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Is it possible to switch to a better university for PhD after completing a Masters in computer science?
Is possible to get into a "better" university for PhD after doing an MS in a relatively low grade school in the United States? If so, what kind of profile is expected during admission?

Of course it's possible.  (Proof: I did it.)  The kind of profile you need for admission to a strong PhD program has already been addressed many times on this site (two examples).

Should low grade be low-grade?

You may have to re-take some coursework, because there may be restrictions on transferring graduate coursework from a graduate program to another, and you are going to need a high masters GPA as well as some research experience for this move to be successful.

@user12169 is correct, at least within the US. Some but not all of my masters coursework was recognized by my PhD department.


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What is academic degree after PhD?
Does your country have any academic degrees after the PhD? If yes, what is it called and how graduating this degree?
Additionally, what is a Post-Doc? Is it a degree or something else? I have seen some people refer to a post-doc in their CV as they would a degree. Is this acceptable?

In general, a PhD is the highest degree you can get. A postdoc is simply a research position that is not permanent, i.e. no fixed contract or tenure. There are some exceptions, for example in the German system where you can get your Habilitation, which is a degree after you get your PhD. But in most systems there is nothing beyond a PhD in terms of degrees.

Thanks for your answer. In our home country we have it. In Mongolia is so called Doctor of Science (ScD). PhD and ScD is very different degree by our rule.

Many countries have higher degrees than the PhD.
In the UK, there's

Litt.D Doctor of Letters / Literature
DSc Doctor of Science
LL.d Doctor of Laws
D.D. Doctor of Divinity

Each of these typically requires the submission of a body of work - a research portfolio - together with a critique of the work. Or they may be awarded as honorary degrees; see the links above for the requirements for the degrees from the University of East Anglia (Litt.D, DSc, LL.d), and the University of Oxford (D.D.), accordingly.
A post-doc is just an academic research job that's typically done after attaining a PhD. It's not a degree in its own right

Thanks for answer. It was interesting to read about different Doctor degrees in different country.

As @Paul Hiemstra pointed out, the highest degree level is a Doctorate (Dr) however, with this in mind, there are different academic titles that you can gain if you work at a University or high-educational institute. Here are a few:

Senior Lecturer (Usually appointed to a academic with a level of experience, this is usually how many years they have been at a University).

Master Lecturer (This is usually a rank about a Senior Lecturer)
Reader (This is someone who usually has a vast amount of knowledge and a strong academic background who is employed by the University not so much to lecturer, but, to carry out research for the university).
Professor (I believe this title is different in the US but this title is given to an academic who has an outstanding background in research and has published books, received a lot of funding for the particular University.) A Professorship is not something that can be studied for, it is something that is achieved and you are selected for by a special panel.

You can find more about titles here

Thanks for very detailed answer. I am agree with you that Professor is academic person who have own space in any kind of science research field.

This doesn't answer the quesstion. It's also restricted to the UK; other countries use different terms and/or use some of these terms in different ways. It also seems to be based on a misunderstanding: you say that a reader is employed "not so much to lecture"  but even lecturers spend the majority of their time on research at the older, research-based universities. I've never heard of a "master lecturer".

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Does going to a graduate school with less prestige than your undergraduate school hurt you?
I am trying to decided whether pursing a Master's in Computer Science will make me more competitive for a job designing video games. I went to a prestigious undergraduate school and finished strongly. The graduate schools which offer Master's programs with concentrations in video game design are less prestigious than my undergraduate school.
The average starting salary with a graduate degree from one of them is actually $30k less than my starting salary with just an undergraduate degree.
If I attend a less prestigious graduate school, will that cancel out my undergraduate degree? Could I end up making less money with my graduate degree from one of these less prestigious schools? Will employers make the false assumption that I attended a lesser graduate school because I did poorly as an undergraduate?

Please clarify -- is your long term goal to work in academia, or in industry?

If you are doing a PhD to go into academia you should ignore all statistics about money because professors don't make much in comparison to similar industry positions.

@Corvus industry

Is the average starting salary for the graduate school you mention for your field, or across many fields?

@mac389 a variation of my field

As a word of warning from one software developer to another, game design seems to have a very high turnover/fail rate. Daybreak Games last month, for example. If you get a more generalized CS degree, your job security will be higher. You can also go to more prestigious Master's programs.

Edited heavily based on further information provided by OP
If you are going into industry, or pursuing a Master's, it may hurt you in the short term
A Master's degree is mostly course work. It's too short for you to create a body of work that stands on its own. The quality of the courses largely determines, consequently, the quality of the Master's. Prospective employers may use an institution's reputation as a heuristic/proxy for the quality teaching.
Attending a less prestigious institution will make it more difficult to get interviews. Not being able to attend the bigger names also means you miss out on their alumni networks.
Create a compensatory professional network that overcomes these limitations. Most Master's in CS programs have a semester-long project. Make an impressive project and shop it around. This is a good way to build rapport with potential employers.

Awesome answer.  Computer science is the undergraduate and some form of video games/interactive media is the graduate.  Any feedback on that? :-)

PhD or Master's?

Master's Degree

Eep!  You are making me strongly reconsider my plans of going to grad school. Thank you for the excellent and informative answer!

M.Sc vs no M.Sc. is a different question from M.Sc. at one place vs another.

Understood. The more prestigious schools just don't have as good as a video game program though, so I never really considered them

@Evorlor To add my two cents.  If you went to a good undergrad school and majored in CS, my impression is that it is usually a mistake to then go get a masters in (some form of) CS.

@LevReyzin I have the opposite impression living near the California bay area. More education is not always commensurately valued, but it is often enough to pay off.

@Evorlor In contrast to my above comment, the field of game development is very different from CS generally. The only positions I can imagine studios would reward you for pursuing a graduate degree would be AI and business administration. Game developers generally are not like enterprise software development firms, the pay is lower and the work is longer.

@Tim Pay is lower, work is longer, but you forgot to mention...the difficulty is greater as well. Job security is non-existent. The average career of a game developer is 4-10 years before they switch industries. etc. The career choice isn't being debated...just the path to it. :-)

A Master's degree is mostly course work — There are two types of Msater's degrees in CS and related fields.  Professional/terminal master's degrees are entirely coursework. Research master's degrees require a certain amount of research culminating in a thesis; the balance of coursework versus research varies significantly from one program to the next.

@JeffE good point, I'll look further into MS for this field. I thought they were classes + one semester long project.

In my experience people care more about whether you have the appropriate skills for the job at hand rather than where you went to college.
What work-related experience do you have in your field?
Do you have a professional network you can leverage to get the attention of people you might not otherwise?

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How to efficiently (and aesthetically) display an evolving publications list on your webpage?
I'm building a personal website where I'd like to list my publications. Perhaps one of the most efficient ways to do that would be to use or build something that pulls data from an online bib file, and lists entries. I found BibBase, but it has only a few options for display styles, and seems difficult to use if you want something that's also visually pleasing. Short of actually building the html page on your own, what are some common methods that people find useful for this task? How about any websites that you think do this very well?

(this is close to a shopping question, so I see some danger of this being closed - however, I think the question comes up for enough people in academia that it warrants an answer here)
What I have found most efficient is to indeed generate the publication list from a hosted bibtex file. The solution that I went for is to have a repository at Github Sites where I can commit my bibtex file (and any other static resources I want in my web page, including pictures and preprints), and then I generate the actual publication list using JavaScript code I extracted from the bibtexify project.
The result looks like that, which I find visually quite pleasing:

A live version is available on my website. To get access to the code you can clone my public GitHub repo. Then the actual publication list can be rendered on any website using some JS/CSS code. This should work either in a stand-alone Web site, integrated into whatever your university uses for hosting (as long as JavaScript / CSS code is allowed), or a CMS such as Wordpress.
Advantages of this approach:

Easy to update (just update the bibtex file and commit it)
Responsive (also works nice on mobile etc.)
Very few assumptions on the hosting environment - it just needs to support JavaScript and CSS.

Disadvantages of this approach:

Setting everything up is a bit hacky as you need to plumb together some JS/CSS code (but once it works I found the solution to be quite stable)

If there is interest I can try to find some time to write more detailed instructions on how to set everything up.

