text:
What problems do non-Chinese people face while working as research professors in China?
I am doing a PhD in EU. Given the high competition for academic jobs in the EU, I am considering moving to China to seek an assistant professorship after finishing my degree. My intention is to have immediate employment and build a teaching and research portfolio. Then move back to the EU again.
I had two classmates from China. Both of them said that they hated living and working in China because their lives were too bound by government regulations and free speech was nonexistent. By free speech, they meant the liberty of using Facebook, which is banned in China.
My supervisor said that one of his research mates was under arrest for a year because he searched "free Tibet" in a Chinese search engine.
On the other hand, there are hundreds of professors working at various Chinese top-ranking universities which seems to be counterintuitive.
What problems do non-Chinese people face while working as research professors in China?

Comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on [meta], or in [chat]. Comments continuing discussion may be removed.

First, about my own background (and therefore qualification to answer this question): I'm a member of the Chinese diaspora, and fluent in the language.  I've visited China many times, but I don't have direct experience with academia in China.  However, I have had plenty of contact with Chinese colleagues (PhD students/postdocs), many of whom either plan to return to or have already returned to China.
Living in China can be difficult, but not for the reasons you think.
Any concerns relating to lack of freedom of speech/government oppression/censorship are wildly overblown.  Unless your hobby is organizing large protests, life in China is just like life in any other country.  You work, eat, sleep, play.  You can think and say whatever you want and practice whatever religion you want.  You won't be voting in local elections, but then again, this applies to living in any foreign country.
The Chinese government has its flaws, and there is certainly authoritarianism in China.  But for 99.9% of middle class citizens and white collar expats (such as researchers) the presence of the “authoritarian” government has no practical effect on day-to-day life.
In addition, I find the OP's story with his Chinese classmates to be highly unusual. Of the Chinese people that I have encountered working in academia in the west, most wanted to return to China eventually (whether due to job opportunities, or to be closer to their family, or because they actually find the quality of life (i.e. food, infrastructure, public safety) to be better in China than in the west), and of those who preferred to stay in the west, for not a single one was it due to political reasons or "lack of freedom".

The real challenge is simply living in a foreign country with a different language, different culture, and different systems for everything.  And realize that "foreign" is relative—to a western person, east Asia will be far more foreign than another western country.  The level of English proficiency among the population (even among educated people) is quite low, and if you can't read the script, you won't even be able to read signs in the street. The culture shock can be huge. The answers to this academia.se question are a good resource.
In addition, moving to China comes with its own extra difficulties, since in many ways China is like a separate universe.  If you go to Japan, for example, you'll experience the same level of culture shock, but at least you can pay with your credit cards/get money from an ATM, and use a lot of the same apps and websites (Google maps, etc.). Not in China.  In China there is a different Chinese equivalent of everything that you are used to in the west.  The great firewall is not a problem, as it is easily bypassed with a VPN (anyone who says that using a VPN is banned is misinformed).  But even if you can access it, Google maps is basically useless in China, for example.  Setting up payment systems is another headache, as most places don't even accept cash, so you need wechat or alipay, but first you need a Chinese phone number and bank account to register for those apps.  It can often feel like one is in a chicken-and-egg situation.
Finally, something else that was a problem until recently, is the fact that China was a developing country with all the usual developing-country-problems  (pollution, filthy public toilets, food safety, poor infrastructure, etc.)  This is not much of a problem anymore, as in most first-tier cities in China today, the infrastructure, cleanliness, and general quality of life are on par with developed countries (except for the undrinkable tap water).

How is the pay level as compared to the EU in general? Do they pay according to the international standard or according to the Chinese standard? If the latter one, will I be able to migrating back to the EU in future?

Another question is, how is the working hour? In the EU no one works more tha 40 hours per week unless you they in multiple jobs.

In terms of salary, in very broad-brush terms, probably slightly lower than in Europe, but not by much.   But also remember that today in Shanghai/Beijing/Shenzhen the salaries and cost of living are basically the same as in Europe (although second tier cities will be much cheaper).  Working hours will be long--that's a cultural thing in east asia.  But working long hours is also a thing in academia.  I would guess that the difference in working hours in east asia vs the west in academia is nowhere near as dramatic as in companies.

I heard traveling between big cities in China by high speed rail is much easier than in other countries, probably expensive though, is it true ?

the “authoritarian” government has no practical effect on day-to-day life - I'm not sure about that (WeChat, Google, ...)

@Kimball I'm not sure what you mean.  care to elaborate? Have you visited or lived in China? yes, Google is blocked in China, but it's easily accessible via VPN, and as I was trying to explain in my answer, that is only one of many problems of living in China, most of which are simply due to it being a different country with unfamiliar systems.

@Nobody The high speed rail is very reliable and affordable. The main problem is that the stations tend to be far away from city centers, and the stations are huge, with security checks, so it feels like flying.  IMHO I wouldn't say high speed rail in china is as convenient as in say japan or europe

I have visited China.  I mean that Chinese government makes many policies, choices etc that affect your daily life--of course this is true for other countries as well, but I think it is more true for China than say Japan.  So I think you what you really mean to say is something more narrow that what you actually wrote.

@Kimball the angle of discussion that is getting lost in translation here is that there is a tendency for Westerners to evaluate China according to a different set of criteria than other countries and to have a greater number of misconceptions about the population and its daily life there. There is the particular notion that censorship is 'instakill' and that you will be jailed for life at the first mistake, as evidenced by some comments in this thread.

Although I was not a research professor and merely a Master's student, I had the opportunity to work alongside many such researchers at a nationally top-ranked university, and will use this experience as a basis for my answer.
There are a number of misconceptions about China that highly influence how foreigners view the country when initially choosing to live there or not.
Free speech and authoritarianism
Yes, there is obvious and heavy censorship at every level, and it has become worse in the past few years. However, the sophistication and ruthlessness of it is highly variable. It's hard to encapsulate the reality without direct experience, but I will leave a few examples here to provide a representative sample.

You could pay extra to get uncensored 'Western' internet at the university. Yes, it was officially provided and just slightly more expensive than the normal internet. No VPN needed.
Some Chinese professors regularly criticized various aspects of the government and Chinese history in class and in public, and no one cared.
Foreign students regularly posted opinions that sounded dangerous to a person inexperienced with China but nobody cared
There is a tendency for foreigners to think that the Chinese authorities care about them quite a bit, but in reality you are just another foreigner among many. Unless you are an actually important or wealthy person, nobody cares. You are far more likely to have your belongings searched and your electronics scanned at an American airport than at a Chinese one, in my experience. There is a line that is crossed when you actually agitate for political gatherings, but you actually have to seek out trouble for it to meet you.
I knew a Chinese diaspora student (who was not a citizen) who was hilariously enough asked to tone down his dissertation, not because it was too critical of China, but because it was too uncritically supportive and hardline against the West

General difficulties of life in China
Regulations and bureaucratic aspects are annoying, but there is often a way to resolve problems if you ask nicely. And no, I'm not referring to bribes, just general social skills and learning to navigate the system. Overall, your biggest enemy is isolation. If you don't learn a bit of Chinese and just hang out with the same foreigners every day, it can leave you alienated and bored, which will magnify your distaste for other daily issues such as pollution and whatnot. It can be genuinely hard to adapt to Chinese culture, and you have no alternative. But if you manage to cross that hurdle, you can unlock a ton of experiences across a vast country. Chinese students and professors are very welcoming and collaborative if you make an effort, closed off and wary if you are boorish and unreflective. It all hinges on whether you have sufficient social skills to read the room and understand what is going on, and whether you can show initiative in taking advantage of what the country has to offer, which isn't a trivial skill either.

How is the pay level as compared to the EU in general?

The overall impression I got from broaching this topic a few times during my stay: 1) Pay will tend to be lower than in the West, but it still earns you a very good living locally 2) Salaries can be extremely variable as some universities won't balk at giving high salaries to attract certain types of Westerners. It's difficult to answer your question because I was not a paid worker myself (financed through other means) and lack detailed insight and also because salaries in the EU are also very variable, often dismal.


text:
What kind of barriers will he face during the hiring process?
Suppose, someone did his bachelor's from the faculty of humanities, master's from the faculty of social science, and then received a Ph.D. in statistical mechanics and did postdocs in the same field.
In other words, he never studied any "course". He did self-study while doing his PhD, and published a lot of papers with high impacts.
What kind of barriers will he face during the hiring process?

@Nobody, He never studied any "course". He did self-study while doing his PhD, and published a lot of papers with high impacts.

@Nobody, I don't know, you tell me.

