT was obviously going poorly), so I question your premise a bit.

Only academia would care, if anybody, and if there is no plan to go back, there is nothing to worry about.

Actually the socially acceptable time to switch is when a (much) better opportunity becomes available
Don’t pass up something that aligns well with your goals. People won’t put a lot of thought into why you jumped unless you disgraced yourself somehow. It’s the least important thing to consider.
If you are in a bad situation (as I have been) spend effort, perhaps considerable effort looking for an alternative. Explore various paths. It may be that academia isn't for you. It may also be that you just are surrounded by jerks locally. Those have very different solutions.

What if it's the opposite reason: that I dislike my situation in academia enough that I feel I have to resign even without something better lined up. It sounds like a very unfortunate pressure that resigning is only acceptable if my next opportunity is "better". e.g. if I resign to become an engineer society would see that as a "worse" opportunity than being a professor.

Your career is yours to judge. But staying in an unhappy situation is suboptimal unless there are no other options. Sometimes you need to tough it out for financial reasons of course but seek better options.

@user1149748 I have heard this sentiment more in the US by some professors of Asian origin who said that professors get a lot more respect in Asia compared to the US. When I was growing up in Asia even in high school it was clear that being a professor was more valued than say being an engineer. I have been in both positions in the US and  academics and researchers are definitely more valued if anything because they have a PhD which is needed to get research-related jobs. The point being that the average industry job is less prestigious than academia, but you gain in other areas.

It's also worth understanding that better is personal. You can quit and go juggle dogs if that's your better. If all you care about is appearances you can make yourself miserable. Love juggling dogs enough and you can make it to Carnegie Hall. (No dogs were harmed in the researching of this comment)

@user1149748 As a former faculty member now in programming I don't think this is right. Just the # of faculty vs engineers leads faculty to be held in higher esteem. I do agree non-academics are mostly oblivious to tenureship distinctions.

@user2562609 some academics value other academics much higher than anyone else. I think those people can be safely ignored.

@user1149748 I'd go as far to say that a large portion of real-world people don't know what tenure even means. It's one of those things that just doesn't really exist outside academia. Very few people will care and if they do, it's not necessarily in your favor ("tenure" implies "long time in academia", which people can associate with being out of touch with the real world and with being less likely to understand how to apply that knowledge to practical problems).

You need to decide what is right for you. Almost all universities have some form of an annual evaluation dossier for tenure track faculty. That serves as a good guideline as to how things are progressing towards tenure, as often do off-the-record conversations with more senior mentors or department chairs.
So if things are not going well or you don't want to stay in academia regardless, why go through the actual tenure application and the preamble to it? My tenure tour alone was a year's worth of travel, giving up to 5 invited lectures per month. That was grueling, all while maintaining my research group, and trying not to be the worst absent father and husband. If I knew I was on my way out of academia, I would have gladly not gone through the hassle and just left.

What's a "tenure tour"?

@AzorAhai-him- Basically extensive traveling and giving seminars at important institutions with potential tenure letter writers so that they can become familiar with you and your work, often starting about a year before going up for tenure. I'm surprised that this hasn't been asked separately before, Maybe it's highly field- or institution-dependent.

@Anyon Interesting, never heard of it, certainly not 12-60 lectures in a year! What country is this common in?

@AzorAhai-him- I've only heard about it in the context of US R1s. Certainly 60 is much higher than I've heard of.

20+ talks is common in US R1s, plus the expectations that you have at least a couple of invited major conference presentations. Keep in mind the window for departmental seminars is typically mid-January to early April, then again early September to late-November. So you need to concentrate them in the active seminar calendar slots. This all varies by school and department as well.

InterstingI've spent my time in US R1s and never heard of this. Maybe people did it while I wasn't looking, but i think I would have heard if my advisor was doing it (they got tenure while I was in grad school).

Zero effect
There's no law that says once you've become a grad student, it's tenure or nothing. As software engineer, I've worked with people with all kinds of qualifications. Not infrequently, they weren't even qualifications in the same field. A previous company had five chief engineers where two were regular engineers, one  was a chemistry PhD, one was a maths PhD, and one arrived at engineering via the assembly line.
Of course interviewers will ask you why you're leaving academia for industry. But then they'd ask you why you're leaving your current job anyway. Don't overthink it.

On that last point, they also don't really care what the answer is as long as it's not "I caused a buttload of drama and bailed"

@ScottishTapWater True. The question is more about finding whether they're going to be sticking around and doing a good job at their new place, and generally whether they look professional.

One possible reason why you don't see many tenure-track professors resigning, may be to do with how many switch to industry between completing a PhD and getting a tenure-track position.

In my first job, my colleagues were (1) a former computer operator, (2) a psychology graduate, (3) a teacher, and (4) a guy whose previous job had been feeding the lions in the zoo, and my boss was a qualified accountant. All of them were excellent IT people.

