text:
Test answer rejected for saying more than asked for
this is about a phenomenon often seen, but I came across a probably more prominent example recently, so I thought I'd ask for the community's opinion.
Here's the situation:
In the past semester's exams there was a question in computer architecture asking for X, and I, and many other students, answered Y, which contains X and is mostly revolving around X, thus successfully answering the question (in our opinion at least). The professor rejected the entire question (20% of the grade) and at any attempt to talk to him he directed us to the sample answer, stating that we "are wrong", we "answered another question, not the one asked", and so on. The question wasn't even given partial credit, and that happens systematically in his tests.
Another similar issue on the same test, was when a very few of us optimized a small bit of code in a way that would, industrially, be significant, and that part was rejected similarly, without any explanations, as "being entirely different". Explanations were also written on the test, so he cannot claim we did it without explaining.
This seems to be a general policy of the professor, as numerical errors are similarly crippling to grades, and in the sequel lesson, of an amphitheater of about or more than 80 people (and of course a lot more don't even attend classes as they are not obligatory, but I don't know if they're better or worse than those who attend), only 11 had succeeded the exam.
I would finally like to note that some of the stuff he rejects, he himself does in class, the most obvious being a computational error, and frustratingly he also did the optimization he rejected in the test.
So finally, the question:
I understand that professors have the right to grade based on their own criteria, but
Is it justifiable to reject an entire answer because more was said, without even partial credit?
Is it justifiable to reject an answer that gives something better than what is required, perfectly equivalent, even if relying on the student's intervention? (in this case, it would be a compiler optimization, thus not an entirely direct interpretation, but an elegant and industrially valuable workaround)
Is it acceptable to direct students to example answers and not allow them to explain why they think their answer is correct?
I'm also itching to see how we could deal with this, but that's not the main question so I leave that to your own discretion and benevolence to answer.

I know from personal experience that it's very frustrating not to get proper credit for knowledge that you think you demonstrated correctly, so let me start by saying I sympathize with your situation. Now let me address your questions:

Is it justifiable to reject an entire answer because more was said,
without even partial credit?

To give a literal, completely general answer: obviously yes. If the correct answer is, say, one sentence long, and your answer quotes the complete works of Shakespeare that happen to contain that sentence, I personally would not give you any points (but I would still be very impressed :-)). Of course, that is an absurd example, but it illustrates the point that what likely matters to your professor (or if not, certainly what should matter to a reasonable professor) is that your answer demonstrates an understanding of the topic the question asks about. It is certainly possible, and happens pretty frequently, that an answer Y contains the correct answer X but by adding more irrelevant things demonstrates a worse level of understanding than just the shorter answer X. The way this typically happens is that a student doesn't understand the material well and upon being asked about a certain topic, regurgitates everything they memorized about the topic, not knowing which part is relevant to the question. Clearly that does not leave a very good impression.
Now of course, the above does not address what happened in your specific situation. It is completely possible that your longer answer Y still demonstrated as good of an understanding of the material as the official answer X, and deserves to get partial or full credit; or not - you haven't given us enough information to say.

Is it justifiable to reject an answer that gives something better than
what is required, perfectly equivalent, even if relying on the
student's intervention? (in this case, it would be a compiler
optimization, thus not an entirely direct interpretation, but an
elegant and industrially valuable workaround)

I think this question is too specific for anyone here to be able to answer without knowing more details. As I said above, the points you get for the answer should be correlated with the perceived mastery of the topic being asked about that your answer demonstrates. If including the optimization demonstrates that mastery, you should get the points. But I can imagine a situation where using the optimized method instead of the official method actually demonstrates less mastery, for example if it appears that you used the optimized method to avoid revealing that you don't know the simpler, less sophisticated method the question asked about. In that case, it may make sense for your answer to be rejected.

Is it acceptable to direct students to example answers and not allow
them to explain why they think their answer is correct?

I think it may be acceptable in certain cases. For example, if you have already asked many questions of the professor, argued with him in a way that he thought was unreasonable, overly argumentative, or delusional, and if the professor is very busy, for example is also teaching a class of 500 students in addition to the smaller class you're taking with him, at some point he may decide that spending more time discussing your exam with you can limit his ability to perform his other duties effectively, and be a disservice to the other students.

Summary. As you can see from my answers above, whether the professor's behavior is unreasonable depends on many details that you haven't provided. It's certainly possible that it is unreasonable, but it's also possible that it is less unreasonable than you may think. Statistically speaking, I've found that students often overestimate the extent to which they understand the material and the degree of correctness of their exam answers. That doesn't mean it's what happened in your case, but it's a possibility you should keep in mind as you consider your next steps. In any case, good luck! As for what steps you should take to address the situation, this answer is already quite long so I think it makes sense to save that for a follow-up question if you care to post one.