@Nobody, I cannot give you hard evidence. However, I know a case at a Spanish university where a person was given a conditional appointment that he has to take some courses and must pass before he starts teaching.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

Please see two comments I put in the other question. I can move them here if you want.

Assuming that the this person is applying for academic jobs in statistical mechanics, I would not expect there to be any barriers to hiring - other than the fact that it is not easy for anyone to land good academic positions. That being said, lecturer positions are sometimes open in the sense that they may accept "related" degrees. I have seen many adjunct and lecturer positions like this. All he has to do is convince a hiring committee that he is capable of the job. This is even more true if he is looking outside academia. He is unlikely to be hired for a highly specialized role unrelated to his education, but there are plenty of other ways to leverage a PhD.
It may be a different story if he wants to teach a humanities class, or a class in a discipline totally unrelated to any of his degrees. But, at the same time, in my experience, he may not have a lot of say in what specific classes he teaches if he is hired as more than adjunct faculty i.e. he applied to teach one class in particular. It would also be difficult to convince a university to give him a lab in an unrelated discipline.

In general, the person "just" needs to convince the hiring committee that (s)he is the right person for the job. Other than there is usually no barrier.
Things may sometimes be different with applied topics like medicine, law, or engineering, i.e. areas where you are going to seriously hurt someone if you make a mistake.

He never studied any "course". He did self-study while doing his PhD, and published a lot of papers with high impacts.

If the person is hired to teach that course, who cares? Now getting hired is the hard part.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Are Russian Ph.D. degrees accepted in the EU and USA without any additional difficulty as of 2023?
Russia has some good universities. E.g., SkolTech, Lomonosov, etc.
Is a Russian Ph.D. degree accepted as usual without any additional difficulty as of 2023?
For instance, are the Ph.D. graduates from Russian institutions implicitly or explicitly barred to join Western academia as a professor or a postdoc researcher?

Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/184401/40589

There was some confusion directly after the beginning of the war in Ukraine about what the sanctions meant for universities in Germany. Many universities there played it safe and did not hire Russians, in fear of falling foul of those sanctions. That confusion is now over. As long as you can get a visum and as long as you are not working in a sensitve area you will probably get a fair chance.

Note that this answer mentions Russians, while the question is about holders of a Russian Doctoral degree, which is not the same.

Fair enough, where you are born is not your fault, but where you choose to go is.

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


text:
What do employers focus on when examining the CV of a PhD graduate when applying for a Post Doc?
What is the thing you look for (and reject when not found) in a PhD-holder's CV/Resume when he applies for a PostDoc position?

Is this a postdoc in a lab science?  Those are very different from postdocs in math.

@Kimball, Computer-based.

What does "computer-based" mean? Computer Science? Something like data analysis, possibly in a lab? Simulations, say in theoretical branches of natural sciences? Solvers and proof assistants, as in math? There's lots of stuff computers are used for.

@MisterMiyagi, Computer simulation of proteins.

What is the thing you look for (and reject when not found) in a PhD-holder's CV/Resume when he applies for a PostDoc position?

First, I look their ability to complete the project I have funding for their position.
This includes, hopefully obvious things, like their technical skills (e.g., methodologies, programming skills, writing), but also their ability to learn.
Almost no PhDs would have a match for my positions, so I know I will need to train them, which is actually a fair trade because a postdoc is a transactional relationship.
The postdoc learns new skills while getting paid a decent wage (I work for a government center, so in 2023, the minimum at my center is about $70,000 with full benefits or ~$85,000 for some contractor positions) and the postdoc solves my problem.
Their study system for their PhD is not as important as their ability to learn new systems.
I check these skills by looking at their CV, coursework, and checking with references.
Second, I look for soft skills.
Their ability to communicate and work with a team.
This includes presenting, but also "playing well with others".
The last thing I need or want is somebody who destroys relationships that have taken years to build.
Some skills appear on CVs such as presentations, but also outreach events.
For example, have you taught elementary kids about sciences on Saturdays in grad school?
Or, do you present to local civic groups?
Were you a schoolteacher before going to grad school?
Reference checks help as well for this point.
Lastly, the interview helps with somebody's ability to communicate and provides some insight into their personality and ability to work well with others.
Third, I look for the ability to ask new questions.
I give my postdocs the chance to develop their own side project.
This comes up via reference checks and the interview.
As one of the closing questions, I ask something like given what we've talked about today, what is a question you might ask as your own research question?
I don't care what the candidate specifically says, but I want to see a decent idea and passion to learn (I know their actual side project will change once they learn more).
Finally, I would make a small note of their writing skills in their cover letter and CV.
Small typos are okay, but glaring problems here can raise red flags.
For example, with your question, I would note you use antiquated English and assume the male pronoun ("he") for all applicants with your question.
Not a deal breaker, but this would raise a small red flag that I would look into more.

You need to add a lot more information about the field... But generally speaking you need to match all the "essential criteria" of the job advert and possibly some of the "desirable criteria" in order to be competitive amongst applicants.
Shortlisting requires the candidate to fit the advertised criteria via a formal HR process in most places. If shortlisted you also need to present well at interview.

Regarding the majority of short postdoc positions (less than 2.5 years), often the Postdoc obtaining it will leave sooner because of another appointment or the likes.
They are expensive, kind of unreliable (and rightly so) but they can be very effective in fixing urgent issues/needs in both teaching and research aspects.
So the criteria is "the closer the formal fit of the candidate I am looking for to the position I described in the opening, the better".
Grants, projects get funded, contacts with the industry: extremely nice to have.
Publication track, awards, all the other rational and objective metrics (i.e. crap like H-index, total count of citations, number of years at MIT, etcetc): yeah, nice to have, but not necessary and often the way they are presented they meta-tell something about the candidate.
What really help, in case of a cynical supervisor, is if the postdoc has a decent publication under preparation that fits the supervisor interest. The cynical supervisor will smell the option of being co-author and will be quite proactive.

+1 ... Can't help but highlight ... smell the option of being co-author and will be quite proactive ... #tapinto


text:
Is it a good idea to do PhDs in Latin America?
I see a lot of South American and Mexican students coming to even relatively poorer parts of Europe (e.g., ex-Communist countries) to do PhDs, but the opposite is not true.
Is it a good idea to do PhDs in Latin American countries?

Compare the relative size of the economies and GDP.

In my opinion, Latin American academia is not as good as its European counterpart. I'm not writing an answer because I think your question lacks more context and is a bit opinion based, but consider that a lot of Latin America countries gained independence from European countries just a few hundred years ago (for example, Mexico became "independent" in 1824, not so long ago!). While European scientists were making scientific breakthroughs, the majority of the Latino population could not even read.

It seems to me like this question is asking for some basic world history education; I don't know that it's the best fit for Academia.SE.

@Amelian - note that the US became independent a scant 41 years before Mexico.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/107964/is-obtaining-a-phd-from-an-asian-country-really-a-career-suicide You might be interested

As long as you do not mind learning Brazilian Portuguese, IMPA is a fantastic place for doing math, better than any math department in Eastern Europe.

@Amelian no offense, but consider some countries (for example Brazil) gained independence but the ruling class was still european (i.e. belonging to the same that were revolting in Europe against kingdoms). There have been more recent occurences in the 20th century in South America that destroyed the "humus" of public fundings behind every decent research&universities (yes, even in the for-profit corporate America research would not be so great without the funding cornesrstones of DoE and DoD , departments of Energy/Defense).

@EarlGrey yes, I get what you say. I was pointing out that while the major cities of the European continent were intellectually growing, native American cultures were being destroyed and oppressed. And, as you point out, even after those countries became independent, the control was still not in their hands. So it always surprise me when people wonders why EU countries are stronger than Latin America countries.

This of course will depend.
One of my fellow Jesuits got his Ph.D. in (Latin-American) history in Mexico at the UNAM and that was a great place for him. Also, at commencement, he got to wear the coolest academic garb of all of us.
I spend five years teaching in Latin America. The biggest research problem is isolation. Going to a conference just costs almost 1000 dollars more, people are not likely to visit, and you might not have anyone to talk to at the professor level. In some countries, there is a very strong academic tradition that sometimes holds on to facets of academic life that nobody else is anymore. For example, Brazilians rejected my conference paper because it did not have the Sections in a certain order. This being said, there has been much more exchange and many universities have many departments that are thoroughly modernized. You still sometimes have to deal with unjustified academic minority complexes.
Also, your Ph.D. co-students might be different. In the Southern Cone (Ar-Ur-Ch) at least, students work full-time in a company, the Ph.D. in Computer Science is not valued in industry outside a few research labs, and the main reason to get a Ph.D. is to be promoted at the teaching job they already got. This makes it hard on a department / advisor to obtain a high level of academic accomplishment.
The political maturity of Latin American countries also matters. Chile is in general progressive and modern, Uruguay is pre-occupied with not being Argentina, and Argentina is still suffering from Peronism and wild economic turns.
For a Latin-American, it might be good to get a Ph.D. from outside the country to break the isolation. But you can get a very good education in Latin America and you can do outstanding research there. Unfortunately, if you do the latter, you are being recruited for more attractive positions in the US and Europe.
This is my personal take on it. Others can and will disagree or have very different experiences. Latin America is a great continent of great variety and size.


text:
Is it safe to publish research papers in cooperation with Russian academics?
I am asking the question in the context of the ongoing Russo-Ukraine war.
Is it safe to publish research papers in cooperation with Russian academics from Russia in terms of future careers?
I mean, would there be any chance of marginalization of someone because his/her paper has a co-author who is a Russian living in Russia?

Comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on [meta], or in [chat]. Comments continuing discussion may be removed.

Depending on the journal it may not be possible to publish an article if one of the authors is affiliated with a Russian university.  Acta Physica Polonica B (a fairly well-known physics journal) has the following message on its website:
In protest against the invasion of Russia (with the support of Belarus) on an independent and sovereign territory and the people of Ukraine, on March 1, 2022 Poland suspended scientific collaboration with the Russian Federation. Following the decision of the Rector of the Jagiellonian University, which suspends cooperation with Russian universities and research centers, Acta Physica Polonica B stops publishing articles by authors with affiliation to institutions from the Russian Federation and also from the Republic of Belarus.

There was a vote among scientists in the ATLAS cooperation at CERN, with the result that they will keep working together with Russian individual researchers, but cut all ties with the major Russian institutes and funding agencies. This might not reflect the sentiment in other parts of the scientific community, but it gives you a sample from a relatively large group.

Science and scientist have traditionally held themselves as being above nationality. If you merely work with someone from Russia, then any objections to it would be close-minded and contrary to tradition. Even during the cold war, collaboration was difficult but not frowned upon.
Now, I for instance would object to any collaboration with Russians that fosters directly or indirectly the war effort, but recognize your right to come to a different conclusion.
However, nobody can give you a guarantee. We live in strange times, where for example the Iris data set is not supposed to be used any more because Sir Ronald Fisher had some then common, but now repugnant views.
So, take this as a vote from someone in academia that you should be safe and let's see what others think.

Comments have been moved to chat; please do not continue the discussion here. Before posting a comment below this one, please review the purposes of comments. Comments that do not request clarification or suggest improvements usually belong as an answer, on [meta], or in [chat]. Comments continuing discussion may be removed.

The problem with "is it safe" questions on the open internet is that there is a bias against answering "yes". Give an ominous warning and you sound smart; give a false assurance and you get egg on your head because someone somewhere will run into trouble.
I have never seen any pushback against collaboration with Russian academics in pure science, and I would consider such pushback closeminded and ill-advised. This does not mean that it does not exist, since academics can be closeminded and ill-advised, but then again you might not want to rely on the opinions of such people in your career anyway.
I am much more loathe to collaborate with Russian institutions, particularly when it comes to ones with official ties (e.g., math contests) or odious administrators (at this point, basically any Russian university). The "lending credibility" effect can be significant here, and even if it is not, by strengthening these institutions, you are reducing the push-factor for Russian students and researchers to emigrate, which is not an effect I would want to have.
In applied project with realistic military applications, I would not collaborate with anyone physically in Russia period. How far these "military applications" reach is a tricky question (networking? coding theory? video compression?), and some amount of eyeballing will be necessary at the boundaries.

Anything that can be used as a tool can be crafted into a weapon. The wonderful story of US stealth technology getting the boost it needed from unclassified Russian research into what was thought to be non-military applicable.

@DavidS: This kind of lateral use doesn't rely on personal collaboration; you can just as well read research papers. Not much you can do to prevent it, short of classifying anything remotely applicable, at which point you aren't doing science any more.


text:
I got an offer of admission to a post-graduate program in a totally different field. How to know if it is legit?
I (actually my cousin) just received an offer letter from SJSM-Anguilla to study MD. They are saying that they are accredited in the Carribbean, and after completing the program, the students can do residency and practice in the USA.
However, my cousin doesn't have any science background. He never studied math, chemistry, physics, or biology in his life. The address of the admission office is from the USA. Another thing suspicious is, the offer letter doesn't have any serial/identification number.
How to assess whether this is legit?

They wanted $1000 in three days (due on Christmas). Hmmmmm….. Did your cousin actually apply?

Saint James School of Medicine seems legit. It is a private, for-profit medical school. They appear on Wikipedia's list of medical schools in the Caribbean, and they are ECFMG eligible, meaning that their graduates may be considered for residencies in the US (and, it seems, Canada as well). The letter also seems legit, in that they are directing you to send payment to the school, not to some random Venmo account.
The catch is that actually getting a residency in the US can be quite difficult. At reputable schools in the US, it is typical for 95% of students to match. At schools like St. James, the number is closer to 65%.
I notice also that they claim 89% of their students passed the USMLE (licensing examination) on the first try, but Wikipedia reports that the real number is closer to 35%. The discrepancy is explained by the fine print -- the 89% only counts students who got 195 or higher on the Comprehensive Basic Science Exam. If your cousin has never taken science "in his life," then it's unlikely he will be in this group.
In short: it looks like your cousin has a pathway toward earning a "real" MD. But, becoming a board-certified, licensed doctor requires more than an MD, and that might be a real challenge. This could lead to a difficult situation where your cousin has spent a fortune on tuition and fees but cannot see much return on that investment.

They have just recently been fined by FTC for deceptive marketing.

Yes, I saw that in the Wikipedia article. It seems that they have now added the fine print.

In other words, acceptance means "we will accept your tuition payments" and presumably provide some level of education that has earned them accreditation. It does not mean they guarantee accepted students a successful career in medicine.

To be fair, that's true of all medical schools. This one has lower average outcomes, but also lower cost and lower admissions criteria. The same dilemma I discussed in this answer.

Indeed, and all schools in general. Sometimes applicants are too focused on admission and not enough on success. This is a recurring theme on this site: other common instances are in the form "I got admitted to this ultra-busy lab with an ultra-busy PI and now they aren't mentoring me personally" or "how should I lie about my research interests/career goals to pass an interview".

Well, also, the U.S. medical schools have the so-called "match", which is a very systematic mechanism that finds internships for essentially all U.S. medical school grads. I have no idea what non-U.S. med-school grads do to get into the system... but there's certainly no comparable virtual guarantee...

Students at the school in question can participate in the match in the US. The matching rate is relatively low, however (65% rather than 95%)

Yes, this is a legitimate offer from a real school.
I also took a quick look at online reviews. There are too many negative reviews such as "don't go there" or "avoid this place at all cost" that will surely make you believe that this school, SJSM, is a real, legitimate institution. There are also reviews with the interesting title "SJSM - The Truth" that I would like you to read.
Also, they have recently been fined 1.2 million USD by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive marketing.

“Saint James lured students by lying about their chances of success,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Misrepresented School’s Medical License Exam Pass Rate: USMLE Step 1 Pass Rate was advertised to be 96.77%. The true rate is 35%

Misrepresented Residency Match Rate: The advertised match rate is 85-95%. However, in reality, the match rate for Saint James students is lower than touted, and lower than that reported by U.S. medical schools. Since 2018, the defendants’ average match rate has been 63%."

So, what you should think about now is whether or not it is worth going there.


text:
Could a paper be rejected due to poor quality of figures?
I recently saw a paper (biological sciences, genomics) that had such poor figures that made consider if I as a reviewer could have suggested rejection based on that. Issues in said paper:
i. 3D-barpplots;
ii. Multi-layers 3D donut plots ;
iii. red-green color schemes;
iv. inconsistent plots with poor labels.
This goes on for the 8 main figures, add nothing to the paper, and is so distracting that makes reading it and interpreting the results quite difficult. I assume the authors (two) know how to make decent figures because in some panels they used stacked barplots which in my view would have been used as replacement for the 3D donut plots.
So in an hypothetical scenario, is it ethical or acceptable for a reviewer to recommend rejection of a paper because of poor figures? Assumptions:

the authors were asked to improve the figures but ignored the request or did not improve enough;
the quality of the research is otherwise acceptable.

Could you please elaborate why 3D-barplots and Multi-layer 3D donut plots are a no-go for you? They are not common in scientific papers in my area, but they are neither "incorrect" nor "banned".
Also regarding red-green color schemes: Due to color-blindness? There are different types of this visual limitation that might also effect other colors.