Different people value things differently, but I'd think it's a waste to "try to push past the tenure goalpost before resigning". The real achievements of research and teaching are many, but tenure is more of a means to achieve them.

Is this anxiety over being perceived as a washed up academic dropout warranted if you resign before tenure?

If you mean in Industry - nobody cares.
It will be good if they understand what "tenure" is to start with. The hierarchy in Academia is opaque to them, and vice versa.

Getting a tenure track position takes a lot of time and effort, so resigning seems illogical in comparison to quitting before even seeking a tenure track position. This also depends on the context, as in some places/fields getting tenure track position is actually the hardest part of getting tenure.
There is always some stigma associated with those who quit academia (they do it for money, they are not doing real research, they didn't succeed to make worthy contributions, etc. see also Why God never got tenure)
In the end, it is a personal decision, as there are may be many personal reason for leaving academia, and they rarely correlate with the moment in the career. Just to give a few examples:

Family circumstances - having to follow your spouse to another town/country, where appropriate academic opportunities might be non-existent.
Wishing to try something new, looking for new challenges - e.g., starting your own business in an unrelated domain.
Disagreements with political and economic views widespread in academia.

Abandoning something to which one devoted years or decades of one's life is always hard... but keeping on just for this reason is a classical example of sunk cost fallacy.

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How to respond to a student complaining about not having enough time on exam?
A student emailed me after a recent exam, complaining about not having enough time to finish the exam. Out of all the students, most managed to finish within 2/3 of the provided time. I wonder what might be some possible ways to respond to this kind of complaint? (This is my first time teaching a class of my own -- I only TA'd before, so I've never had to deal with this type of issue in the past).
More details: Some people asked about the student's performance. The student's grade was between 60-70%. This is actually a pretty good grade: our system is such that 70%+ would be considered a top-level grade (similar to an A in the US), though grades of 70%-90% are not unusual. Such a grading scheme is typical here; I do not think it is likely that the student interpreted their grade incorrectly.

Did you state the rules beforehand?

While running out of time could be indicative that the exam is too long or difficult, it would appear that is not the case if most students managed to finish early. However, I would check their grades too, as finishing early can also occur when students do not know the material or struggle with it so much that they give up.
Assuming this student is an outlier, it could be worthwhile investigating why. Perhaps this particular student has unusual difficulties, health issues or some other reason for not managing to finish in time. It may be necessary to refer the student to appropriate student support services for advice and assistance. This includes study skills and/or exam-taking techniques.
Be firm, but fair; show kindness and understanding as warranted. Give the student the benefit of the doubt, initially, but look into the facts insofar as that is possible. Arrange a meeting with the student and point him/her in the direction of appropriate assistance, based on your investigations and what you learn during the meeting. Finally, be clear on what is the student's own responsibility. You are there to help, but not to carry people.

Being nice and telling the student about student services is the way to go. You could also help the student, or direct him/her to resources, on improving time management during exams.

Also ask/discuss with him why he needed so much time. It is possible he took an unexpected route. Eg. perhaps he demostrated all theorems and you expected him to simply apply them. Or misunderstood a question in such a way that the problem he solved was much more complex (it wouldn't be the first test with ambiguous questions).

"It may be necessary to refer the student to appropriate student support services for advice and assistance. This includes study skills and/or exam-taking techniques." I did not know something like this is commonly available.

@G.Bach: It may depend on the country and institution. Perhaps it isn't commonly available in some countries.

@StrongBad: Yes, for instance Felder & Stice's Tips on Test-taking.

I record the time that each exam is turned in.  When exams are graded, I compute the mean and median times for the A-B students.  (I built this in to my grading spreadsheet years ago, so the only time it takes is entering the end time for each student.)  That lets me say, with confidence and evidence, "The exam wasn't too long.  Let's explore what the real problem is."

@G.Bach the reference to 60%-70% being normal and 70%+ being very good suggests to me this is a UK institution (or somewhere with a similar grading system). Every UK university I know has student support services designed to help with study skills and exam-taking techniques.

When I was a TA for a large artificial intelligence class, we frequently had this complaint from students.  The reason was that, due to the nature of the class, many of the problems could be worked out eventually from first principles (or from the book or notes, since these were often open book as well) by somebody who didn't understand the material, but could only be worked out efficiently by a person who knew the material.  We thus tended to end up with most students finishing well before allotted time, but a noticeably minority who did very bad work right up to the end, and felt "if they'd just had another hour or two" they could have done everything right.
Our response was to explain that the test was looking not just for the ability to solve the problems, but for facility with the problem-solving techniques.  Thus, speed really did count!  This was also borne out by the distributions: it really wasn't a problem for the stronger students.
I would thus recommend first looking at the distribution of the grades: if the strong students mostly finished early, then you probably have a weak student who was trying to work things out from first principles, hazy recollection, or source material (if you're open book).  You can then explain something similar, that you are testing not just the ability to solve problems, but facility with the concepts, and if they are weak with the concepts, it is likely to show up in slow test-taking time.
Now, it is also possible that the student has a medical impairment, such as dyslexia, that genuinely means they cannot work quickly.  If this is the case, then most universities have services that can help to evaluate them and plan appropriate accommodation, which can be communicated to you for application to future exams by the responsible personnel.  Don't just take a Doctor's note, because an M.D. can only detect the existence of a condition, not calibrate an appropriate educational adjustment for it.