Some use Google scholar. The advantages are

that much data are already gathered by Google itself
high chances that people know how to use it
it is professionally designed and will be updated from time to time
it calculates some metrics
not much effort

I think the answer to this depends on how many new publications you get per month/year/whatever.
If you are early-career and it is only a few, then the most "efficient" way is probably to manually maintain a web page (whether that is by editing HTML, or editing a Wordpress site, or whatever). The overhead of setting up an automated system will probably take years to pay back, by which time it will be obsolete in some way anyway - and some monitoring and intervention will probably be required anyway so that Google Scholar's notions of what a "publication" is don't make it to your page.
If you are a senior academic who, through co-authorship, publishes multiple times a month, then this may work out differently.

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How to read and take notes on research papers
In each research paper, there are a lot of things that I want to highlight for later use such as definitions, explanations and concepts... While most of them focus on the topic of the paper, there are some relating to a different or broader topics, e.g. a paper about investigating performance of a specific system may introduce different benchmarks and metrics for performance evaluation and explain why those approaches are applicable for this specific situation.
Normally, I just highlight all of them, put some notes directly into the paper or using Evernote. However, when I want to look for all highlights and notes about one specific topic, I find it difficult as they scatter in different papers and documents. So, are there any tools or techniques to affectively highlighting important points and group them by topic while reading research paper?

I struggle with this too and want to draw more attention to this question

This probably isn't an ideal solution; but I still find it to be the most effective in the long run:
I simply keep a log of what I read, and I specifically do this using tex. That way, you will have a searchable document for any words that you may be looking for in your notes. You can also use the makeidx package to add an index to your text document, which lets you "tag" sections of your documents with various keywords. I also make sure to cite what I read, even if it is for my own purposes. This is especially useful when you are writing a paper, since most of your references will be ready in bibtex format.
It took me a while to get used to, but I find it very nice to have a well organized research log.
Since requested in the comments, given below is what the log looks like. I don't want it to become a full latex document, but it should be sufficient enough to give you an idea. Note the index markers, which are basically "tags" that don't show up in the text.
\section{Paper #1 Name, Authors, Date, \cite{...}}
My summary of the motivation and findings of the paper, or whatever I find interesting/useful.
May be as short as a few sentences or as long as a page, depending on how relevant it is.
\index{an important word}

\section{Paper #2 Name, Authors, Date, \cite{...}}
Same thing here.. \index{another important word or two}

\section{Paper #3 Name, Authors, Date, \cite{...}}
and so on..

\printindex

Then you can look up your page numbers in the index, which is included at the end of the document. For more information about the package, see CTAN and Wiki.

I See. Thanks. So each section corresponds to a paper. How do you attach the tags to the section? Once you do that, can you select the papers corresponding to each tag?

@FaheemMitha They can be sections or subsections depending on what else you would like to include in the document. And I added some information on how to do the index.

hanks for the details, Cartonn. I am a LaTeX user, so this is potentially useful information.I assume the "page numbers" will correspond approximately to section numbers, right?

Very good idea, I liked it indeed. One can put a \newpage command after each section to have each note to start on a new page. One may also use citations to have a list of the papers he has taken note from at the end of his notebook.

This is a nice implementation, if you use bibtex anyway: http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/208210/39366

I currently use the software called Papers.  You can use tags to arrange PDFs according to topic.  Another alternative is to use "collections" since a single PDF can be placed in more than one collection.
Next, filter PDFs that match a certain "tag"/"keyword".  In the example below, it's "hydrogen embrittlement":

Lastly, for each PDF, you can get a list of all highlighted text (summarised in the right column) as follows:

The page numbers in the right column are clickable, so its easy to jump to the relevant place in the article.

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Can I use abbreviations in the title of a research paper?
Is it a good practice to include an abbreviation in a title of a research paper.
for example : PC , IDE , RAM

Look around. How many authors do that?

if it's well known abbreviations I believe it's OK.

Why would you want to?

Most of your examples are actually acronyms, not abbreviations. In my experience acronyms are pretty common in titles. There are plenty of acronyms where writing it out is rather unusual. AES, TCP, FPGA...

I am seriously against using abbreviations/acronyms. Please take a look at this wiki page and tell me if I write a communication related paper of title ... ATM..., what is the ATM I am referring to?

I've seen "LBS" in a lot of titles and it has other meanings too and it may confuse you. But when you looking for a paper in computer, you know it means location based services. I think choosing the abbreviation (LBS) made those titles way shorter or in some cases more appropriate. You should check and see if people before you have done that or not. If they've done it they make your job easier to use it again.

There is a big difference between can and good practice. I can think of no reason why it should be considered good practice and a number of reasons why it would be bad practice. despite this, many journals will allow you to use abbreviations in titles, but you will need to check with the editor to see if you can.

Why would it be bad practice?

I would go against the checking similar papers in the field, and more with checking the submission guidelines.
For example the IEEE Trans in Evolutionary Computation will reject any paper with Acronyms in the title.
Yeah, it just happened to us recently, that is the reason I know, however it was our first time submitting to that Journal, and we had no trouble with acronyms before.
A friend even told us that the very same journal asked him to put the explanation of S.O.S. since it was an acronym as well.
So, I would recommend checking the submission guidelines.

Ironic that a journal with an acronym in the journal title will reject any paper with acronyms in the title.

If community practice conflicts with the journal's submission guidelines, the journal's submission guidelines are broken.  Submit elsewhere.

Using acronyms/abbreviations in title is very bad practice. Doing it also in abstract and highlights, which are all separate documents used by indexing services, is also bad. Avoid it.


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Should I send my mediocre test scores if it's not compulsory to do so?
I want to apply for a scholarship, but my TOEFL score is 81 and I think it is not good enough. Sending language proficiency scores is not compulsory for scholarship application but it is encouraged. I am indecisive to send it. What is your idea?

Do you think you should have scored higher? If they interview you, will they think you have a bad or good English?

@Davidmh I know no thing about their expectations.

Unclear. Are you seeking for a piece of advice?

In general, test scores are only used as the minimum requirement for the scholarship. High scores don't help but a score much below median would likely hurt you. If your application statement was well-written and your other materials (letters, grades) were good, I wouldn't worry. If the accompanying materials were weak, then you have much bigger things to worry about than your TOEFL.

The question was whether or not to send the test scores.  Does your answer address that?

If you are not satisfied, take the test again to improve your score.
If not, a score of 81 is good enough to get you into many schools. However, some schools require higher scores. Is there a minimum TOEFL score for the school you're applying to?

No, no minimum score is announced.

Presumably winning the scholarship requires evidence of your fluency in English. If your test scores do not provide that evidence, you should not send them.  (But then the rest of your application still has to provide that evidence.)


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Citing my own thesis in the extracted paper
I am going to extract a paper from my MSc thesis. But I am not sure how to point out that this paper is the synopsis of my thesis. What is your suggestion? In which section should I refer to the thesis, in introduction or related works? Is it allowed to insert some part of my thesis to my paper without modification?

"that this paper is the gist of my thesis", perhaps?

This would be an excellent question to ask your advisor, who will be familiar with the norms of your field.
If your thesis is already finished by the time you submit your paper, treat it as you would any other reference. In particular, you may want to cite it if you wish to refer the reader there for more details on certain points.
In my opinion, it's not necessary to explicitly state that the paper is extracted from your thesis, though you could if you want. (If it's your first major paper, people will probably assume it's from a thesis anyway.) Normally the place to mention this would be either at the end of the introduction, or at the end of the paper.

If you only wish to point out that you have a thesis that may contain additional material, you could add a sentence in the acknowledgement to the effect that the work was largely "funded" by your master's project resulting in your named thesis. It is, at least in my field, not uncommon that people cite their own thesis for details that usually are not included in a regular paper. Typically theses contain much more detailed descriptions of experiments (or their equivalents), including error discussions, as well as contain more data (results) than is possible to fit in a paper. There must, of course, be a clear purpose for quoting your own thesis for information that cannot be included in a paper and I would state that you cannot cite a thesis for any critical points since those must be included in the paper.


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Can experience as a high school teacher or freelance tutor be useful for graduate admissions?
If someone works as teacher in high school after completing his undergrad studies or works as a freelance tutor, can he write about it in his statement of purpose? Would such experience be considered as "Teaching experience"?

Both types of experience should be in the CV as well so I wouldn't waste the space in the statement just to repeat them. Rather, provide some more qualitative meaning/impact of these jobs on your overall purpose. Do they reflect good command of the subject? Make you aspire to be a teacher? Remind you of your passion of seeing the "Aha~!" faces, etc.? Try to make relevance to the program you are applying for.