Your answer to the first sub-question is especially true in cases where the exam question said something like "Describe briefly how to ...", "Explain in two sentences ...", "Outline the core aspects of ...", where the exam contains general hints such as "Read all questions attentively. Answer exactly what is asked.", or if the relative expected amount of information and level of detail can be deduced from the relative score that can be achieved in each of the questions.

The answer to the first sub-question is spot-on my reflexive reaction to the question. The only thing that I find immediately very dubious about the things OP mentioned (without more information -- others may or may not be wrong depending on the other side of the story) is severely punishing numerical errors. I usually reduce the score at most nominally for such mistakes (unless they are of the sort they really ought to have noticed, like probability over 1 ;) ). But that may be just the fact that, as a mathematician, I don't really care about calculations. :-)

@O.R.Mapper - I find it true even when I'm not asking for a brief explanation. Suppose I ask something like: Explain how concept X might be applied in situation Y. A student then writes down every bullet about concept X verbatim from the slides, with some small mention of situation Y. While I admire that student's memory, I'm usually quite unimpressed with their answer – all they've done is parrot back bullets to me, when I was looking for them to be able to sensibly apply those concepts to a given situation. The student either missed what I was after, or else was fishing for partial credit.

I think he should have asked this question citing his specific test question on Computer Science Stack Exchange. What he really wants to know is whether or not his specific case was a valid answer. Fundamentally, it's too broad of a situation to provide an answer for without knowing the question, but the question itself wouldn't be within the scope of the skills expected of answerers here.

You bring up the interesting point that at some point a professor may conclude that a student is being overly argumentative and he's wasting time continuing the discussion. I'm reminded of a prof I had when I was in college who said that if a student challenged his grade on a test, he would review the question. But, he said, if you challenge the mark on one question, your entire test is now opened for review. He said, "This is my response to the nit-pickers. If I made a mistake grading your test, I will fix it. But if you're going to nit-pick, I can pick nits with the best of them."

Dan Romik's answer is excellent, but I'll add a bit more perspective. Your instructor sounds a bit severe but not entirely unjustified.

Is it justifiable to reject an entire answer because more was said,
  without even partial credit?

Yes. I do this (perhaps in smaller doses). Here's an example: If I ask the question, "find the margin of error for this estimation", and a student works out an entire confidence-interval estimation -- which includes the margin of error as an included term -- and then boxes the C.I. as the answer, then I think: "This student doesn't know what the margin of error is", and needs to be corrected. In that case I'd take off partial points, and probably receive the exact complaint from the student that you're presenting here; after a short discussion, the student usually sees that their understanding really was lacking and needs some improvement.
Sometimes for shorter explanatory questions, expecting maybe two lines, a student will write a whole half-page regurgitation of all the subject matter of a particular chapter. If it's a 1-point question, and it seems like the student really can't incisively identify the particular item asked, then off comes the (entire) 1 point.
When I see responses like this, I'm being taken back to bad interactions I had in the past with my own teachers or coworkers in school or industry. E.g.: a teacher that when asked a tough question, wouldn't respond on-topic but would give to a random dump of other information so they'd look smart but wouldn't answer your question. Or a coworker who would behave similarly. Either case is a big aggravation, so if I can I'd like to help escort people out of thinking that that's useful/rewarded behavior. It's so much more helpful to have a colleague say, "I don't know", so you can go search elsewhere, rather than do a brain-dump of random information on you, which is just wasting your time.

Is it acceptable to direct students to example answers and not allow
  them to explain why they think their answer is correct?

Yes. Especially in large courses, such as your "amphitheater" course. Presumably the instructor spent time writing up the example answers and distributing them, specifically to save time from interacting with students one-at-a-time on the issue. (See also: "it's on the syllabus" comic, "it's on the syllabus" T-shirt, etc.)
Remember that at most research universities (likely ones with large amphitheater courses), teaching is not the professor's top professional priority (in terms of evaluation, promotion, etc.). Published research is required to come first, and then teaching is effectively a secondary part of the employment -- so the time spent on the teaching side, especially on large introductory courses, has to be kept very constrained as a necessity. (Personally, I'm a dedicated lecturer,  not a research professor, so I'm very happy that I get to spend more time responding to individual questions from students, providing personal feedback on tests with partial credit, etc.)

"[T]eaching is not the professor's top professional priority"  - I realize this is hardly the professor's fault, but it still annoys me greatly.  At least in the US, the students have paid (often quite a lot of) real money for the right to sit in that lecture hall.  To be told that their education is not a top priority is... well it seems rather unfair to me.  Without those tuition payments, the university's continued existence might well be in jeopardy.