And of course if they do have such a condition, it needs to be reported before the exam, rather than as an excuse for doing poorly.

@TobiasKildetoft Absolutely; I have edited to more clearly emphasize this fact.

I rather suspect that OP is in the UK, in which case (a) there are very strong legal requirements and standard procedures for dealing with such things; and (b) the person setting the exam has no role in this process: on completion of the necessary assessments and such, the exams office will simply organise separate examinations happening at the same time, but in a different room, with an extended time limit.

My usual response to this complaint is to agree that there is a problem, reassure the student that they are not alone, and to provide them with as many tools as possible to address the problem on future exams.
I strongly suggest working with (not just copying from) a study group, attending office hours and discussion sections, posting questions to Piazza, reading carefully through homework solutions, and most importantly, not being afraid to ask "stupid" questions.  I try to probe for specific topics that the student is struggling with, and offer additional resources for those (usually prerequisite) topics.  I suggest specific time-management strategies for the kinds of exams I write.  (For example: Read the entire exam and understand every problem before consciously thinking about how to solve anything, much less writing anything.  Never spend more than five minutes staring at the same problem; if you're stuck, jot down what you're thinking, turn the page, and come back later.)  I offer to set up additional meetings with the student to go over their future homeworks before the submission deadline.  (They almost never take me up on this offer.)  I mention that there are well-oiled official channels for students to request additional time or other accommodations, but the request must be made well in advance.  I suggest that if they decide to drop the class, that they continue attending lectures and discussions and submitting homework, as a dry run for their next attempt.
What I do not do is accept that student's "lack of time" as evidence that the exam was too difficult, that the student was treated unfairly, or that I should change that student's exam grade.

The more I teach the more I realize humans in general either complain about something or blame someone for their lack of achievements. Here, you have the opportunity to teach this valuable lesson to the student. I would do the followings:
Notification: I would send an email to the student, and tell him/her to meet me at my office to discuss this issue.
Discussion: During the meeting, I would honestly show him/her, the overall statistical point, that shows, most students did well and he/she did not. Then, he/she has two choices that needs to make on his/her own about reality of life and studying at the university.

Simply reply something like:
"I believe that with respect to the test enough time was given and have not heard many similar complaints. Yet, if while grading the exams it will be visible that most of the students had trouble finishing the test in the given time I'll grade the exams properly."
This makes you seem understanding of his complaints yet basically tells him that if he is the only one who had problems with the time then the problem is his and not yours.

I don't think being the only one with a problem means that it is the student's and not the teacher's.  Some people are speedier than others.

There are many excellent answers here which raise points I agree with. @JW correctly points out potential underlying alternate needs issues and the role of student support services. @jakebeal correctly points out that more complete understanding of the material permits the better students to move directly to an answer, and the purpose of some questions is to make that distinction between students. @JeffE shows his experience in being a supportive tutor. I relate to all these points as an experienced tutor with responsibility for students with alternate needs.
This question (and the answers) may be read in the future by students who feel aggrieved and new staff who may be less experienced, so I wanted to ensure an important part of academic/university processes was mentioned. Sometimes we are so familiar with our own internal mechanisms we forget to explain them to outsiders (like students). Less experienced staff may also have not become aware of the different ways students react to these situations.
Firstly, let me mention academic processes of quality and scrutiny. I do not have experience of the procedures in every continent, but in the  UK, all examination processes are overseen and monitored by an external examiner. I myself am an external examiner for other institutions. Usually the exam questions, the marking scheme and the sample answers are submitted, scrutinised, and moderated by such an external examiner. This helps ensure comparable levels of quality and difficulty across the sector. A reputable department would have internal moderation and scrutiny processes in place to remove basic errors and typographic mistakes at an early stage, and should have some form of level checking in place (i.e. are the questions set at the right level). Many students are not aware of this and think the Professor just threw the paper together to torture them personally.
The next stage of scrutiny is during the marking and grade determination. It is good practice for answers that are qualitative in nature (and thus the grading is judgemental) for there to be a double-marking processes. Usually this might be by statistical sampling of scripts or it might be a full double-bind re-mark depending on the need. The final grades are then submitted to a board of examiners that makes the final decision based on the evidence available with the support of the external examiner. The full statistical information of the mark profiles and distributions would be available to the examination board and these would indicate and papers that appeared to have too high or to low an average. There is often a mitigating circumstances panel (that meets in camera) and takes into account any submitted mitigation and alternate needs. The decision that results is a decision taken jointly by the combined examiners. It is thus, not an arbitrary and ephemeral decision of the on the part of the Professor as some students might imagine.
Failure to communicate effectively with students on the quality processes in place can result in adverse publicity as this media report might indicate. Also, if your department or institution does not have such quality processes in place you are not achieving best practice; but then I am departmental quality officer too!
The last part, for the less experienced, is knowing that different students respond in different ways to being challenged by learning experiences. See articles on The Theory of Mind and how this can affect Undergraduate Behavior ( Disruptive behaviour, avoidance of
responsibility and theory of mind ) and theories of high conflict people.