Regardless of the field that you are in, teaching is a valuable skill. In my experience as a graduate student it has only ever added value and is often included as a separate category on various applications. I would consider high school teaching and tutoring to both be great experiences that are worth including in an academic admissions context, especially if the subjects fell within your field of interest.

Yes! Showing that you can teach is such a key skill, not only because it shows you can teach but it also shows you can present.
It also may make you more competitive to get funding through TAships!

This does not provide an answer to the question. Once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post; instead, provide answers that don't require clarification from the asker. - From Review


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"Challenging" Teaching Experiences for Math Grad Students?
I am currently a graduate student, who will (hopefully!) graduate in the next year (or two . . .).  I have slowly come to realize that I enjoy teaching, and consequently want to do more of it!  My main reasons are:

to gain experience
to bolster my CV
to learn to be a better teacher

That last point is particularly important to me, because I feel I have received insufficient training in how to teach mathematics well.
Now, I have done the usual TA thing.  For the past year, I have also been an adjunct instructor at a local four-year college, so I pretty much know what it's like to be "fully responsible" for a course.  What I am looking for are challenging opportunities which allow me to do some–or all–of the following:

teach fairly sophisticated math to bright high school students / undergraduates
engage them in innovative thinking/research
be consistently mentored/evaluated throughout the duration of this experience

Again, the last point is rather important to me.  So my question is:

Do such programs exist?

I am sure they do, but when Googling, I invariably come up with graduate summer schools, or "local" opportunities. (By "local" here, I mean those which are only eligible to students in that particular school's graduate program.) So I am hoping someone (or several people) here know more about it than Google does.
I know that most opportunities for this summer have probably already expired, but I want to stress I am not only focused on summer sessions.  In particular, I would gladly forego my usual TA appointment for a semester, to be a part of a more difficult and rewarding experience somewhere else.
Thanks in advance.
PS - This is my first question here, so feel free to edit my tags appropriately.

Hi, Steve. Welcome to Academia.SE. I've edited the title of your question slightly to account for the "unique" aspects of your question. Unfortunately, this is a bit out of my purview, so I can't really comment on this. However, it sounds like you'd want a position at a school with an "innovative" advanced HS or freshman curriculum. (Something like the Concourse Program at MIT.)

One possibility is to get involved with a program like Learning Unlimited (full disclosure: a few of my friends are heavily involved in running it).
I've also heard (through the grapevine) that a short while back AoPS may be looking for instructors. I don't know whether the position is still/was ever available.


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Journals selection - alternative criteria to impact factor
While trying to select the journals I can submit my present work and future work, I realize the time between the date the authors send the article to the journal and when the revised article is submitted. Usually this is something between 6 months and more than 12 months.
Althought I am focusing on the Impact Factor (IF) to select journals, I think that 12 months to have a feedback that might include "add more variables analysis","this article will be more valuable if you test also model x,y and z", can have a huge impact on you work. It will make you stop what you are currently doing and possible spend up to 2 months making the changes. This might make a big mess on your work if you have deadlines to respect, however this happens to everyone in academia.
My question is, besides the IF journal based selection, how can we select a journal with enought quality with lower IF? What alternative criteria should one use to select the journal? Should we choose newly created Journals?

You might want to clarify what you are asking here; are you asking for alternative criteria for choosing journals, or whether or pros/cons of publishing in new-founded journals?

I largely prefer to talk with people about what they think of the various journals, see who is in the editorial board, and look at what they publish to determine which journals I consider as good. IF can be very biased even at the scale of a journal (Chaos, Soliton and Fractals had a pretty decent IF...)
Other criteria include price and politics of the publisher (e.g. see the cost of knowledge pledge and the blog posts around it), quality of the publishers work (do you have to check proofs in three days with no indication of what has been changed in your paper?), dissemination (is the journal subscribed by a lot of libraries? is it open access? Is it read by many people?), editorial standards (ranges from "any editor do what she wants and takes decisions alone" to "all the editorial board must approve a paper for it to be published, and the name of the handling editor appears on the paper"). All of them may be difficult to determine, that is why talking with other people in your field about journals is important.

...and: does it allow posting preprint on arXiv (see site with journal statuses: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/).

@PiotrMigdal ArXiv is limited to a smaller set of disciplines but the Romeo link is very useful, thanks!

Sadly, the published times between when a paper is submitted, revised and published should be taken with a pinch of salt.  Some journals these days have changed the review process so that there is no longer a "revise and resubmit" option, and instead the paper is rejected but with an encouragement to resubmit a revised manuscript as a new paper.  This means the "submitted" date on the published paper is the date of the submission of the accepted version, not the initial submission of the paper.  I personally think this is unethical and no longer review for journals that have this policy as I think it is unfair on the authors, firstly because it deceives them into thinking the journal has a more rapid review process than it actually does, but more importantly because it deprives the authors on priority on their discovery.
So as well as IF, I would say that the review process is a factor to consider.
A good way to choose a journal is to see where the leading figures in your field publish their papers.

Many good suggestions have been given in the answers by Benoît Kloeckner and Dikran Marsupial. I would like to add to these answers by including the following.
Most journals are fairly specialized. The impact factor (IF) tells us how much a given paper published in a specific is referenced on average. So although it may be important to publish in high IF journals it is also (I would say more) important to make sure the paper is seen and read. A high IF journal ensures that this happens to some extent. But, sometimes ones subdiscipline is poorly represented in such a journal and it may turn out that a lower ranked journal may be the major outlet for papers in the discipline. Knowing where people publish their papers is therefore a good guide to the palette or possiblities.
Therefore, take a careful look at where papers you refer to are published and try to assess where your "audience" is likely to look. Such journals are also likely to provide very good insightful reviews. So when you look at journals try to look at your possibilities from all directions and assess the best journal based on all of the suggestions made in the answers here.


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How to add a paper to google scholar as "to appear"?
I had a paper in an IEEE conference which will appear in the proceedings. But the proceedings is not out yet.
Meanwhile, I would like to cite mentioned paper in another paper.
How do I do it? I want it to be added as "to appear in ..."
Can I add the article manually to google scholar?
If I do so, what happens if the proceedings out eventually? Will it be merged automatically?
I have read this Submitting conference paper to Google Scholar when proceedings not available but this doesn't solve my problem. Because of copy right I can not publish the pdf in preprint, research gate, etc.

How is the need to cite connected to adding the paper on Google Scholar?

To be clear, of course I can cite it manually anyway, right?
but I want the citation to also appear in scholar so I want to somehow first add the paper to scholar and then cite it. Does this make sense?

Meanwhile, I would like to cite mentioned paper in another paper. How do I do it? I want it to be added as "to appear in ..."

Cite the paper as you would any IEEE conference paper, omitting any information that you don't know (e.g., page number) and tagging "to appear" on the end.

Can I add the article manually to google scholar?

If you want.

If I do so, what happens if the proceedings out eventually? Will it be merged automatically?

It may or may not be automatically merged, we cannot predict how Google's algorithms operate.

Because of copy right I can not publish the pdf in preprint,

Actually, you likely can, since many publishers let you publish preprints on personal websites.


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Why are some computer science conferences not included in the CORE ranking?
So CORE is the de facto standard benchmark to check the quality of a computer science conference.
However, there are some premier events that are not covered by this ranking.
For instance, I'm quite puzzled with the IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER). It will be the 28th edition of this conference in 2021, and yet SANER has not been included in CORE! What is more, it is a well-established venue, recognized in the software engineering community for the quality of the accepted research papers.
Any thoughts why SANER is not ranked A, or as a matter of fact not ranked at all?

"de facto standard benchmark" is to be taken with a grain of salt, especially since the ranking is a bit biased towards applied rather than theoretical conferences and the committee has made some much disputed decisions in the past. Good question, though.

I'm not sure that we here can answer why some organization has decided this or that. Perhaps the Australians just don't like IEEE?

I thought that CORE is dead.  If not, it's just dodgy.  Academics are simply including their favorite conferences into the list and using that to justify to the ARC that they perform world class research during ERA ranking.

@JonCuster more like the CS people do not like IEEE.

I'm told conferences must apply to be ranked by CORE. A conference may not be listed simply because the organizers haven't done so.