@J-Kun there are already some studies showing that "the addition of
3-dimensional (3D) perspective depth cues lowered accuracy" ref and it is generally adviseable not to use them ref.

@J-Kun For the layered donut plots, it is pretty easy to see the 10% of the volume in the inner ring is not equivalent to 10% in the outer ring making the comparisons meaningless between rings. Furthermore the perspective it adds changes how the same area in the bottom and top of the ring is perceived (Steve Jobs used to use this trick)

@J-Kun re the color scheme, yes there are other types of color-blindness and red-green was just used as an example (it is also afaik the most common). Changing colors comes for free and there is no reason to alienate a % of one's audience. Ultimately it's about making the paper as easy to ready as possible without dumbing down from the research.

@fridaymeetssunday Oh my god, who ever okayed wood-styled 3D pie charts?

In principle yes. However the situation is, as always, more complex. Usually a paper does not get rejected due to a single thing that is wrong, e.g. if there are problems with the abstract, the references, the figures, the organization, the language… and if it is just one of them, but the overall contribution of the paper is good, it may still get published A few exceptions: If the findings of the paper are wrong, the methodology is flawed, or the premise of paper is false it should be rejected. In the other cases it depends on a combination of the shortcomings and if they are fixable or not.
So I would say that the quality of the figures should play a role in the review to the point that a reviewer should write that they cannot recommend acceptance of the paper paper unless the figures are improved (same applies to the list "abstract, references,…" from above).

Of course a reviewer can point out poor figures, and if they get not improved he or she can surely state that he doesn't recommend the paper for publication in this state.
However, a reviewer does not reject a paper, that is the editor's job, based on multiple reviews and possible other information (e.g. how many papers are needed to fill the journal).

"a reviewer does not reject a paper" - I have rephrased the sentence where this was stated. As for the need to fill the journal, this is was in a purely online journal.

"Figure X is illegible" is one of the most common things I write in peer reviews.

I think that it is fairly reasonable to ask reviewers to comment on any technical fault they find. It will be the editor's decision how serious these faults are. In this case it sounds as though the problem is not substantive and that the improvements should have been added to one of the stages of revision.
In some cases convoluted figures could prevent proper review of the paper by misrepresenting the results. In this case they should be fixed at an early stage in the review process, and of course if the standardized figures no longer support the arguments presented in the paper this can lead to rejection.
Most journals have clear standards for figures and the editor and/or editorial staff should make sure that the paper conforms to these standards even if the reviewers don't mention it at all.


text:
Is it ethical to assign problem sets and not tell students which subset of problems will be graded?
It is common practice to have a homework strategy as follows: a professor might assign N homework problems but only have some random sub-set of those problems  graded. This is motivated by a large class size, and a finite amount of grading time. The argument is that it motivates the students to do all the whole homework set, as they will not know which ones will be graded.
However, as someone who has been assigned to grade in this way, it feels immoral. I have had students who will do 9 out of 10 of the problems, but that one unanswered problem is 1 of the 3 I am grading, so they get a low grade.
I am curious to hear what folks here have to say about such a practice.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment.

While I see no ethical issue here, you could suggest the following alternate scheme.
Once the homework is due, you take a quiz where students are allowed to use their homework notes. In the quiz you ask the students to provide solutions to the (randomly) chosen 3 problems in a limited time.
As a result, the graders only need to grade the 3 chosen problems.
If the students have done the problems before, they can write down the solutions from their own notes. If they can solve the randomly chosen 3 problems without having done any of them before, in the limited time available, then they probably deserve to get a good grade!

I've seen this done and I think it works well and addresses many of the involved issues - for the student, the homework becomes more optional and worth discussing (which is where the real student gains often are), while at the same time, the TA/professor grading and academic honesty loads are greatly reduced! (note that I recommend having problems of the same style, not precisely the same to encourage understanding rather than wrote copying)

See also my Answer here https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/116463/68971 with a comparable strategy (homework discussion and any-paper tests)

While it may average out to be alright, it is very important to look at the other side and consider how a student perceives this grading practice.
Students don't tend to look at the average but on the outliers which are caused by this system of grading things. The attention is shifted to those that lucked out when giving a partially solved assignment and those that hand in a very well solved assignment and barely/poorly pass. Particular attention is shifted towards those that experience one extreme or the other multiple times.
From a student’s perspective, luck becomes a factor in something simple as having their assigned work to be looked at and this is simply frustrating regardless of whether or not it evens out or can be considered fair across a semesters worth of assignments turned in.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting any further comments.

I see no ethical issue, particularly if the students are aware of this grading scheme in advance. The defect you observed averages out: the unlucky students this week might take no penalty for partially-completed homework during another week.
Still, if you are allowed to modify the grading scheme, you could consider mitigating the effect (or perceived effect) of luck by giving “completion points” for plausible-looking answers to the other questions.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment.

It is not only ethical, it is an excellent way of assigning homeworks especially if homeworks are necessarily long and the number of students is large.Say, if a homework assignment has 20 problems (normal number for a calculus course) and the class size is 30 students, then you would have to grade 600 solutions.
Another thing is that the homeworks for a class of calculus level consist mostly of practice problems, many similar problems designed to practice certain skill. Usually it is clear whether a student has acquired this skill if you grade one or two of these problems.

20 Problems is normal for a calculus course? I think we had maybe 5-10 proofs per Homework assignment per week

@SirHawrk: 5 proofs and 15 computational problems (find an integral/derivative/limit/sum of a series...).

I don't think we ever had Computational problems that were not just part of proofs

@SirHawrk: What you are saying about your "calculus" course is highly unlikely.

@markvs I don't think SirHawrk is lying—it sounds very similar to intro calculus at Caltech, for example.

@SirHawrk At most American institutions, freshman-level calculus is a cookbook class taught primarily to engineering students and pre-meds.  Theory tends to be de-emphasized in favor of plug-and-chug computation and formula memorization.  There are still some institutions out there which teach calculus more like "baby analysis", but that is not typical approach.  And high school calculus classes are even worse (e.g. the AP curriculum is all plug-and-chug).

With the scheme of picking 3 problems to grade, if have an equal probability to grade any problem, then a student who regularly does 9/10 problems should expect you to grade the one they didn't do about 30% of the time. That is something a student should expect to happen fairly often, if they turn in, say, 10 homeworks over the course of a semester. Even for one homework, that is a fairly large risk, that they are taking by not doing the question.
There may be correlations that make this more likely, for example if students tend not to do the more difficult questions and there's a bias toward grading the more difficult ones.
Given that the policy is announced in advance and grading the one unfinished problem is not expected to be a particularly rare outcome, the policy seems fair to me.
Based on some discussion in the comments, let me add I don't think this policy is ideal or good. It clearly has problems in that there is some noise in the evaluation of the student. But, I can easily imagine situations where some instructors would choose this grading style as the least bad option. In particular, I think this scheme can make sense in a scenario where you have a lot of students, limited resources to grade, and a lot of (mostly straightforward) homework problems and assignments. Then, the noise should be fairly small (at least comparable to other sources of noise inherent in grading such as the variation in harshness/generosity of different graders and the choice of a finite number of problems to put on the homework), and it could be used by the instructor to encourage the students to do all the problems necessary to cover the full range of material, while not overspending resources on grading.

If this is a math course, figuring out this risk could be considered part of the class. It seems like appropriate for an English class.

@Barmar (assuming you meant to say "it seems inappropriate for an English class): It seems strange to think of assigning 10 problem homework in an English course instead of a paper. But, anyway, in my mind the core of the issue is that if the student simply does all the assigned homework, none of these issues ever arise. They only arise because the student is taking a risk by not finishing an assigned task. If so much homework is assigned that it's impossible to finish all the problems in the time students are supposed to commit to the course, that is an issue, but that's a different topic.

But what if they do all 10 problems and just get 1/10 wrong? Then they're a 90% problem-solver, who could still get unlucky that the few they answered incorrectly will be in the set of graded problems. A student who did 100% of the work and solved 90% of all the problems shouldn't get a 70% grade. This does not seem a fair system.
Students also have limited time and energy, not just instructors. If a student only had to do 3 problems instead of 10, more time could be spent on each one ensuring it was correct. The student should be able to economize just like the instructor does.

@ErikE Every system is unfair. If only three homework problems are assigned, perhaps there will not be enough problems to cover the full range of material, and then the final will have a problem that wasn't done in one of the homeworks and people will complain about that. Or, the three problems chosen may cover concepts the students doesn't understand, while they could do a problem not chosen. (...)