It may interest you to know that the layers of scrutiny you describe do not exist in the US system. Exams are generally designed, written and graded (marked) solely by the course instructor. (In some cases these duties may be shared with other instructors or teaching assistants, but authority still rests with the instructor.)

There are usually policies in place to prevent others from interfering in this process. Grades can in principle be overturned by higher university authorities, but this often requires a formal hearing and a showing that the grade was assigned in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner.

There can be exceptions for particularly high-stakes exams such as graduate qualifying exams. These are often written and/or graded by committee.

@NateEldredge Yes. I have not mentioned appeal or complaint procedures, which are something else entirely. In the UK we have a Governmental Agency that sits above an institutional procedure for this: http://www.oiahe.org.uk/.

@NateEldredge: More or less the same is true about exams in Poland, as far as I know, though I have not heard of anyone attempting such an overturn in case of regular course exams.

I have had timing issues with exams all my life. Recently I found out that I have dyslexia. Now, when I use a special font for dyslexic people, I can read and solve problems in literally half the time. I wish someone would have suggested me looking into this many years ago - my two cents.

Give them more time (within reason). Everyone doesn't work at the same pace. Unless you are specifically trying to test a pressure situation (in which case you have failed to apply that to the faster students) then time should not be the major factor. Allowing more time won't suddenly give the knowledge/skill you are trying to test if they don't have it. You might even find that with the extra headroom that student won't get flustered and finish quicker.
Apart from that, look at why they are having trouble and how you/they can work to improve it. It is a bit dissapointing that both the existing answers are about how to leave that student behind.

Everyone doesn't work at the same pace, but everyone doesn't get the same grade, either.

@sapi The correct answer slowly is better than the wrong answer quickly.

Can you be more specific about what you mean by "give them more time"? Every student, or just this one? For the exam they already took, or the next one? Every interpretation I can think of suffers from serious issues of fairness and/or logistics.

@JamesRyan Someone who takes twice as long to get the same number of correct answers has demonstrated a different level of skill and deserves a different grade. Teaching is separate from evaluation - identifying and scoring differences between similar students is the whole point of an evaluation process, not 'leaving that student behind'.

@Peteris only when you assume testing time taken is important.  For the vast majority of exams this knowledge/skill will only ever be used to further build upon which requires retention and understanding not speed.  Also the assumption in all these comments is that the student is failing, convenient to forget that the teacher is also failing that student.

convenient to forget that the teacher is also failing that student — [citation needed] My job is to provide students with the tools they need to master a body of material, and to give them respectful but brutally honest feedback on their mastery.  My job is not to ensure that every student passes.  In particular, sometimes the best way to teach a student is to give them an F.

In principle, I tend to agree that I would rather test retention and understanding rather than speed.  If there were a practical way to give exams with no time limit, I would consider it.  Unfortunately in the real world, courses are scheduled for fixed time periods and so time limited exams are a reality.  I think most people would agree that basic fairness requires us to enforce time limits equally for all students (barring medical issues and the like).  So this is why I don't understand how it is feasible to "give them more time" as you suggest.

If you have implemented policies in your own courses that address these concerns, I'd be interested to hear more details about what you did and how it went.

@JeffE  Your job may not be to ensure that every student passes, but it is to try and help even the worst students to improve.

@NateEldredge There are practical ways this can work by eating into breaks, designing shorter exams, etc. But will depend on individual circumstances. The key question for me is what is the aim of the time limit, is it for our convenience? Is it to disadvantage slower readers, etc? It is often used to judge mastery of a subject but I don't think it is actually a good indicator of that, most of the time.

"Design shorter exams" is a very different suggestion than "give students more time".  In the case at hand, most students finished in well under the allotted time.  Do you think it would be a good idea to have the next exam test even less material, for the benefit of this student and a few others who for some reason did not finish?

@NateEldredge I think it is likely worth going through exam answering strategies with the slow ones so they complete quicker, successfully or not.  But then adjusting length/time so that nearly everyone can complete as much as they are realistically going to be able to is better than writing students off. These students might not always be slow, breakthroughs happen, but there is nothing more demotivational than getting a fail grade through being cutoff rather than by ability.

try and help even the worst students to improve — Of course.  But you equated student failing a course with the teacher failing the student, which is offensively incorrect.