Adding to the point by @Thomas : The organizers may be reluctant to receive a poor ranking and thus prefer to not apply for one.

CORE is NOT a "de facto standard benchmark" to check the quality of a computer science conference. Ranking academic research based on where it was published without having a read through the actual work and understanding its impact will end up in bigotry and corruption. The community that I respect and appreciate working with does not care about CORE ranking.

I guess it is because SANER was called WCRE before (present for example in core 2018, ranked B which seems right to me) and changed name. From experience, CORE people do not change things by themselves, it is better to send them update requests

Regarding update requests, one might mention that there is a formal process for that: within certain submission periods, conferences can apply for a (re-)ranking. They can apply for a specific rank, and then need to present evidence that they fulfill the criteria for that rank. Often, the decision committee eventually ranks the conference lower than applied for. It's very plausible that some conferences prefer to not apply because they are reluctant to receive a poor ranking.


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The challenges of learning when there are no tasks
I like exactly this format:
Knowledge -> Task -> Knowledge -> Task

And the knowledge is required to do the following task. Not more. Not less. Therefore you know that the task is solvable and you do have enough knowledge. In other words:
Knowledge1 -> Task(requires only Knowledge1) -> Knowledge1+Knowledge2 -> Task(requires only Knowledge1+Knowledge2)

How do you call this method of teaching?
Books and courses that I see are all the same:
Knowledge -> Knowledge -> Knowledge -> Knowledge -> Knowledge -> Knowledge -> Knowledge -> End.

I think I have to read till the end, even summarize in mindmaps, just to realize later that I have no idea where to start.
Therefore I need to create my own tasks in between.
But I don't know whether how I solve my tasks is accurate.
How could I handle this?

In what discipline are you studying?  In many, it's common for textbooks to have exercises and for courses to have homework.

French currently.

This method of teaching is called “scaffolding”

I think you could propose for yourself such a task solution of which you could publish in some community.
For example, if you're studying French, you could translate something form French to your native language and publish on Medium

Studying languages can be difficult because many natural sentence constructions use “difficult” language in their everyday use. But since language often doesn’t use “easy” language, it’s imperative that you learn it anyways. There are a few strategies that I have found helpful:

Manufacture “easy” language, such as by doing textbook exercises
Find organically occurring “easy” language, such as by consuming media meant for children (picture books, television, etc.)
Familiarize yourself with “difficult” language, such as by listening to the radio in your target language
Keep track of what you know on notecards (or whatever method you prefer) because you might discover that you’ve seen “difficult” language before even when you’ve been learning “easy” stuff

Learning a language seldom falls into neat boxes, but learning how to use parts of many boxes at a time will make you great. For example, you don’t need to memorize every preposition to be able to use prepositions.
Read. Write. Speak. Listen.


text:
Existing publication in Google Scholar profile vanished
During January 2017 I noticed that one of my publications from 2000 that had a significant number of citations had disappeared from my Google Scholar publication list. I re-entered the missing publication manually, however, the citations have not reappeared. Rather another author’s paper appeared in my publication list with several hundred citations. I noticed the same problem in a colleague’s Google Scholar publication list.
Any suggestions to resolve the issue would be appreciated.

Some time ago Google Scholar started to cite old APS and some other journals differently. For example, my paper previously cited as
Possible metal-insulator transition at B= 0 in two dimensions
SV Kravchenko, GV Kravchenko, JE Furneaux, VM Pudalov, M D’Iorio
Physical Review B 50 (11), 8039 (1994)
is now cited as
SV Kravchenko, GV Kravchenko, JE Furneaux, VM Pudalov, and M. D’Iorio, Phys. Rev. B 50, 8039 (1994).
SV Kravchenko
Phys. Rev. B 50, 8039
This will not make much difference if you are the first author. But if you are not, all citations to this paper will disappear in your profile.
Solution: if you are not the first author of a certain paper, click on "+" on your Google Scholar page and then on "Add articles". Search for the first author's papers in which you are a co-author, select them and click on update (a tick in the upper right corner). The paper and the corresponding citations will be added to your profile.

There is nothing much to do except for things which you already did and can try again:

Add/remove the publication manually
Submit a request for correction
Contact Google Scholar directly for help about this specific problem (https://support.google.com/scholar/contact/general)

The Scholar system is highly automated, and their automatic methods for parsing/counting of citations can change abruptly and cause general fluctuations in the level of citation. I have noticed it is quite common to see my citation count suddenly increase or decrease by as much as 100 citations (and in one case it changed by more than 500).
Alternatively you can use other citation count resources such as Web of Science or Scopus.

Speaking of abrupt changes in Google Scholar's citation count, there was this experiment...


text:
Does rejecting an undergraduate admission offer have any effect on my chances of postgraduate admission?
I am currently an international undergraduate studying in the US. When I was in school, I applied to a few different universities, including some in the UK. Two universities in the UK accepted me and I ended up rejecting them both. I am a freshman but I am strongly considering applying to their graduate schools after I graduate here. I understand that GPA, recommendations etc are very important, but would the fact that I had previously applied and rejected an offer from their undergraduate schools have any effect, negative or positive, on my chances of admission to a postgraduate course? Have I burned any bridges?
I can post the names of the specific universities if it's relevant.

I added the UK tag since this may depend on how admission practices work there.  In the US, graduate and undergraduate admissions are handled by completely separate parts of the university, and the grad admission committee would have no reason to even be aware that you had ever applied (and even if they were, I see no reason why it should have any bearing on their decision).

@NateEldredge I see, that's quite reassuring. Is it reasonable to assume that this would be the case in most places worldwide?

I don't know.  If I did, I would have posted an answer instead of a comment.  It seems to me unlikely that it makes any difference, but I don't have much basis for saying so.

In the US, I would say it would have absolutely no impact - people apply to any number of schools for either graduate or undergraduate so not accepting entrance to undergrad is not held against you. As well, the two processes are wholly separate. I can't imagine that it is any different in the UK.

Universities are not uncle Tom and aunt Beth, and you are not their nephew who didn't turn up for their combined 175th birthday. Figuratively speaking. ;-)

I have worked on admissions councils and I'm 99.9% certain the answer is no.  I doubt they'll even consider whether or not you had previously applied.  I'd be surprised if they even have a way of looking up that information.  The pile of applicants who reject is tossed away pretty quickly, time to move on.

Data safety regulations might even enforce the disposal of rejected applications after a year or two, and prevent anyone without a court order from accessing them in the meantime.


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Ph.D. in engineering after Ph.D. in mathematics
I want to start soon with a Ph.D. in mathematics, though I'm not sure, that long-term I want to stay in mathematics. But I know that I'm going to like doing mathematics full-time right now and invest the effort required for a Ph.D. so this unsureness will not deter me. Additionally, because I'm quite old, I want to do the Ph.D. fast(er that usual).
[This remark is bound to generate comments, I know - as "old" is relative, assume that I am compared to my colleagues and that I am bothered by the fact that I'm lagging behind compared to them; speeding up my Ph.D. is reasonable I believe, because
1) being "older" I've had more time to make sure I have all the mathematical prerequisits needed for the subfield I want to get my Ph.D. in (e.g. where some of my colleagues learned about Crandall-Rabinowitz only after being admitted to a Ph.D program, I know about it already now. "Bang. Just like that.")
2) I want to do the Ph.D in my home university (which is in Europe), where I already know all the relevant professors, have already taken seminars with them, know which Ph.D. programs exist, how I can get into them, how the system works etc. so I won't loose time by these non-mathematical things and I'm less hindered by formal criteria.]
Ok, this sound all nice and dandy, so where's the question. Here: Given the facts, that
a) I may not want to stay professionally in mathematics in the long-term, a Ph.D. degree from a very famous U.S. university, as they're world-wide the most well-known, could prove helpful for getting a job in the industry in a Western country later on (of course this doesn't apply to France, were you'd better have studied at ENS and not at Harvard, but I think I'm safe to chose a country were a degree from e.g. Harvard weighs) and that
b) I also like engineering applications of mathematics and I've read for myself books in a certain area of engineering and started taking occasional related, non-mathematical courses there and like to see research in this area,
I may like to apply, after having obtained by Ph.D. degree in mathematics, at a famous U.S. university for a second Ph.D. degree in engineering. (MIT comes to mind as prototypical example.)
What effect does a previous Ph.D. (in mathematics) has for me getting accepted at a highly ranked U.S. university ?
(Good, bad, irrelevant ? It will show that I can to research, which is good, but not that good, since its research in mathematics and not engineering. If I have to do one of those pesky standarized tests, like GRE (do you know good programs, where this may be waived a Ph.D. ?), does this weigh more then the Ph.D. ?
Further reflections:

Besides the reputation of the university of the top U.S. universities, it seems that in the United States formal admission criteria for Ph.D. programs are less strict as in Europe (for an extreme example, take a look at the careers of these professors), so not having a bachelor in engineering may not knock me out from the start.)
For the nitpickers: Note that actually I'm not getting a Ph.D. in mathematics but a doctoral degree.
I also considered the possibility of directly applying for a Ph.D. in engineering in the U.S. But I doubt that I'll be able to do it as fast as the one in mathematics, since none of the reasons from 1) and 2) apply. Additionally I may have to exclude some programs, because my prerequisits aren't sufficient. So there only seem to be disadvantages to doing one directly.