(...) Really, for a course with a lot of homeworks where the homeworks are 20% or less of the final grade, the variance introduced by this system is not big. If the student's goal is to learn the material, they should do the work. For some courses (particularly introductory courses), giving three "big" problems is less productive, because the point of the course is to learn relatively straightforward exercises that are building blocks to higher level material. The way to learn that is practice.

The fundamental problem is that students need to do many problems to learn, but there are not enough resources available to grade all the problems that the students should be doing to learn the material well. Any solution to this problem is going to be imperfect. It is a problem if there is so much homework assigned that students can't finish it in the time they should be committing to the course. But that's a different issue.

"If only three homework problems are assigned ... then the final will have a problem that wasn't done in ... homework and people will complain about that" - you seem to be intentionally disregarding the better alternatives: assign additional homework problems while being transparent about those not being marked, give them smaller tests whose scope includes all problems, keep both the homework and exams focused on the most fundamental things only, partially mark it but don't include the mark in the final grade, make full solutions available, just tell students the scope of the exam, etc. 1/2

Literally no-one has ever complained in classes I've taken where teachers were competently making use of some combination of the alternatives I mentioned above to make sure students are prepared for the final. I can't imagine what your education was like that this didn't happen or didn't work, or are you just presenting a problem which is disproven by your own first-hand experience? The only "problem" with some (but not all) alternatives is that they rely on students doing things without being forced, or studying material that wasn't covered in homework, which isn't a problem at all. 2/2

@NotThatGuy I don't have any issues with those methods. The question was whether this grading style is ethical. I think it is. I've taken courses and taught in courses where this method was used. I've also take courses and taught in courses where it wasn't. At the end of the day, what matters is that you learn the material by doing the problems.  I don't think it's productive for a student to completely disengage from the subject because they don't like how the class is run. There are a lot of factors behind what grading scheme is chosen. I think all of them have good and bad features.

I actually agree with you that this grading style is not ideal. I also understand why it feels demotivating. The main point where I disagree is that I don't think that either of those points is sufficient to say that this grading style is never a justifiable choice, and in particular I do not think it is sufficient to say this grading style is unethical. I don't think you should always use this style, and I also think in cases where one person might choose to use this style, another person might also justifiably choose to use a different one.

@Andrew "I don't think it's productive for a student to completely disengage from the subject because they don't like how the class is run" - of course it's not productive. The point is not that students are being reasonable for completely disengaging, the point is simply that this will happen if one adopts objectionable teaching methods, and by making choices that result in students completely disengaging, you'd be failing in your duty as a teacher to teach them.

@NotThatGuy OK, well, we aren't going to convince each other. Final thoughts. The fact that a student finds a grading method objectionable, is not by itself a reason to avoid the method. You yourself said you agree with that point (at least, you said that you weren't claiming that teachers should only use method students don't find objectionable). Sometimes, reality means that we have to choose to use non-ideal grading systems. As a student, it's sometimes hard to see the whole picture of why a choice was made. I'm not saying the method is "good". I'm just saying it's not unethical.

"I'm not saying the method is 'good'. I'm just saying it's not unethical" - if you don't think the method is good, then you really should be making that clear in the answer. A bad teaching method should be discouraged even if the question is focusing on ethics. You're focusing a lot on the word "[un]ethical", but most of what you've objected to in the comments is just saying the method is not good, without explicitly calling that "unethical". Whether you have an ethical duty to avoid bad teaching methods is probably more of a deep philosophical question than anything else.

@NotThatGuy Well, I focused on the word unethical because that was what the question asked :-) Anyway, I added an extra paragraph to my answer to clarify. Honestly, I don't think that the grading scheme matters that much. I don't think this method is good or bad, just a choice that isn't ideal but still makes sense in some situations. What I do feel strongly about, is that to learn the material a student needs to do a lot of problems and learn how to do them well. Teachers should use methods to encourage that when possible, but students also need to be self-motivated to learn the material.

It is statistically absolutely unethical in the parameters you described, if you pass/fail students based on average assignment grade. I assume a hypothetical best-case example where you:

Teach a motivated class filled with students that do not skip any questions. (The problem only becomes worse if they skip some questions.)

You teach a course with weekly assignments, maximizing the chance of "averaging out". I will assume a 12-week course, so 12 assignments.

Grade objectively and fairly, where each answer is either correct or wrong to give a % score on each assignment.

I assume that an average homework grade of 60% is needed to pass.
Let's model an adequate student as someone who answers ~70% of the total number of questions correctly, in three scenarios:

12 assignments where 3 out of 10 answered questions get graded (as you mentioned in your post).
12 assignments where 10 out of 10 answered questions get graded (extra workload).
4 assignments where 9 out of 9 answered questions get graded (same workload as #1).

The only randomness I allowed in the model is that the correct/wrong answers are shuffled between tests (or within a test for grading subsampling). That is, there is no randomness in the total number of correct answers given by a student in this model. In scenarios 1 and 3 the total number of correct answers given is 25/36, in scenario 2 it is 84/120.
In both scenario 2 and 3 across 100,000 course simulations the student who answered ~70% of the questions correctly has a 100% chance to pass (that is because the average of averages still has a linear relationship with the total number of correct answers, if not subsampling). In scenario 1 this drops to ~94.4%. If all your students are perfectly adequate, you would unfairly fail 2 students out of a class of 37.
What about a more borderline student, one which answers ~61% (22/36, 73/120) of all questions correctly? What is their probability of passing? Without subsampling it is once again 100%. With the subsampling in scenario one it drops to 56.5%!
My code for the above simulation.

Subsampling is fair if and only if you subsample randomly (without bias) and you compute the average grade only over the subsampled questions. It is unethical in my opinion if you compute the average grade over assignments where it is random which questions are graded, as it unnecessarily introduces statistically significant variance in who pass/fail simply based on whether they got graded on the questions they got right, and which they got wrong.
To spell this out crystal clearly: when you use the average assignment grade rather than average correctly answered questions in combination with subsampling, you are throwing away information you already have and unnecessarily replace it with randomness. It's no more ethical than ignoring the existing pass/fail policy and instead flipping a coin to pass/fail students with a borderline grade, as that is essentially what you're doing.

Nice! But I would add a standard error and use the lower bound of a confidence interval to set the cutoff for getting the credit. Also, consider a process in which those with marginal or low grades can appeal for another random problem to be selected.

The grading scheme may be fair under certain conditions.

You need many homework assignments. If it is only biweekly or monthly, then averaging out is unlikely to occur for almost all students.
The students should always finish approximately the same number of problems on each assignment. Imagine that you have 10 assignments with 10 problems each, for a total of 100 assignments. You grade one random problem of each assignment. Now, one student one student solved 9/10 problems on assignment 1, and all problems on all further assignments. The student thus solved 99 out of 100 problems. Unfortunately the missing one was the problem chosen to be graded on assignment 1, so the student has 9 correct assignments and one missed one, for a total of 9 out of 10. Sounds unfair to me.

Furthermore, you might run into trouble with perceived unfairness.
The larger the number of students, the more likely it is that one will hit a lucky/unlucky streak. This will quickly spread amongst the students and they will perceive the grading as unfair, even though it is fair for the vast majority.
And finally, you might be accused of not really choosing the questions randomly, but selecting only problems which your favorite student has solved. This could be prevented by publishing the selection to be graded beforehand in an encrypted manner and then handing out the encryption key/password after the grading has occurred.
Checking whether this grading system is fair/unfair under different conditions might be a fun exercise to some introductory statistics class.
Personally I would recommend to tell the students beforehand which exercises will be graded and which won't. After all they chose to be there to learn I assume. For me it worked pretty well with pretty much no graded exercises at all. Most of my friends and me did almost all exercises anyways. And the ones who didn't: Well, most of them stayed at university for longer, only to not graduate in the end.
Edit Forgot to mention that we got feedback on all exercises, graded or not. Sometimes individually, sometimes in the form of example solutions. I think that's important so that all solved exercises help the learning process, not just the graded ones where you get feedback in the form of the grade.

Personally I would recommend to tell the students beforehand which exercises will be graded and which won't. --- You could also tell students that some (many, all, etc.) exercises on their major tests/exams will be selected from the exercises that were not graded. Of course, this works better if there is a reasonable uniformity in the types of exercises, and the relevant types are represented in both graded exercises and ungraded exercises.

"And the ones who didn't: Well, most of them stayed at university for longer, only to not graduate in the end." This sounds like a very strong argument against following the recommendation of telling the students which exercises will be graded and which won't.