@JeffE no I equated not allowing them to show their ability or working with them to fit into your arbitary requirements as failing the student.  If they didn't complete the questions then your assessment of their mastery is also incomplete. You have control over the design of that assessment, therfore you failed.

I wanted to explicitly second @Nate Eldredge's comment: "If you have implemented policies in your own courses that address these concerns, I'd be interested to hear more details about what you did and how it went." Telling a veteran instructor that they have "failed" is harsh almost to the point of uncollegiality.  But the comment might be constructive if you could show us something about your own teaching experiences that we could draw from.  So: please tell us about your experiences here.

@PeteL.Clark Seems to me that you say veteran when you mean jaded.  I'm not going to change your attitude any more than you will see me approve of it so I suggest that this conversation is over.

@JamesRyan: I don't know you, so whether you approve of my attitude is not my concern here.  You are criticizing the professional practices of others without saying anything about your own.  I am unjaded enough to ask you one more time for more information about your own experiences.  What practices have you implemented in your courses that we could learn from here?

Adding more time is not an appropriate response if most students completed the exam in a timely manner. If a student feels that the exam is too long for the time they have been allocated and there are a multitude of students who have similar sentiments, then perhaps timing needs to be addressed. However, if someone is only receiving a complaint from a couple of students, then it is not time that is the issue but rather, the lack of preparation on the student's part, or an underlying issue that can be addressed by utilizing university accommodation services such as the disability liaison unit.

I want to push back a little on the comments some have made about the relative value of solving the same problems at a faster/slower pace. I don't mean to say this is necessarily the case in OP's circumstance, but anyways.
Pacing can be hard to prepare for, especially going into the first exam of the semester; this can be exacerbated if you don't know how many questions there will be and you aren't working closely enough with other students to be aware of where you fall in the pack on pacing. In the absence of information which makes clear the pace at which you'll be expected to deliver correct answers and a way to know where you stand now, it's perfectly reasonable for a student who is able to complete all homework and practice materials without significant difficulty in an amount of time that doesn't feel onerous to assume they are prepared for the exam.
I'll give an extreme example of how this can go wrong: In a class where we had weekly vocabulary quizzes, our final included pairing a few hundred words and definitions. We were all prepared for this. But the semester of training we had matching words with definitions was relatively useless when we discovered all of the words were in a single bank, and all of the definitions in another. Knowing each word well enough to pair it with a definition on a short quiz wasn't anywhere close to knowing it well enough to sort out the correct pairings among many similar words and definitions. Even using flash cards and giving acceptable definitions--one of the primary ways we study vocabulary--was woefully insufficient preparation. The only way we could've possibly prepared to complete the task in the given time was knowing the full scope of what we'd be asked to do and the time we'd have to do it.
All of us make tradeoffs when it comes to how we allocate our time based on our goals--and we all inevitably make mistakes allocating our time when we're short on information.
I figure it's worth documenting here a few policy/design things you might be able to do to hedge against pacing issues in the future:

Allow any student extra time on an exam in exchange for a penalty (assuming your schedule allows).
Build tests which are hard to complete but allow a student to skip up to N unanswered questions; students who go over can either get bonus or simply dilute the per-question risk.
Include information useful for pacing or even explicit recommendations at the beginning or throughout the exam. While it's true that self-pacing is a worthwhile skill, pacing can be tricky if parts of the test vary substantively in the time they'll take. Imagine you flip through an exam, note there are 40 questions, estimate the pace you'll need to hold, and think you're doing well to hold just under the pace for 20 questions until you hit a block of 10 questions that take three times as long to complete.
Include pacing recommendations with any practice tests or study recommendations. Think not just, "be prepared to answer these types of questions", but, "in order to complete the exam, you should prepare to solve problems like the ones in this section at a pace of N minutes per question."
Intentionally scale up the amount of time you intend a test to take up over the semester, and clearly communicate this to students.

A major problem with exams is when you're tested on something that isn't the focus of the course.
EX: I once took an exam in an EE class where I had to do all the calculations by hand within the given time limit. It became not an exercise in the topics we covered but in algebraic manipulation under time constraints.
I would suggest you change exams to test knowledge of the material or give additional time for problems which require a lot of mechanical operations which are not the focus of the course.

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Are there areas where only some universities fund their sports scholars? If so, how do the ones without scholarships attract athletes?
According to Wikipedia:

Athletic scholarships are common in the United States, but in many countries they are rare or non-existent.