I may not want to stay professionally in mathematics in the long-term  then why on Earth do you want to do a PhD in mathematics?

You think you're smart enough to blast through a maths PhD at Harvard and do an engineering PhD at MIT but you think the GRE might be a stumbling block? This does not compute.

@CapeCode Because maybe I just love doing it, although loving something doesn't mean I want to do it forever on a professional level! There are more things to life than math and I want to explore those too! Sticking to math professionally won't allow me to do that because the publish-or-perish manner to climb the career ladder is too time consuming. To give an extreme example: If you know a bit about ODEs, you may have heard of N. Fenichel who is famous for his "Fenichel theory"; what is less known is that most of his theorems were published in his dissertation and afterwards he left math.

@DavidRicherby You didn't read my question closely enough (and neither did the six+ upvoters). I didn't said that I was going to blast through my PhD at Harvard - but at my local university which offers my every advantage in terms of finishing faster! I'm pretty sure a PhD at Harvard would take me a long time and that is why I just want to do one PhD at a good U.S. university, now two. [...]

[cont] And GREs aren't a stumbling  block in terms of an intellectual challenge, but they waste my time for nothing, since I don't get any relevant knowledge for my PhD out of them. It's just another exam I have to prepare for, when I could be doing other more useful things that accelerate my progress. That's why I want to avoid them.

You might find this useful : http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17232/is-doing-two-phds-a-good-path/17245#17245

@Kimball I assume that pink_pyjamas is referring to the 6+ upvoters on David Richerby's comment.

From what I know, it would hurt you. From the MIT ECE website (just as an example):

If I already have a PhD, can I apply for another PhD in EECS?
No, we will not admit an applicant who already holds a PhD degree (even if it is in a different area such as Physics or Math).

I'm sure it's like this at many of the top schools in the US. Here I'm assuming what you refer to as a "doctoral degree" will be treated the same way as the American/English "Ph.D."

This is a very useful information, although I'm not happy about it. Why do you think that other top schools also exclude directly from a PhD ? Is it custom for them to all have similar rules ?

@pink_pyjamas I don't know for sure, but PhD programs put out a lot of money to fund their PhD candidates. I doubt they want to admit someone who is going to be a "professional student" so to speak.

I think the question that supersedes, "What effect does a previous Ph.D. (in mathematics) has for me getting accepted at a highly ranked U.S. university?", is the question of what effect your current plan will have on your overall career.
What I mean is this: Knowing, before you start a Ph.D. program, that you are going to switch fields immediately after your degree and get a different Ph.D. is just highly unusual. Having this as your plan from the get-go could potentially cause you problems for the rest of your career. Here are a few issues I see that haven't been already mentioned:

If the admissions committee of your initial intended Ph.D. program knows that this is your plan, I imagine it will cause them to question why they should admit you. While nobody can predict what a student will do post-degree, I think that most professors will not want to spend years teaching and mentoring a student whom they know ahead of time has no longterm commitment to the field of study.
Your attitude of thinking that you can just crank out your math Ph.D. quickly and then move on to your "real" subject is also likely to be negatively received by the math department from which you want your first Ph.D. In particular, it signals that you don't have a good grasp of hard work needed to obtain a Ph.D. in mathematics.
For the rest of your career, you will likely be answering the question, "why do you have two Ph.D.s?" If you tell your story to anyone that has any connection to the academic world (including potential employers), they will almost invariably find it odd, and it may be perceived quite negatively (for reasons which I think have been addressed in similar questions on this site).

I think the third item addresses your question directly: If most academics will (in my opinion!) find your plan odd, then it will likely negatively affect your admissions to the second Ph.D. program.
You could always choose to keep your overall plan a secret at each intermediate stage of your career, but this I think carries its own obvious set of serious issues.

Thanks for your answer. I have to make some comments regarding 1.-3., at least for other readers, so that my question is better understod. Regarding 1. Because right know there are more open positions for PhD than students, so professors are happy if they get some students, because they are a) paid for tutoring b) it looks bad for their reputation if no one does a PhD with them (I'm curious, are you from the U.S. ? Because most comments strike me as being written from the perspective of people from the states, where academia seems to be rather different from Europe.)   [...]

[cont] Also notice that most PhDs done at not-top-schools (at least in Europe) end up leaving mathematics, so not having a longterm contribution rather is the rule than the exception. For 2: This is good to know, but probably varies very much from individual to individual, as some profs probably equate "crank out a PhD quickly" with "this student looks ambitious and promising, so I probably can rest assured by taking him on, that I won't abuse my offfice hours with his questions".

This seems like a very weird plan to me. Even if you aren't explicitly excluded from applying for a PhD (e.g. as per @AlexMiller), you will likely be at a significant implicit disadvantage.
You also don't seem to have considered the implications for your post-PhD career. I was part of an early career workshop (applied mathematics) in which a post-doc with two PhDs asked how having two PhDs might affect her career. The general consensus was that, while it wasn't insurmountable, it did put her at a disadvantage and she would have to justify why she did two PhDs and why it was the best path for her (we weren't provided details, but it seemed as if there were extenuating circumstances that led to her doing another PhD - i.e. it wasn't her plan all along).
Assuming you don't have a master's degree (which you might), why don't you do a master's degree in maths and try to do a PhD in engineering from there? That way you get to spend some time pursuing your maths interest, without having to commit to it long term, but don't have the stigma of two PhDs. It also fits better with your 'older' time-line, as a master's degree takes far less time than a PhD. Furthermore, an applicant with a master's degree in math is going to be more attractive than an applicant that is immediately applying to do another PhD (how would you justify this in a cover letter? First thought would be that you became disillusioned during your first PhD - not exactly the ideal candidate unless you can spin a very good story.).

I already have a masters degree, but math really gets interesting only at PhD level, i.e. stopping now, when there are many interesting directions to pursue, would be annoying.

Well, I know several math PhDs who work as faculty in engineering departments in fields like control, dynamical systems, optimization, signal processing etc. You can do your math PhD in such fields and work in engineering departments or some of the research labs. No need to do 2 PhDs.
Some representative departments/groups where math professors work in engineering are:
CSL at UIUC
LIDS/CSAIL at MIT
CDS at Caltech
There are several others.

The US academic system usually avoids students having multiple PHDs. There is some concern about students remaining perpetually in PhD programs without ever stepping up to obtain independent funding, as a faculty member.
The usual solution for a field switch or diversification is a post-PhD masters. In your case, you could get your Math PhD, then apply to MIT for an engineering masters. Or, since you have this plan up front, get a Math masters from your local college and apply directly for an engineering PhD.
So far as the GRE goes, don't sweat it. I got a perfect score with minimal studying. The math doesn't go above algebra, and the vocabulary, etc. are standard high-level English. If you're accustomed to speaking and writing technically in English, it shouldn't be an issue. Remember they use this same test with similar thresholds for entry into humanities graduate programs as well. It's very much lowest common denominator.

But you generally don't need to take the Math GRE for entrance into an Engineering program. That's for US Math graduate programs.

You're right, I misread.  Sorry.