@Stef I think that depends on your goal and your target group. If you have a bunch of high school students and want to make sure everyone learns some math, then sure, I totally agree with you. If you have a bunch of college students who you want to raise to decent adults who take responsibility for their choices and actions while also teaching math, then I think my proposed approach has some benefits.

I once went to a pedagogy talk and the faculty presenter (in a STEM discipline) said that, among things, which can improve student results are: assigning homework, collecting homework, grading homework.
You have to think about "what is the purpose of this specific homework?" and "what is the purpose of the grade?" Is it to ensure understanding, correct misunderstanding, deepen understanding, assess understanding, and then what is the level of the work (think Bloom's taxonomy).
There are many kinds of homework, and different strategies are okay for different types.  For example, in teaching writing a "minimal grading" model for grading, e.g. essays, is often suggested for both pedagogical and time management reasons. It's good for students to write, and it actually is not necessarily helpful for them to get back a document filled with red ink. But if you were giving a multiple choice grammar test obviously it is minimal grading by definition.
One purpose of grading is "riding herd" which is to say to simple establish that the student has done the reading or made a valid attempt at the assignment.  Then it's fine to just quickly give check/no check grades.
In your case, it sounds like the grading involves giving substantive feedback in order to help students do better in the future and highlight errors in their thinking. It sounds like you would be giving "partial credit."  Thus all of the comments about "getting it right" are not exactly on point because it is not an all or nothing grade.
In that case, it makes sense to randomly pick a few problems to do that for.  That work is time consuming and students are unlikely to read all of the feedback on all problems.
Of course if the homework is a high percentage of the grades and are the main summative assessments of student understanding that's a different story.
So, if the main benefit of homework is improved understanding then having students do homework is good.  If they need a reward for doing homework, announcing that three  problems will be randomly selected for grading on each assignment lets them know they need to at least try all the problems.    You could also reward simply attempting all of the problems on a check/no check basis.

An ethical issue would arise if such randomness were the primary cause of poor grades for a student who had no knowledge of the rules and no way to make up a poor individual grade. It is the overall course grade that matters, not the grade on a single assignment.
But, since this is homework, not the final exam, the student can probably absorb a single hit and still come roaring back. Grades are usually based on a collection of individual marks, even when only a final is graded.
But, a student who is otherwise qualified shouldn't be given a poor overall grade due to any random factors. A fair assessment, overall, needs to be made.

"cause of poor grades for a student who had no knowledge of the rules" - This is either entirely the student's fault, or there has been a disastrous error in the beginning of the course, namely not telling the rules to the students. Which is obviously wrong.

@Neinstein, indeed it is "obviously wrong" to not tell students what the grading criteria is. So, I was stating a general principle. I don't know the actual specifics here. And, I hesitate to assign "fault" to busy students who have many tasks to manage and, perhaps, limited time for it. There is a problem with any form of "gotcha" grading.

It doesn't seem to me there is actually a large random component, because there's a simple way to guarantee that an individual homework grade won't be affected by this policy: just do all of the assigned problems. It might be that the teacher is assigning so many problems that it's not reasonable to complete all 10 in the allotted time, which would be unfair, but in my mind that's a separate issue.

@Buffy I still fail to see how the student missing core information regarding the course he is attending to, due to being busy with university stuff, is an ethical issue with the instructor. I just don't see how either of the two causes outlined in the first paragraph would support that the grading system is ethically wrong.

Let's just count. We have 10 problems out of which 3 random ones are graded, so the probability of any particular homework to be graded is 0.3 and the direct computation shows that the largest possible variance on a set of 10 problems for the grading score of an individual student is 7/12, attained if the student solved exactly 5 problems, which (50% performance) is the usual cutoff for the F grade. The typical semester course lasts 16 weeks with 2 homework sets per week, which gives 32 homeworks. Assuming the normal approximation, we conclude that one standard deviation is at most $\sqrt{\frac{7}{12}32}=\sqrt{56/3}<4.5$ problems even for the borderline students (everybody else is better off). Now, with the expected score of 48 on the borderline, the probability that a (barely) passing student will get <44 problems is 16%, which may be a bit too much. If you lower the threshold to 39 problems, being out of luck has probability 2.3% for each student, which seems acceptable for moderate size classes. If you have 100+ students, I would go for 3\sigma, i.e., the passing score of 35 problems with probability of being unlucky 0.1% for an individual student. In other words, if you add 14 points to everybody's score in this scenario, the bad luck (getting a lower grade than one deserves due to the random chance) will be essentially wiped out even in a large class. You, of course, may now raise some scores beyond what is deserved, creating another type of "moral problem".
In other words the message is that the idea of such grading is neither ethical, nor unethical by itself. It just has a certain chance of error that you should clearly understand and, if you find it unacceptably high, compensate for before implementing this scheme.

Another way to do this, which partly mitigates the 'luck' problem, is as follows: a student can hand in A of the N exercises. Three of them will be graded randomly. If the score on them is x%, the total score on the assignment will be x%*A/N.
This way, a student that solved 7 of the 10 exercises cannot get a low score by having bad luck: if the 7 exercises were indeed correct, the score will simply be 70%. Conversely, a student that solved 3 of the 10 exercises can not get more than 30%. Luck only comes in is if a student tries to game the system by intentionally handing in wrong answers, or if a student thinks they solved an exercise, but they did not.
The disadvantage of this system, is that, while you only have to grade 3 exercises per student, it will not be the same 3 each time. So there is some extra work in devising grading schemes for all exercises etc.

"Luck only comes in is if a student tries to game the system by intentionally handing in wrong answers" If I were a student and a teacher set up this weird system, I wouldn't even think of that strategy as "gaming the system". I would think of it as "This is obviously was the teacher wants us to do so of course I'm doing it". Although I would not exactly intentionally hand in wrong answers; I would intentionally hand in random answers or incomplete answers.

That wouldn't give you a higher expectation value of your score, though.

Interesting! And counterintuitive if that's true. I'm about to turn my computer off but I'll think more about it later.

@Squala Only if the wrong answers are all 100 % certainly worth zero marks. Extremely poor answers that might be worth a mark or two still increase EV.

Consider that essentially the same thing happens each time a student writes an exam in that only a subset of all the possible exam questions are actually graded, while the remainder don't appear on the exam.  The difference is simply the amount of information that everyone has: in the exam scenario the ungraded questions are unknown, while in the homework scenario the ungraded questions are known.
If time constraints are such that only three questions can be graded, then the other option would be to just ask three questions.  In this case one could worry about the student who knew 70% of the material, but got 0% because the question selection didn't reflect their knowledge.  Such a student would have (likely) done better in the randomized version.  Finite time requires that we approximate student knowledge via the random selection of questions from an infinite pool.  As such, we must accept that the randomization will be beneficial for some and a detriment to others (and hope that this evens out over the course of a semester).
To me, asking 10 and grading three is ethically equivalent to simply asking three.

"To me, asking 10 and grading three is ethically equivalent to simply asking three" how? If I ask you to grade 10 exams and then tell you that only 3 actually needed to be graded, would that equal to simply asking you to grade 3? In the homework scenario, assigning a few hard problems that all would be graded would incentivize students to study and figure the problems, while assigning a bunch of problems and then grading a few disregards that they also have limited time (just like grading time.)

@jDAQ  Your concern seems to be that asking 10 and grading 3 wastes student time so is unethical.  Assuming that the professor isn't asking pointless questions just for filler, then I disagree.  If all of the problems have a purpose towards satisfying learning outcomes and preparation for an exam, then the effort isn't wasted and will contribute to the course grade, but in a delayed manner.  If it's only ethical to expect students to do work that immediately becomes a part of their course grade, then we wouldn't expect them to study for example.

@jDAQ Do you see no scenario when those "extra" seven questions would be beneficial for the students to do?  What if (variations of) all ten were to appear on the final exam for example?

I see scenarios where the grader could at least give completion points to problems they assigned, were solved, and they do not have time to grade. Instead of relying that "on average" people got a grade (highly) correlated to the quality of their work. Or, the graders could let them know half the problems that will be graded and make students' grades less probabilistic. As an incentive to make students do their work this is effective, but not as much as feedback on the quality of their work (grading 3/10 problems). They could grade just 1, it would be equivalent to simply asking 1, no?

@jDAQ I think your suggestions are good, and improvements on the scheme can be made.  I just don't think that it's (more?) unethical/immoral, per se, to grade m of n assigned problems with m<n rather than grading all of them.