But are there areas (e.g., countries or cities) where there are some universities that offer sports scholarships while other universities in the same area don't? If so, why would any athlete attend a university without a sports scholarship when there are nearby universities that do offer such scholarships?
I have this relative (sibling) who recently got accepted into a first world university for an undergraduate degree in engineering and was accepted as a sports scholar...sort of. But none of their tuition is waived. The only thing my relative gets is that their fee to be on the team (!) is reduced. They also get lower grade requirements in admissions or retention, but they do not need this.
I found out that several universities in this area apparently do offer substantial sports scholarships ranging from 50-100% off tuition. Some of these other universities are actually ranked lower than my relative's university. So: I do not understand, why would anyone play sports for a university but not get paid or get tuition waived?
Some guesses:

Lower admission grade requirement
Lower retention grade requirement
Admission or retention for dormitory requirement
Possibility of future scholarships
Prospects of a sports-related careers after graduation

But none of these really explain why athletes without scholarships wouldn't just transfer to schools where they could get a scholarship.
Update: My relative did get a dormitory scholarship at the beginning of their second year.

I think you also imply that every university has a sports team with the goal of making it the best team possible. Many just have teams so that their students can play - if that's your philosophy your economic argument makes little sense.

RE fun: I think that's what clubs are for. Sure, have a volleyball club. Same as having a maths club. But to represent universities interschool as a varsity player, I think that's significantly different. Is it not? I don't mean to say that the difference implies that varsity players are (which is not the case) or should be (there are arguments for and against) paid, but simply that there is some significance.

In the United States, many (perhaps even most) institutions do not give sports scholarships.
For example, I went to MIT, which gives only need-based funding (0% sports scholarships), but has a quite high NCAA varsity participation rate because, well, sports originally exist because people enjoy playing them, especially in the company of others. That's certainly why I was a student athlete (even captain of my team).
What institutions without sports scholarships tend to lack is not athletes but audiences.  At MIT, for example, the varsity football games were infamously said to be better attended by the band (who loved chances to play) than by anybody else, though I can't verify this because I never bothered to go myself.
By contrast, the institutions that do give sports scholarships tend to have big crowds and be the high-visibility teams that you see on TV, thus exaggerating their apparent frequency.
Given the wide mix of public and private institutions with varying philosophies and missions, I expect you'd likely find this contrast in every major US city.

Like Philly, Boston has the same mix. MIT is NCAA Division 3, Harvard is Division 1 but Ivy League, Boston College and Boston University are Division 1 with scholarships, and the myriad of other colleges/universities are various other mixes of situations...

This Community Wiki answer was created from answers-in-the-comments.

Are there areas where only some universities fund their sports scholars?

Take the Philadelphia area. The University of Pennsylvania, an NCAA Division 1 Ivy League school, does not offer athletic scholarships since it is against Ivy League policy. Temple University does offer athletic scholarships, as do Drexel, Villanova, and other Division 1 schools. Bryn Mawr college, a Division 3 school, does not per Division 3 rules. So, basically anywhere in the US with multiple college/universities likely has a mix of scholarship and non-scholarship situations.


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Winter internship for Indian students (computational physics)
I am 3 year BS MS dual degree student (at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) in Physics and I want to learn computational skills for my future career needs because we don't have computational physics course till the 8th semester.
Do we have any provision of winter internship in India?

Yes!
Keep in mind though that most such internships at places like IIT, IISc, ISI, TIFR etc. are likely to be unpaid and you will most probably have to bear costs on your own.
The way to getting them is to email appropriate professors that you like and then ask them if you could, given their availability, work with them over winter.
I do not know if there are industrial research internships in India over winter. Most of them seem to be restricted to summer.
Source: When I was a graduate student in ISI, there were 2 students from IISER who worked in our lab for a couple of months over winter (Dec-Jan)

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Reviewers’ comments are not sufficient to reject my paper, what to do?
Recently I received a rejection letter from a journal editor (including some comments). However, when I checked the reviewers comments (from two reviewers), I found that their comments do not seem to be sufficient to reject the paper. Given these comments, I would have expected the decision to be "minor revisions." Specifically, some of the comments are very simple like: I mentioned table 1 in text, while I used table 5.1 in table headings. I got total of ten comments, two of them are just related to formatting and acronym, two are repeated from both reviewers, ending up with only six significant comments. What can I do in this case?
Here are two related questions I found on this site:

Do editors allow authors to respond to reviewers when a paper has been essentailly rejected?
How to react to unfair reviewer comments?

Some new info from the comments has been edited into the post; answers-in-comments and other discussion has been moved to chat.

It's also possible that the referee has reserved their most negative critiques for private communications. I've done this when I think the paper should be rejected but understand that it could be appropriate to accept.

You make the suggested changes, assuming you agree with them, and submit to another slightly less prestigious journal.
Most likely, the editors didn't think your paper was interesting enough for their journal, and the reviewers weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the paper to convince them otherwise.
At the top journals, for a paper to be accepted, it's not enough for reviewers to recommend acceptance; if the reviewers don't explain in convincing and gushing detail about why the paper is the best thing since sliced bread, it's not likely to be accepted.  (Of course there are the few exceptional cases where it's obvious that the paper is the best thing since sliced bread and there is no need to gush about it.)