Thanks, the idea with doing the master is GREAT, as a masters does give allow me to put a foot in the doorstep of engineering science and also takes less time then a full-blown PhD. And good to now about the GRE, I actually always assumed it was something like a European school-leaving exam, which, in some countries (e.g. where I'm from) are tough and time-intensive to prepare.


text:
Academic 'rehabilitation' after poor undergraduate results
I'm an undergraduate studying Mathematics & Philosophy in the UK, about to sit my third-year exams. My course is structured as a three-year self-contained BA and a fourth year 'integrated masters' with its own exams, which I automatically progress to as long as I get a 2.i classification from my combined second- and third-year results.
I've not been a good student. My tutors consistently report that I'm clever and engaged but I've suffered real motivation and work ethic problems. My results in second year were poor, and while I'm reasonably confident I can get a 2.i in these exams I'm unlikely to achieve stellar results this year.
I'd like to have a shot at going on to further study. Obviously I would need to do well in my fourth year, and as well as is possible this year; that's a given. I'd like to know if anyone has any advice on other things I could do to 'rehabilitate' a potential application, both from the perspective of being a better candidate and with a view to getting reasonable references from tutors.
While I'd welcome general answers as well, for specificity the most likely further study I'd be applying to would be a masters programme (combination taught/research) in philosophy.

It would be helpful to know which are of study you intend to go into. For example, if science it would be helpful to get some research experience, but it depends on what you are doing.

@Skunkness I've added some salient details.

I can't speak to Philosophy programs so this may not be terribly useful to you, but in general, if your grades/marks are not stellar, and you exams are not either, then you should probably rely more on the power of recommendations from people who know your good traits well.
There are probably several ways to do this, and though I'm not sure about philosophy, in the sciences for example, a couple of years of volunteering in laboratory with one or two different researchers and making yourself invaluable to them can garner you major points.
I didn't do wonderfully in my studies either, and my exams were not fabulous, but I spent three years after graduating my undergraduate university volunteering in two different labs, and enrolling in evening courses to (a) try and do better in essential courses pertinent to my area and (b) demonstrate that I was serious about graduate studies because of my initiative in taking all these courses.
I ended up with three great letters and job opportunities, and later grad school (PhD) through working with these professors.
However, a word of caution: If your weaknesses really include motivation and work ethic, then post graduate study is not going to be fun for you. It's completely different than undergrad as there is way less structure, and you have to be very self-motivated, make your own deadlines, work all the time without people asking you to, and complete projects on your own. It's really hard. If you do decide that you can do it though, I suggest finding an advisor who will be more hands on.
Hope this helps a little!

Good answer, but I disagree with your second-to-last paragraph about work ethic. I had a terrible work ethic as an undergraduate, though since then it's been improving markedly because I like doing research. I don't think you can fairly judge if someone will enjoy grad school based on their undergraduate experiences.

I doubt it's possible to "volunteer in a lab" in the UK for a couple of years. It would be very hard to argue that that wasn't employment and, thus, subject to the minimum wage, among other things. (Also, with very few exceptions, there is no such thing as a "mathematics laboratory".)

I must admit that my initial reaction was what's pointed out in that last paragraph. If you're having problems with motivation and work ethics as an undergrad, things will only get worse. Motivation is pretty much your only driving force in grad school.

I strongly disagree with the last paragraph. I know plenty of students (including myself) who had zero motivation for classes and tons of motivation for research.

I would suspect that someone who had zero motivation for classes as an undergraduate could possibly still find graduate studies difficult; for most programs, there is a minimum GPA that students must maintain in order to stay in good academic standing.

I don't know the details about Phylosophy (the large majority of the population of this site seems to be STEM, unfortunately), so I will speak from my experience (first and second hand) in Physics and related fields.
Universities in the UK thrive to be fair and objective. Admissions are regulated by committees that put high weight in objective measurements: that is, your transcript mostly. Even if you had a brilliant last year in your master's, your bachelor record may hinder you to get a position, at least in the better universities. Spain is a more extreme case, where a score function of your academic record and, to a lesser degree, proven research experience (ie, publications, that very few undegrads ever get) is the sole parameter considered for a grant.
In other countries the system allows for a more flexible and subjective evaluation. Good memory and analytic skills may get you high undergraduate marks, but if you lack creativity and good thinking you will not be good at research.
In Sweden, the PhD student is normally chosen by the PI based on whatever criteria he decides. I believe the majority of them put high weight in the projects you have done as an undergrad or master, and how well they think you will be able to work together. Grades are not so important for many because until some time ago, most universities only have "pass" or "fail" marks. I know of cases of PhD students that were hired without their supervisors even looking at the transcripts, but had a very good masters project.
Bottom line: if you were in STEM (as I cannot know if this is extrapolable to you), if you apply yourself in the last year, you could have options in a lower tier (but perfectly reputable) university in the UK; but you would probably have better chances in other academic cultures. Improving your grades will always help (don't let them fall); but the best you can do now to make you show apart from the other candidates is to excel at your thesis.

I can say something about philosophy Postgraduate study in the UK. If you have a 2.1 By, you ought to be welcome onto a whole load of decent MA courses, though to be prepared for a major step up in expectations. Bristol and Edinburgh both have MAs in Philosophy and Mathematics, for instance. If this is where you want to go I'd email their PG contact in Philosophy, say you're on an exit velocity for a 2.1, though nothing spectacular, and would anything stop you applying?

The Edinburgh course you mention is actually equivalent to the course I'm on now, as it happens.

I'm not sure you have much to worry about so, at least from what we have to go on. As an academic working in the postgraduate end of the social sciences -  law and governance - I tend to see people very much admiring performance improvements over an undergraduate career. Exit velocity on a degree programme is actually pretty unusual. Most people are more or less consistent in their performance. Easy for me to say of course.

Going straight from undergraduate work to graduate is not the only path (not sure what the alternative paths would be in philosophy exactly - but I can imagine they are many and varied). The years between undergrad and grad can certainly be used for reform. Recommendations can weigh very strongly.


text:
Is it ethical for departments to have publication requirements for students
This question and this question suggest that it is not uncommon/unheard of for departments to require publication by students (generally masters and doctoral) either to get credit for a course or graduate.
This seems to me like a way of off loading the assessment of students to peer reviewer, and therefore it seems ethically questionable. Is there a pedagogical reason to require externally peer-reviewed publication?

Not an answer, but this sort of requirement is nearly universal for PhDs in Japan. They even have a form called ronpaku where previously published work wrapped together qualifies for a basically untaught PhD completion. As a holder on an American PhD, I've always found this kind of troubling.

For an individual course (assuming a time-limited scenario, e.g. a semester, quarter, or even year), it's certainly ridiculous to have a publication requirement.  The timing is far too variable, and even the best researchers can have papers rejected or discover before submission that they've been scooped.  If it were possible to reliably publish a worthwhile paper within the timespan and amount of effort required for a typical course, then there would be a lot more papers published.
A requirement of submission is not as absurd, but still unreasonable.  I see no advantages over a mock submission sent to the professor teaching the course, but there are severe disadvantages: it can put pressure on students to make inappropriate submissions, and it can waste the time of editors and reviewers on submissions that may be withdrawn once the course requirements are complete.  My cynical interpretation is that submission requirements deliberately use the threat of professional embarrassment to encourage students to work harder, and that seems unethical.
The one scenario where publication requirements can make sense is for a degree program.  For example, some PhD programs require that a dissertation must be based on peer-reviewed publications.  Of course that's reasonable only in fields with a sufficiently rapid publication cycle, and even there I'm not fond of this idea personally (but I wouldn't call it unethical).

I worked in a department where the criterion was "sufficiently high quality to lead to publication". If it was published, it was not debatable about the whether it was publishable, but it was not a requirement.

@Anonymous Mathematician: What about requiring Ph.D, students to spin their dissertation into three journal articles that need to be submitted for peer review before you are allowed to defend? Not a department requirement, but a new lab requirement. I get submitting the whole dissertation, but this feels a bit stilted, in that rewriting the dissertation into a few articles before defending adds at least a semester to students timelines.

Here, math students are required to have a peer-reviewed publication. I like it, no matter that publication process in maths knows to be very long. If preparation for research career is part of PhD studies, then I consider it crucial. If nothing else, one has to know how f@$%^& lot of work it is to publish a paper.