Ethical? Not fully sure about it, I do not see a problem with this. Fair or sensible? For sure not.
The function of grading is grading. The function of homework is training.
Bias: This scheme results in better grades for students who do all the homework, even if they would perform worse when presented with identical tasks as better students who - for some reason - don't have the time to do all the homework.
Adding spread: If the grade should be an assessment for how good the student is able to handle problems, then this is going to increase the statistical spread of the assessment.
If you have to use uncertainty about what is being graded as a whip to make students work, something is wrong with your lecture.

Hmm why would something be wrong with your lecture? Do you think it's possible to enthrall every student with your presentation so much they will go and learn on their own?

@DRF: if you want that people do the homework, make handing in homework and prerequisite for passing. If you accept homework, then correct it all. If you correct it all, then you can grade on every homework if you li. If you give a grade on every homework, then it would be irrational to not use all the information available to grade the students. If you use uncertainty in getting graded as an means to do your work half-a**ed, you are not making the best use of the students time to learn.

The students are told in advance, so they know what gamble they are taking leaving one or more unanswered. (If they don't that is an academic skill in itself that needs some work!)
So in principle, this is a way to ensure that all students take the material covered by the set equally seriously.
So the practice as such is ethical. There is a problem, however, in that some academics wish for their subject to occupy more of the students' attention that is proportionally reasonable. (The "my subject is the only one worth doing" illness is too prevalent among academics.) They can achieve this via this trick. If I have three contact hours per week (normal for a typical module) and the students have 15 contact hours (excluding TA time, workshops, tutorials etc) then my homework should roughly occupy 1/5 of their homework time. If I inflate this doing the subset trick, then that is unethical.
Also, the prof should decide (perhaps using randomising methods) which questions are going to be marked before seeing the worked answers, and not taking any bribes from students.

I agree and think this is an important point. Giving too much homework so that it's not possible to complete the assignment without spending more than the hours that a student should reasonably commit to the course, is a problem. But I think that's an independent issue (except insofar as people may use the "grade a subset" policy to enable giving too much homework, as you said).

It is ethical so long as problem sets are not a substantial part of the final course grade. The pedagogical value can be increased, and concerns about unfairness mitigated, through some minor adjustments.
I use a version of this in some of my courses. The major concern that you raise is one of unfairness due to the randomness of which problems are evaluated.
The ethics of the assignment should be evaluated with an understanding of the difference between formative and summative assessment. Formative assessments are supposed to provide feedback to the student and the instructor about the student's (and the class's) progress in the material. Summative assessments are supposed to provide an evaluation of student mastery at the end of a course module or entire course.
Summative assessments are high stakes (i.e., have a substantial impact on a course grade) and can include things like term papers and examinations. Randomness itself in a graded assignment is not a concern, but would become a concern for a high stakes assessment. An example where I think it is handled well is that, as an undergrad, I often encountered essay exams (usually in humanities or social science courses) where we were given 5 questions to prepare for, but only 3 appeared on a final exam (and sometimes the student would only have to answer a subset, like 2 out of 3). This offers a nice balance between having an overly long exam vs. a short exam where the students study to the test, i.e. ignore material that will not be on the exam. An extreme in which it is handled poorly would be assigning three papers and grading only one of them, where the final paper represented 30-50% of a final course grade. This would be indefensibly arbitrary, and I've never seen anything like it done.
Formative assessments should be low stakes, and some instructors seem to think should be no stakes (i.e., not graded at all). The question is how do we treat problem sets, which are common in STEM courses where practice of methods is necessary to learning.
Problem sets sit in an awkward place. They are often graded, and sometimes form a substantial part of a course grade, yet their place in a course sequence really means they should be treated as a formative assessment:
Reading/Lecture → Problem Sets → Examinations

In some sense, if the student does well on the summative assessments, the formative assessments shouldn't drag their grade down. That is, if a strong student is lackadaisical about homework but aces the exams, giving the student a poor grade due to missing or sloppy homeworks seems both punitive and just plain inaccurate as an assessment of their capabilities. So if their purpose is formative rather than summative, problem sets could be ungraded, and used entirely to provide practice for the student and feedback on how well they are learning the material. Unfortunately, I have found that if the problem sets are ungraded many students won't do them, and subsequently will perform poorly on exams.

Sidebar: Doing the problem sets improves student performance, but inevitably there seems to be a high correlation between the students who don't do the problem sets and those who I suspect would struggle with the material no matter what. I think the causality is that students who are underprepared get discouraged by the problem sets, and then don't do the work they need to in order to master the material! Trying to encourage those students while still making it clear that they have to actually do the work is a constant struggle, and probably not unique to me.

The students have to do the problem sets in order to learn the material, but the grades are really utterly irrelevant to the assignment's pedagogical purpose. But getting the students to engage with the material is very difficult if they are no stakes assignments. Offering low stakes (maybe all the problem sets are no more than 10% of the final grade in total) is probably enough motivation to get them to do the work. Since the purpose is practice rather than summative assessment, assigning more work than will be graded is acceptable. It becomes less acceptable if the impact on the grade is higher. It also becomes less acceptable if nothing is done with the ungraded problems. That is, you shouldn't just grade some of them and completely ignore the ungraded ones. Ungraded problems can be gone over in class, in discussion section, or answers could just be provided for the students to self-check.
Finally, there are a number of ways that the assignment could be changed to increase the pedagogical value.

All problem sets can be graded for extra credit. I do this in some of my courses. I have found that it provides sufficient motivation for most of the students to attempt the problem sets, while mitigating student concerns regarding grading of random answers. (If they don't earn the points, it's "just" extra credit, and has no impact if they do well on other assignments.)
For your example, points can be awarded for 3 out of 4 possible answers. That way, if a student skips (or just messes up) one question out of the 4, that one will be ignored. Points will be awarded only for best 3.
Switch to the flipped classroom model. This is of course a major pedagogical shift. In this case, the problem sets would be done in class. They could be completely ungraded, as the professor and teaching assistants will be observing the student learning directly (both that they are doing the work, and how well they are doing). Or they could be graded, but students will have assistance with them. Or they could be marked "complete" if the student is present and works diligently, rather than for correctness, but the professor could require them to be submitted for a grade by students who are absent or clearly not doing the work while in class.

Any of these things would improve the pedagogical value of the problem sets. But the randomness in and of itself is not an ethical concern so long as the problem sets are not a substantial part of the final course grade.

If the assignment is to do 10 problems, out of which 3 will be graded at random, then what might perhaps be seen as unfair is that the student might have done a poor job on some of those 3 problems but an excellent job on the other 7. I can see why it would be frustrating to a student to spend a significant amount of time on one problem only to be graded on the basis of another. In particular, if the problem set consists of problems of widely varying difficulty, then this sounds like a sure recipe for inspiring legitimate frustration among students.
On the other hand, if the assignment is to do 10 problems and the student decides to only do 9 and hope for the best, that's entirely on them. They haven't done the assignment and instead intentionally opted to enter a universe where they had a probability of 2/3 of getting away with doing slightly less work than required for the same credit and a probability of 1/3 of being significantly penalized for this. (Significantly in the context of a single problem set. It probably isn't significant in the context of the entire course.) This is a trade-off that they chose of their own volition. Focusing on what happens in 1/3 of all universes where, some could say, they get a worse outcome than they deserve misses the point that there are also 2/3 of all universes where they get a better outcome than they deserve and that the decision to enter into this gamble was their own.
Of course, if this grading scheme is used as an excuse to burden students with assignments which place unreasonable demands on their time, then this would indeed be unethical. But the same is true if all 10 problems are graded.

2/3 is actually 0.7, right? (1- the probability that the unsolved problem is graded). This misses one essential point however: we are not talking of students who decide not to do the entire set, but of those who are not capable of doing the entire set, so they don't really "enter this gamble" at their own choice. They do their best and still may get less (or, as you correctly said, more) than they deserve.

@fedja I agree, but this is a degenerate case of the first alternative considered in the answer, where doing a poor job reduces to not doing the problem at all.