@Kevin: It annoys me, too; I think it may be the single greatest misalignment and misunderstanding about the academic system. Even when I started as a college adjunct instructor I was surprised and confused about it. But: It's still the case that a minority of college funding comes from tuition -- although it's risen in recent years (24% in 1988, 47% in 2013; http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2014/05/15/students-paying-bigger-share-of-public-college-costs)

And that's exactly why I like to inform people about this state of affairs; it' so commonly misunderstood.

@Kevin for better or worse, most universities in North America (and most of the rest of the world) provide other services besides educating undergraduates. They also are centers for research, and educate masters and doctoral students. These functions are important and there is a lot of real money involved in them too. You can reasonably argue that these functions should be disentangled, but I am not sure I'd agree: I think there is real value to active researchers teaching undergraduate courses (which is traded off for the amount of time they can spend on their teaching).

@Kevin you should not feel annoyed.  If you don't feel that you are getting value for your tuition dollars, you can go elsewhere.  I feel that there are too many talented people wasting 4 years of their lives (and lots of money) sitting in amphitheaters.

You remind me of a quote attributed to Mark Twain: "I was pleased that I was able to give him a complete and accurate answer. I said, 'I don't know.'"

It's hard to say without seeing the specific question and answer.
I can easily imagine scenarios where too much information would be wrong, because it would indicate that you don't know which portion of the answer you gave is relevant.
To take a silly example, if a history test asked, "When was George Washington elected president?", and a student answered, "One of the years 1750, 1751, 1752, 1753, ..." etc, listing every year from 1750 to 1850, to say, "But the correct year is in there somewhere! I am being penalized for giving too much information!" would be true, but clearly the student does not know the correct answer. It is properly marked wrong with no partial credit.
On the other hand, if a student answered, "In 1789, and his vice president was John Adams", I'd say the bit about John Adams is not relevant to the question and I don't know why he mentioned it, but I probably wouldn't take points off.
But in general, any information that is not relevant to the question likely indicates a lack of understanding of the subject. If a test asked, "What loops are available in Java?", and a student wrote, "FOR, WHILE, and IF", that's simply wrong, because "IF" is not a loop. Yes, you could say it's extra information in addition to the right answer, but it's flatly wrong. It indicates that the student either doesn't know what a loop is or doesn't know what an IF does.
The best case I can think of is if a question is potentially ambiguous. Life if a history test asked, "When did Barrack Obama become president?", a careful student might answer, "He won the election in 2008 and took office in 2009", because the question is not entirely clear which it is asking for.
And ultimately, if you give more information than asked for, you are wasting the professor's time asking him to read it. If a test asked, "How much is 2+2?", I'd expect the answer "4". Anything more than that is wasting my time, and at some point I'd start penalizing for it.
Update several years later
I just got an upvote (thanks!) that drew my attention back to this old post, and looking at it again, I came up with a better example than my George Washington one.
Suppose a test asked, "What causes a compass needle to point north?", and a student answered, "The gravitational pull of Jupiter, the magnetic field of the earth, and the Coriolis effect." Yes, the right answer is in there, but the fact that the student gave additional information that is irrelevant shows that he does not know what IS relevant. He doesn't understand the subject that the test is asking about. A teacher might give partial credit, thinking the student has some understanding, but he'd be justified in saying no, you don't get it.

This is the best answer. It explains how "more than asked for" is not a single concept.

2+2=21431 ;)  The right answer is in there, together with "extra information"

These are non-examples: the answer "One of the years 1750, 1751, 1752, 1753..." is not the answer "1789" with additional information, as the former contains less information than the latter. There is a clear distinction between giving a correct answer supplemented by correct additional information, and a giving several answers only some of which are correct.

@Kostya_I You're missing my point. I'm saying that if you gave a correct answer, and also gave completely irrelevant information, that demonstrates that you do not know what the right answer is. That's my whole point with "but the right answer is in there!" I discussed the "correct answered supplemented by CORRECT additional information" elsewhere in my post. From the original post, it's not clear if the student gave a correct answer and additional correct information, or a correct answer mixed in with incorrect information. And that is my point.

@Kostya_I If you assume that everything the student wrote was true AND RELEVANT, then yes, he should not have been marked wrong. But from the information given, we can't assume that. Maybe the professor was just being unfair. Or maybe the professor's position is that by including irrelevant information, the student demonstrates that he doesn't understand what is relevant and what is not.

RE suggested edit: "Penalise" is the British spelling. "Penalize" is the American spelling. It's not clear that a British spelling is to be preferred here. I'm an American so I used the American spelling.

Here's the situation: In the past semester's exams there was a question in computer architecture asking for X, and I, and many other students, answered Y, which contains X and is mostly revolving around X, thus successfully answering the question (in our opinion at least).