First things first: a doctoral student should be expected to publish something other than a thesis. Even if she has no desire to enter into a research profession after the PhD, publication of scholarly articles should be an important milestone in the process.
Beyond that, however, expecting that a student—whether a master's student or a PhD student, or even worse, an undergraduate—publish a paper as part of a single "course"—is absurd for a multitude of reasons. First, in the context of a single educational course, the time spent will almost certainly be unsuitable for the preparation of a manuscript; moreover, given the lag times in between submission of an article to a journal or conference and its acceptance, it is unlikely that it can be completed within either a trimester or even a semester, which means that incomplete grades will likely be par for the course.
Thus, since it serves no real valid educational purpose for the students—since the work isn't being evaluated by the educational staff whose job it is to provide instruction—such behavior is extremely questionable, and very likely unethical. This is doubly so if the only criterion for grading is the acceptance of the paper in an external journal, particularly since there are so many "pay-to-publish" journals out there that will publish anything, given the page charges.
Now, I do require that students prepare something like a research article for one of the courses I teach. However, I do that as an exercise in preparing them for writing research articles. I have no expectation that they would bother to submit these papers to actual journals—the material just isn't sufficient for that. However, in terms of learning how to write a paper—mentioning relevant literature, explaining their methodology, clearly demonstrating and illustrating their results, there is nothing comparable. You learn to be a  researcher by doing research—and that includes writing about research!

The answer to this question may depend on the country and possibly on the field. The following is based on a European CS perspective.
As other answers have noted, asking for a publication within one year or within one semester is - at least for comparably inexperienced (pre-Master) students - a rather unrealistic or at least highly uncontrollable goal (because successful publication is dependent on a number of external factors, not the least of which is what else is submitted to the same venue).
Asking for publications as a prerequisite for graduation, on the other hand, is partially a different topic, which depends highly on the degree aimed for:

A Master's degree is commonly thought of a certification for specific verifiable skills. Everyone who invests the necessary effort and fulfils the pre-defined requirements is supposed to be able to achieve that degree. As such, I agree it is ethically questionable to outsource the evaluation of a part of the preconditions for that degree to an external body rather than evaluating the work oneself in a somewhat stable manner (i.e. in a way that two students who did more or less the same work get more or less the same mark). Peer reviews wouldn't judge the work by its fulfilment of the rules imposed for the Master's degree, but based on its contribution, suitability to the venue, and its relative value to all other current contributions.
A doctoral degree, in contrast, is not a degree you can reproducibly achieve for doing certain defined tasks. In a way, upon starting to work for a doctoral degree, one leaves the world of studying and doing things in order to fulfil pre-defined requirements, and one enters the world of being an active researcher who does things in order to find new knowledge - which of course means that the final result is partially outside of one's realm of influence. A doctoral degree is a degree that is granted as a result of contributing to the body of knowledge. Hence, any particular work effort that served for someone to get their doctoral degree will not do for anyone else (because that particular contribution is not new any more), and in the hypothetical situation that all knowledge in the universe has been discovered, no-one can get a doctoral degree any more. This has rather nicely been illustrated in a webcomic. In this case, requiring peer-reviewed publications makes sense in several respects:

Peer reviewers evaluate the work exactly by the desired criteria, i.e. whether the work is a contribution that is currently notable enough to warrant publication.
Rather than being just an idea that someone uttered, the new finding is validated by the reviews and thus has reliably extended the overall amount of knowledge.
Due to the aforementioned fact that the amount of knowledge that mankind is familiar with is constantly changing, what was a disadvantage in the case of the Master's degree is exactly the desired outcome here: By trying to make it a peer-reviewed publication, the work is evaluated in comparison to the current state of the art and all other work currently being done.

tl;dr: Binding a Master's degree to successful peer-reviewed publications is questionable as the degree should be granted whenever you prove your skills by completing a pre-defined set of conditions such as exams. Binding a doctoral degree to successful peer-reviewed publications, on the other hand, is the entire point, because a doctoral degree says This person has successfully expanded the knowledge available to mankind. These accomplishments are not measured by exams, but the same way as the quality of all research is measured: by peer reviews.

The problem certainly seems fishy and whether it is unethical or not probably depends on  what the (local) rules and regulations governing courses will be as well as the possible ramafications of the process relative to those regulations.
The main issue for me is what will be the purpose of having publications as a requirement for students (not at graduate level). There is of course nothing wrong if undergraduate papers can be published, and experiencing the publication process can be valuable. But as one of the posts referred to in the question states, it seemed as if the requirement was to submit, not to publish. I do not see any particular value in that experience that could not be replicated within the department itself.
Since any publication process requires quite a chunk of time I can see a major problem in the timing. In my system, a course should be possible to complete within the stipulated time (corresponding to the number of credits). Imposing a system where publication is part could (really would) clearly violate such limitations. So, a follow-up question would be "are there systems where courses can be open ended?" or "can courses be required to last until an un-controllable goal is achieved?". If the system allows such cases, then the requirement would be ok from a legal point of view. I would still think it is in a grey zone.
Your point of off-loading the assessment is part of the shady picture. I would have thought that each university regulatory system would have some, at least, recommendations on how quickly assessments must be done and, again, assessing through journal peer review would require at least as much time as the length of a typical course itself. So as a whole, I think that using paper submission and/or publication as part of course requirements can be violations of local assessment regulations and very poor behaviour. I would call it unethical if it means unnecessarily prolonging the students graduation or impacting on their ability to get student's loans (equivalent) due to not getting credits in time (impacting their ability to take responsibility for their timing).

I would like to add some argument to the existing answers, which I first give in distilled form for clarity and on whose details I will elaborate afterwards:
Main Argument
As scientific publications are reports of research, requiring students to publish essentially requires them to successfully perform research. The essence of research is to explore the unknown and thus its results (and success) are not predictable. Relatedly, successful research requires amongst others luck. And luck is something that successfully finishing a course, degree, etc. should not depend on too much.
Some comments

I think publications which do not require original research such as reviews are not what we are talking about here. (It may be a way out though: I know somebody, who at some point strongly considered fulfilling the publication requirement of a PHD by publishing a review after many unpublishable research approaches.)
While failed research idealistically is also worth reporting (as it has produced the knowledge that some approach does not work), it certainly is much more difficult to publish (leading to the publication bias). This holds even more so, if the reason for failure is not that you have run into some long cul-de-sac but there are many short culs-de-sac.
There is some research which is very straightforward (and thus has little luck involved) as it basically consists of applying some established method to a new object where no big surprises are to be expected. For example: Determine the distributions of volumes of organ A of rats fed with diet B. Such research is however arguably better published in one big study going through a series of objects (e.g., organs and diets) instead of thousands of small publications, which all are essentially the same.
When the impact of luck is sufficiently low that assessing students by publications can be considered fair depends on several factors such as the publication threshold of the field or the typical duration of experiments. Arguably this only happens at PHD level in most fields, if at all.
Another related problem is that people being pressured to produce successful research are more likely to fake data, plagiarise or commit other types of fraud. Now, while this is a general and not totally unavoidable problem with students, requiring this to be published may also harm others who try to build upon the respective publication.


text:
Am I helping my graduate students too much?
As a new university professor, I have been informally tasked with making sure the MSc students in my program are prepared for their dissertations, by prepping them in my research methods course. My students are generally very motivated but they are from academically diverse backgrounds and, frankly, many are ill-prepared to undertake a dissertation and have been struggling with the material and assignments.
I have been trying to help them as much as possible, but it feels like the more helpful I am, the more they ask for help!
I have students who express extreme distress and confusion, which I try to allay with more explanation. Then they send me their work in progress, asking me if they are on the right track.
I want the students to do well, and to feel like they are progressing, but the constant emails and meetings are completely taking over my life. On the other hand, I can see that many of them are just not getting it, and that make me feel like they really do need help.
Is there, in any of your experience, a good point at which to tell students that I cannot help them further and do you have suggestions for wording this without seeming like a bad educator? I appreciate their motivation and I sympathize with their frustration, but at what point do I stop helping and how do I communicate this?

This may be helpful.

I would definitely say that evaluating work-in-progress for a course is not normal.  These are MSc students.  They should be near adults by now.  If they can't hack a simple postgrad course by attending the regular lectures, doing the work, and using regular office hours, then they need to start facing the possibility that they are not going to succeed.  Graduate studies require students who have a functioning aptitude for self-learning and independent work.  If they can't succeed without continuous mollycoddling then they probably should not graduate.

I have been trying to help them as much as possible, but it feels like the more helpful I am, the more they ask for help! — It sounds like you're not actually helping them, but rather doing their work for them.