This is jumping the gun IMO. Why not get into touch with the editor first for clarification? Make them justify their decision, don't just roll over when they make it. Sometimes it's made in error and sometimes it's made because they haven't even looked at the work or reviews in detail.

I need to disagree with @AlexanderWoo: in my experience, at high-ranking journals, "interesting enough for the journal" is something that the editor generally decides before sending it out to reviewers, which is why most papers at such journals are rejected without review.  Enthusiasm is not needed from peer reviewers, just a scientific assessment of the results.
Thus, I suspect that you are instead dealing with one of two other cases:

Those six comments actually included something the editor considered quite serious, even if you did not.  If a paper is fatally flawed, it may not take many comments to state the flaw, and major issues sometimes become invisible to an author because they are too close to the problem.
The editor is being lazy and sloppy somehow in their handling of the paper. Even if the reviewers hated your paper in hidden fields, the editor should normally have explained the decision in at least an abstract fashion (e.g., "not appropriate to this community", "not significant given the citation from reviewer 2").

Note that in both of these cases, a reviewer's assessment of significance (or lack thereof) may cause the editor to reassess their level of interest in the manuscript. Again, however, what is required to pass is not enthusiasm but merely finding that close examination of the paper does not invalidate its claimed significance or results. In both cases, however, such a reassessment should be clearly reflected in the comments of the reviewers and/or the editor.
You can distinguish between the two by writing to the editor for a more thorough explanation of the reasons for rejection, politely explaining that you are not understanding the reasons for rejection and wish to improve your paper.  You will almost certainly be unable to change the editor's mind at this point, but you may learn what (if anything) needs to be changed to give your paper a better chance at the next place you submit.

This is the only right answer here. It disturbs me that the top answers basically say that you should passively give up. Paper reviews, like everything else in science, are subject to the whims of the very human and sometimes very wrong people in charge of the process.

It's important to remember that journals are (typically) published by private organisations, and there are few inherent constraints on how that organisation should select papers. If an editor decides to arbitrarily reject every third paper they receive, and whoever they report to chooses to support this decision: so be it. There is no fundamental right to be published, nor to receive an explanation of the editor's decision. Of course, reputable publishers want to be seen to treat authors fairly and reasonably - but that is a commercial decision, not one based on any intrinsic duty.

In terms of high ranking journals, deciding whether the paper is interesting enough before sending it off to review seems to vary by field. In my field one of the famous top journals (some in my field say it is the best journal) explicitly asks the reviewers to comment on whether the paper will be of sufficient interest to the broad readership of that journal. The comments from the reviewers on this matter are then given a lot of weight and there is thus a comparatively high rejection rate after the paper is sent to review.

@spacetyper - Why bother fight?  Any paper I write, there are a three or four journals at roughly the same level I could submit to, and another dozen or so journals further down on the prestige ladder.  It takes a lot less effort to send it somewhere else.  A journal that keeps getting it wrong will just have worse papers and lose reputation.

@2ndQuantized From my experience as an editor, I can almost guarantee there's a still a lot of stuff that's not being sent out for review. There's a lot of poorly guided, foolish, desperate, or dishonest people out there throwing badly written and irrelevant manuscripts at journals.

@AlexanderWoo Please note that I am not advising fighting the decision, but simply asking for clarification on it.

@AlexanderWoo That isn't always an option depending on the subject or field. There may also be requirements from the institution, a doctoral student trying to complete a publication based thesis may be required to submit only to high impact journals, and some will reject them immediately because they are a doctoral student with no publication record.

@AlexanderWoo It's not necessarily about fighting, but requesting justification about the rationale of the editor. Sometimes editors don't have good reasons for turning things away and simply asking them to justify their decision makes them reconsider. It can also (depending) be faster than pulling out and reformatting and resubmitting elsewhere.

@spacetyper - In my field (mathematics), we do not reformat submissions.  Usually journals reformat at the typesetting stage, and if they don't, we only reformat after acceptance.  It's a much saner system - do reviewers really care about formatting?

@AlexanderWoo Reviewers don't necessarily care, but the editor and/or person/machine handling the submission does. Some journals want methods in main text, some want them after, some want them in SI. Some journals limit section lengths, some don't. Some limit figures, or want tables in TeX format. Or want them as excel files. So it's not always trivial to pack up and resubmit elsewhere. It's as terrible as you're imagining it is.

Top answer is uninformed, and upvoted by the uninformed. Biggest problem with this SE format, on display yet again.... This is the correct answer.

The top answer is right in mathematics.  Perhaps this answer is right in other disciplines, but that doesn't make the top answer or its upvoters uninformed.

@NoahSnyder Do mathematical journals really want reviewers to gush enthusiastically about the awesomeness of the result?