In lieu of writing more stuff in comments I decided to write up an answer that adresses both the original question and some of the discussion that has emerged following it. I'm writing from a perspective of math and in particular the lower level math courses 300 level ones and below in general (i.e. Calc 1-3 and below in the US). This is definitely not applicable to the European system where this wouldn't be an issue probably.
I will first describe the system I'm talking about in more detail. When I taught we would usually assign roughly 20 problems a week for ~10 weeks of the semester and grade 5 problems of each set. The total grade for a homework set was made up of 5 points for the five problems 2 for completeness and 2 for tidiness. Completeness is self explanatory, and tidiness involved not handing in the homework chewed up and illegible and using correct mathematical terminology (equals signs where there supposed to be equal signs, implication where there were supposed to be implications and similar). The total grade for homework was usually about 20% of the course grade. This meant any given problem was worth about 20/90 % of the total grade. (Much less actually because sadly almost all courses I graded were graded on a curve, don't get me started on that).
I want to answer two things. First, is this immoral (assign N choose K to grade)? Second, is this the best?
Let's start with number one: No, it's not immoral.
The reason we assign and grade homework is mostly because students even at the university level (in the US) can't be trusted to do what they should on their own. If the homework is not graded a significant portion of the students will not do it.So they will not learn and they won't figure out where they have shortcomings. Now the morally best choice would be to treat students as adults assume they do the work and when they find out they are struggling come to office hours or otherwise deal with it. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to work. Thus, trying to provide a service, the system attempts to incentivize doing homework by grading it.
Grading all of the homework is logistically and functionally impossible. It would either mean not assigning enough for it to be worth it, or paying way too much money for grading all of it. Math TA's are usually costly and in short supply since they often have better ways to earn money and the STEM fields are less full. Assigning more homework and announcing which problems will be graded in advance doesn't help since it goes back to many (most) students only doing the graded parts.
I admit you only ensure there's no luck involved if the student does all of the homework correctly. To me that's enough, you have a path to a perfect score that's not based on luck. Also assuming you do all the problems and most of them correctly the chances of getting a significantly bad grade are rather minimal.
In the end you have an optimization problem, to which the answer of randomized grading is a heuristically optimal solution. Thus it's not immoral.
Is it the best? No. I don't believe it is the best.
I do believe given the constraints of the US systems it is probably optimal though. We've already covered why it's not optimal to leave students to their own devices and why not all reasonable homework can be graded. There is another way to deal with the problem of providing feedback to students during the semester though and that's oral exams combined with quizess. Oral examination is (in my opinion) by FAR the most efficient and effective way of both providing feedback and finding out what the student knows. In 10-20 minutes of speaking to a student I get more of an idea of what he knows and doesn't, than I can gain from three exams and 20 homeworks. Unfortunately oral exams are strongly disfavored in the US. I'm guessing it's mostly due to size of class and the dislike of telling students they don't know stuff.
The trouble with oral exams is they are more prone to claims of unfairness or randomness and take more time away from the professor, since exams in the US are usually graded by the TA's, whereas oral exams would likely have to be done by the professor only.

"Now the morally best choice would be to treat students as adults" I really agree with that. However, I feel you are missing a point in your answer. If you grade 2 out of 10 questions for every assignment, and a student solves all questions for each assignment but only gets 80% correct, then the student has a non-zero chance of failing the class simply because of the subset of problems chosen for grading.

@laolux This would be the case if the homework was actually worth a significant part of the grade and at the same time the grading was done by automatons without a brain. Since the grading is done by people and the homework is a fairly small part of the grade (read the rubrik we used it's stated at the beginning) it's a non-issue. The TA sees all of the homework often he will add comments to non-graded problems when he thinks it will help. When grades are handed out whether the student got really unlucky (always messing up just the graded problems) would be seen and handled.

fair point, failing is too strong language, but it would still leave a bad taste for the unlucky student. Now I want to stress that it is entirely possible for grading humans to not even be aware that said student handed in solutions to the other problem. At my university for real exams we solved all exercises on different sheets and then put them into different baskets. If the same was done for the homework, baskets 1,2 would be checked and 3-10 discarded (randomly chosen baskets of course), so no one would notice who handed in solutions to those problems.

@laolux if that was the way the homework was handled, I'd be willing to give you that it's problematic. But homework in all the classes I've seen was handed all together to one TA who graded it. That meant he saw all of it, and would comment on a number of problems. He would only grade the chosen N though. We did also grade on completeness and neatness as I point out above.

I think it should be mentioned clearly that this can be an issue and care should be taken to avoid it. I can clearly imagine busy TA's which do not remember what they graded last week and might put the unlucky student off as bad luck this week. Next week they would probably not notice that it's the same student. After 5 weeks they might get suspicious, but now they would have to look back at ancient homework to check. And they may have returned all the sheets already, so this really could get lost. Poor unlucky student, hope this won't kill the motivation.

That meant he saw all of it, and would comment on a number of problems. He would only grade the chosen N though. – This seems weird to me. If the TA has engaged with a solution to the extent that they can provide constructive comments, they have already done the majority of the work required for grading.

One thing about the "non zero probability" is to (a) review with students sampling and measurement theory to show that while it is  possible, with a standard error included it is unlikely over a whole semester that the measure of understanding or effort will be wildly far off. The other is to allow students an "appeal" to substitute another randomly selected problem if they really believe that doing so would impact their grade.

One professor might work this way, and another professor might work another way. Each gives ten homework assignments and grades three. The first one doesn't tell which ones are graded, the second does.
The result is that students either put more effort into your course, which makes it entirely unfair to the other professor. And "putting more effort into your course" isn't a positive. Students will learn a lot from homework they do; they don't learn from the extra work they need to do for optimising the grading. In homework, it is reasonable to focus on the things that the student doesn't know; something that the student knows how to do doesn't help them learning and is therefore wasted effort. Any effort put into your course is effort not put into another course.
On the other hand, the students might vote with their feet and take two other courses instead of yours.


text:
Ph.D. enrollment from May to September
Universities from which region in the world receive and process Ph.D. applications from May to September?

There're two basic kinds of PhD programs I'm familiar with. The first kind has a regular intake, sometimes divided into spring intake and fall intake. You join with a cohort of other students, take courses together, etc. This is presumably what you're thinking of, since you refer to intake months.
The other kind is join whenever you want, as long as there's a position for you. There's no official start date aside from the one you agree with your supervisor.
My understanding is that most universities in Europe and Australia/New Zealand follow the latter model.

We also hire phds whenever the job is open in the Netherlands.


text:
Are there any statistics as to the percentage of European students getting a PhD from the USA and then getting employed?
I have a feeling that US PhD degrees (or, at least, a US PostDoc after a PhD from the EU) are valued more in the EU than EU PhD degrees. However, I cannot prove that.
Are there any statistics as to the percentage of European students getting a PhD from the USA and then getting employed in the EU versus the percentage of European students getting a PhD in the EU and then getting employed in the EU? I.e., which group is more successful in the EU? Or, which group has more acceptance in the EU in the job market?

I would assume the majority of either group will get a job in general. Do you mean a professorship in an EU university?

@JonCuster Do you mean a professorship in an EU university? --- Yes.

I would expect this varies quite a bit by field of study.

Those data wouldn't really give you the answer you want. It would just tell you (probably) that more people want to move one way or the other, not that one of the two is 'more succesful'. To find that out, you'd have to know the number of successfful and unsucessful applicants for positions in both places and then make some assumptions about that.

A further reason your statistic will not settle your question is that while it might be the case that some people value a PhD from the US more, it certainly is the case that people value significant international experience, so you would really need to compare people have did their PhD "properly abroad" but within the EU vs. people who did it in the US. (By "properly abroad" I mean possibly excluding cases like Irish people who did their PhD in the UK etc.) You also need to account for the fact that in some fields there are more leading groups in the US than in the EU.

It might be a little difficult to give you exact figures for the overall EU region because the statistics maintained by the US Department of Education mainly profile and characterize data from the countries rather than regions. However, what is in your mind is roughly covered in the reports published by the US Department of Education and the private organizations such as the Institute of International Education (IIE).
You can find a recent report published by IIE on the international students growth in the US here https://www.iie.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/IIE_Outlook-2030_March-2024-1.pdf
I also like this interactive tool
https://opendoorsdata.org/data/international-scholars/all-places-of-origin/
Here is an interesting infographic as well :)


text:
Is it easier to get a foreign medical degree (MBBS) recognized in Australia than in Germany?
Is it easier to get an MBBS degree recognized in Australia than in Germany?

This is, regrettably, an incomplete answer to your question. The place to start your enquiries about Australia are with the Medical Board of Australia.  The process of accrediting graduates of foreign medical schools is well documented on the website of the Medical Board. In particular, you need the page for "Assessment pathways to registration for international medical graduates" which sets out the various pathways to accreditation.
You will also want to take an early look at the page that lists all the medical schools around the world whose degrees might be recognized by the Medical Board.  That page has a drop-down list from which you can select the country wherein you graduated, presumably Pakistan given your first paragraph. If your medical school appears when you choose the correct country, then you have cleared the first hurdle. There is still a long way to go, but at least the process in well described.
I have no knowledge of the German (or European Union?) accreditation system and, even if you find someone who can give you detailed information on the accreditation process in Germany, I think it unlikely that you will find anyone who can make a direct comparison between the Australian process and the German process. You are likely to have to make that assessment yourself.
Good luck.