As a new university professor, I have been informally tasked with making sure the MSc students in my program are prepared for their dissertations, by prepping them in my research methods course.

There is a lot going on in this first sentence!
First of all I see that you are new, which makes things especially difficult for you: you don't really know how the department or the MSc program works yet, but you are trying to guide students through it.  Trying to do everything exactly right the first time around seems unrealistic: I think you should concentrate on making a good effort and showing the students and your colleagues that you take the job seriously, bring a lot of skills to the table, but are also open to advice and adjustment in terms of this particular service situation.  This may end up resulting in your spending more time and effort the first time around than you will in the long run, un/fortunately.
(Let me also say that, based only on this sentence, I am not thrilled with your department for placing you in this situation.  If the newest member of the pantheon is immediately signed up for something so critical and complex, one has to wonder how functional the pantheon was before the new arrival.)
Second of all you mentioned an informal task but then also a formal task: you are teaching a research methods course.  The latter sounds good to me, and you should certainly be having office hours in this course, and setting more as needed if the students seem to be struggling as a group.  But the task of being single-handedly responsible for the preparedness of all the MSc students in your department for their dissertations sounds like a lot to hang on your head, if by that you mean much more than successfully teaching the research methods course.  Expecting every student to be prepared to write a dissertation after completing one course doesn't sound very realistic to me.  Also I hope that each student has, or will have, an advisor for their dissertation other than you (at least in most cases), and that these advisors will take on more of the responsibility of their preparedness/progress than you.  You simply can't carry an entire master's program on your back in your first semester.  So I would try to create a distinction between the amorphous informal task and the reasonable formal task, and set yourself up for success in the latter.
In terms of helping the students more versus coming to a point where you can't help them: unfortunately the setting discussed above makes this an especially open-ended and intense version of that. I think the other answers have given you good advice nevertheless.

You do need to limit your total amount of involvement: set aside a certain number of office hours per week, including extra office hours for drop-in appointments.  You can help the students a great deal, but not infinitely, and not "as much as they need".
If the students seem far from the mark, have an assessment meeting with each student (yes, this is very time-consuming...).  At that meeting you can learn from the student their background, their progress and their current position, and then you can make an individualized plan to help the student move forward.  It is not realistic for the goal for every student to be the same, but it is a reasonable (though still ambitious) goal to help every student make clear forward progress during the course of the semester.
Make sure that your plans for the student give them plenty of things to do, and things that they can do: i.e., you want them to be doing most of the work, and you can help them with it at key moments.  If you ask them to do something that they simply don't know how to do, then you're either going to fail them or spend way too much time doing it for them.  But in a research methods class every student should be able to start somewhere.  Make sure that the ground that they start on is relatively solid: I think that's much more important than how far they get by the end of the course.

I agree that I am tasked with undue pressure. I was not aware before arriving that I was in part hired as a replacement for someone who did not do a good job and I am definitely expected to make sure that the students can at least understand basic research. It is interesting considering I have never taught before and this the core class for the program. I do appreciate your advice, though with 150 students it might be hard for me to visit with each one! Instead I have been having them work in groups and uploading work each week which I then give them feedback on. Still a lot of work.

Whoa: never taught before?  150 students?!?  The core class in the program?!?!?!? Holy crow.  Look, just do your best.  If you succeed in any sense, let us know, and we'll arrange for a medal to be sent to you.  Good luck.

Haha thanks. And no TA's. I teach two hour lectures followed by five hours of seminars/labs of aprox 25 students each. And supposedly I am on a research track (not happening this year, ha). I award myself a medal (usually a few glasses of wine) every time I get through one of those days. I am definitely learning a lot though :)

@Skunkness: Keep up the good work.

One of the solutions for limiting / demarcating the time you spend on MA students is to set aside specific office hours for that purpose.
For example, you could dedicate Fridays 1p - 5p for the purpose of answering MA questions on theses. If they have questions or if they want to show you revisions of their thesis, then they need to sign up and come to your office hours in person and you would be happy to walk them through things. You need to make clear that the only e-mails you will accept regarding the theses are for signups (or use an online signup system in your course management system), otherwise you'll defeat the purpose of this.
This serves a dual purpose.
First, it allows you to schedule your life (and balance your e-mail queue).
Second, it sets up a small but perceptible cost to see you in the eyes of the students. If they know they only have a 15/30/50 minute slot once a week, they will see your time with them as a limited resource in contention with others and try to use it more efficiently by preparing their questions and materials to review ahead of time. In the process, they may answer their own questions.
Of course, you'll want to select time/times that will work for you and your students, but when you chart out your week you should try to set a top limit for student contact hours (and e-mail hours) until you get tenure.

p.s. You should also look into tutoring referral services for the students who are really struggling with basic questions. Your Director of Grad Studies (or Chair or Dean) may be able to help, especially if the students are an underrepresented population in your field.

Excellent answer. Give feedback in person (for many reasons). Email is for scheduling appointments and short answers.

When teaching graduate students, I've found that lowering the bar on the level of difficulty of a course tends to lower the amount of effort they are willing to put in. Conversely, raising the bar (lowering the amount of help I give) tends to increase the amount of effort they put in.
The students appear to get better outcomes when their level of effort matches the level of effort required for the course material.
Obviously the extremes of this don't work for anyone, but I'd suggest that you ease off on the amount you are doing to "help" them.
Each student is different, and some will require different levels of support, in different areas. The best thing you can do for them is to help them identify and address their weaknesses.
That doesn't mean you have to fix their weaknesses.

A significant facet of being a professor, which is to say, a large part of your raison d'etre is to educate graduate students. So you should be prepared to make time to meet the needs of the students you are involved with.
You should certainly exercise some judgment about when and in what form you provide help to your students, but you should really try to avoid this mindset where you tell yourself "I cannot help them further." I can certainly sympathize with your sentiment about "constant emails and meetings."  I think it is perfectly reasonable (and necessary) to set limits on your availability so that you can fulfill your other obligations ... but that comes down to you setting some boundaries and managing your time more effectively.
Part of the problem may stem from providing too much help, or help that is too specific, so the student is sheltered from the (often frustrating) trials of a learning process. Graduate students need to develop their ability to take initiative, try different approaches, and explore things. They need to be able to fail, to identify when things aren't working, and to seek help when they have exhausted their own efforts.
Note that "making demands" is a two-way street. The students demand your time and attention ... for your part, you should be demanding that they apply themselves to these problems they need help with. This can also be used as a tool to moderate students that demand constant attention (a way to put on the brakes, so to speak). Just make sure your demands are helpful, and don't abuse it.
The fact is that learning takes time and effort on the part of the student. An instructor can help, but you cannot learn something for someone else. What you want to do as an instructor/advisor is to enable your students. Keep them on track, and help them avoid getting stuck or distracted by unnecessary details. Warn them about pitfalls they're about to encounter, and point them at good resources.

First of all, tell them to take it easy and do their best of preparing their works while considering your instructions.
I feel there is nothing wrong with both the lecturer and the students; however make them understand that you are going to teach them how to research and you are NOT going to do their researches for them. State that there is not just a single correct way of doing things; while following some  basic rules every person has it's own way and style of doing researches.
To sum up, there are some basics that you as the lecturer have to teach them and rest of the things primarily depends on the person himself/herself.

authors: Виталий Костырин


text:
How should I stay in professional contact with former supervisors and/or colleagues?
I want to ask if anyone still keeps in touch with former supervisors and/or colleagues from previous universities and how to do it in a professional way.
I want to keep in touch with them for not only future reference letters but also potential research collaboration.

The easiest way is to keep working on projects with them. If that ship has sailed, then the next best way is to be friends with them on social media, which is to say, be friends with them in real life. Barring that, you have to work to communicate with them on a regular basis about topics relevant to your shared interests: go to conferences and strike up conversations with them, share interesting papers with them via email (i.e., "Did you see this new paper from prof X? What'd you think?"), propose joint projects and write joint grant proposals, etc. It's not hard, but it does take active work.
People definitely do this, and I think it's one of the best ways for a new post-PhD researcher to get experience writing grants and proposing projects if they haven't gotten that experience already. That being said, it's also hard. You're supposed to be striking out on your own and establishing new frontiers. Your old colleagues are either doing the same thing or using the slot you left to pay new students/postdocs to continue the work you left behind. It can be challenging for everyone to strike the right balance.