@jakebeal: It depends a lot on the level of the journal.  For the top 10, definitely yes!   In order to accept the paper they expect the referees to make an enthusiastic affirmative case for the importance of the paper in order to accept.  Whether "enthusiastic affirmative case" sounds like "gushing" or not depends on the personality of the reviewer.  At say a top 30, they still want clear enthusiasm.  Below that you can get by with a less enthusiastic, but still positive, opinion.

"at high-ranking journals, "interesting enough for the journal" is something that the editor generally decides before sending it out to reviewers" This is true, but it is still a question that is put to the reviewers, even at top journals.

Generally an editor will give a summary of why they decided to reject your paper outright, rather than allowing you the opportunity to revise. I would look very carefully at this sentence.
You should be aware that it is common when reviewing to be given two boxes to fill in. One with comments that are visible to the authors, and one that are for the editors eyes only. I would usually only use that if I had concerns about ethics or integrity, but its possible the reviewers have put other things in there.
It is possible to appeal against such as decision, such appeals are very rarely successful, although I have managed to convince editors to allow a resubmission once before.

Papers can be rejected even if there's nothing wrong with them
Often a publication venue will want to select a particular number of papers at most. If they intend to publish x papers, and after the reviews it turns out that there are more than x papers that have no serious objections, they can and will reject some papers simply because there are x other papers that are more suitable according to the editor's opinion and the reviews.
There's no such thing as "comments not sufficient to reject the paper". In competitive venues there are rejections of unquestionably good papers where all reviewers recommend to accept them, simply because there are many other papers which have even better reviews.
If there are no meaningful drawbacks mentioned, then there likely is nothing wrong with your paper, it's just not considered as important or impactful as the other candidates they got, so you'll have to submit and publish it somewhere else. Often papers are rejected without review because they seem not as important or impactful as the journal wants, however, in your case probably the editor expected that the paper had that potential, so it was sent out for review, but perhaps the reviews were not as enthusiastic as the editor expected, and perhaps the editor simply reconsidered - as is their right (and, in competitive venues, duty) to reject papers where's nothing wrong with them other than the fact that they do not seem not as much impactful and citeable as the journal would like.

You don't get to decide what is sufficient or not sufficient reason to reject a paper. The editor does, and they've already decided it's sufficient.
There's not much more to do other than the standard - you can:

Make the suggested changes (if you agree with them) and submit to another journal, or
Send the editor an appeal (if you do this, make sure to include technical rebuttals of the reviewer's comments).

If you send an appeal, one thing you definitely don't want to do is say "the comments are correct but they're not sufficient to reject my paper", because the editor has already rejected that line of reasoning.

even more brazen: make the changes, indicate so in the cover letter, and resubmit to the same journal without suggesting this is an appeal. That would force the editor to clarify  his or her position.

@ZeroTheHero Another way to phrase "That would force the editor to clarify his or her position" might be "That would be a passive-aggressive way to piss off the editor". If you want to press on for the same journal, follow the other suggestion to appeal (or similar suggestions in other answers).

@BryanKrause my experience (in physics) is that in many cases “reject” is often the default option unless referees explicitly recommend publication, and that fixing the paper and resubmitting once is often enough to overcome the initial rejection.  YMMV

I think the truth lies somewhere in between the answers of Alexander Woo and jakebeal.
It is certainly true that editors reject a lot of papers without even sending them out to reviewers, if they clearly aren't interesting enough. And the top journals will  normally contact a suitable expert for a quick opinion on whether it is worth sending out to reviewers.
However, this still leaves a lot of papers where it is not obvious whether they are interesting enough. Certainly whenever I review a paper I am always asked for an opinion on whether it is good enough for the journal. I don't think this has to be "gushing"; in my experience a statement that it is with some sort of justification will normally be enough, unless another reviewer disagrees. This is different for conferences where there is a hard limit on the number of papers accepted. Conversely, when I've had a paper rejected after review, which certainly does happen, it has been because a reviewer has explicitly said that they don't think the paper is suitable for the journal.
While you haven't seen anything that explicit in this case, often there are checkboxes to fill in about interest level, etc. In my experience these tend not to be sent to the authors, so quite possibly one of your reviewers checked a box rating your paper as not interesting enough, and that is why the paper got rejected. The comments you saw aren't the reason for rejection, but just some comments the reviewers thought would be helpful.

Sounds like you're saying you think it's option #2 in my answer.

@jakebeal Well not really, since you seem to preclude this reason for rejection in your first paragraph. I think it is overwhelmingly likely that the paper was rejected simply because the reviewers weren't convinced (or convincing) that it was interesting enough for the journal, which is closer to Alexander Woo's answer than yours.

Ah; I see I needed to be clearer in presenting the distinction between "potentially interesting" and "actually significant". I'll tweak my answer to clarify.