You are saying that, because X is in Y, Y should be a valid answer to the question. However, one could argue that the professor is testing your knowledge of X, so he expects to see X on the exam. Y might show a misunderstanding of X – it could suggest that the student is confusing X and Y, or cannot differentiate between them.
I've had students answer essay questions almost as if they had been coached: "Write down everything you can remember associated with that topic. Chances are, something in your answer will be what the professor is looking for." I've seen that often enough that, before a midterm exam, I now warn my students to throw that strategy out the window. "Your jedi mind tricks do not work on me," I tell them.

I would like to note that some of the stuff he rejects, he himself does in class, the most obvious being a computational error, and frustratingly he also did the optimization he rejected in the test.

This might be a telling clue. I know that sometimes I get frustrated when students parrot back things to me that we covered in class. My exams are not meant to see if my students can regurgitate tidbits covered in class, but to see if they can demonstrate mastery and expertise. Part of my pre-test hints remind them that I'm often more impressed by an original example than a summary of one discussed in class. So it's quite possible that, by including the optimization covered in class, it seemed once again like you were grasping at straws instead of competantly answering the question.

numerical errors are similarly crippling to grades ... of about 80 people, only 11 had succeeded the exam.

I'm not sure what you are referring to here; does that means about 70 people got a failing grade? If so, that is perhaps the most disconcerting part of your question – but I still wonder if I'm getting the whole story. Are these truly exams, that are worth a significant portion of your final grade? Or are these quizzes (which is more of what I would expect if you have one on "a sequel lesson," as you say). If I was grading 80 quizzes on a regular basis, I, too, might be very stringient on what I'd accept as an answer.

This seems to be a general policy of the professor.

To me, this is the crux of your question. Now that you know this is the general policy of the professor, what will you do about it? If I were in that class, I'd be very careful in my future quizzes and exams. If the professor asks for X, then I would give him X, the whole X, and nothing but the X. Evidently, this professor values the student's ability to differentiate X from Y, and not confuse the two. Without having a conversation with the professor, I can't really tell if that's motivated by pragmatic or pedagogical reasons. However, in and of itself, it doesn't seem unfair to me.

As a footnote, I hope that your professor isn't a member of this community, because, if he is, he'll almost assuredly downvote my answer, since I've not addressed your enumerated questions, but focused on your introduction instead.

Your reaction to the "rejects what he himself does in class" part did not take into account that the teacher has very specific answers that will be accepted. While the rest of your answer is fine, that part actually goes against the details we've been provided. Though we don't have the whole picture, we have enough that it seems more likely the professor does want a regurgitation of what was done in class, and that professor does not want a demonstration of the students' mastery of the topic. (Sorry to dredge this old post up, but this topic is important)

I had a professor like this when I started my CS degree - I hated him, three semesters in a row, as I struggled to keep my GPA afloat because of his grading style... I even got into a verbal argument with him once that left me red in the face.
Then I was grateful.
Your post begs the question:
Are you in it for the degree or the knowledge you obtain from going?
Your professor, although hypocritical and imperfect at times himself, is holding you to a higher standard. He doesn't want a "good" answer, he wants the "best" answer, and as such, he will craft you into more than just a "good" developer.
How you choose to go forward with all this is up to you. I can tell you from experience, you won't win (at least not without going above him), and even if you did, what you achieve may be less desirable of an outcome than you realized. You could always go to another professor, another version of the program at a different college, and earn your slip of paper, but you'll be doing so at the cost of learning what the best answer was to all the versions of these problems you'll face in the future.

This answer assumes that the professor actually is looking for the best real-world answer, rather than the professor's (arbitrarily?) preferred answer. We don't have a lot of information on what the specific question was, but it's entirely possible that knowing Y, a superset of X, would be more useful in the real world, and that arbitrarily limiting your knowledge to X would just be good for getting the degree. If the OP is describing the situation accurately, it sounds like the professor is going for the regurgitate-the-textbook answer and not a better-in-principle answer, and won't say why.

I am an ex-physicist and such an expanded answer would be fine in my book for a scientific course.
Now in industry, I work an awful lot with legal and compliance groups where answering exactly the answer and not an iota more is key. So an expanded answer would get in management or similar courses a reduced grade.
Zero points is not acceptable, though.

It depends on whether the original question or parts of it ask for some kind of differentiation. For example, if I ask for the best way to cook brussel sprouts, a general overview of cooking methods won't do. Even if you correctly say that sprouts should be roasted in almond butter, it makes perfect sense to deduct points if you also talk about deep frying, because describing other methods of cooking looks like fishing for partial credits in case your initial guess about almond butter was wrong.
However, deducting points without explanation is wrong. If the class is large, the professor cannot discuss every single answer with every student, but if a personal discussion is impossible, then at least the example solution should contain comments concerning all problems which occurred several times.

If the test question is multiple choice, you can't get away saying that the answer is either A or B or C or D or E, even though that would be logically correct, the answer is one of those alternatives.  Clearly on a multiple choice question, the answer must be a single and correct choice of one of the alternatives to be considered correct.
Now the issue might be: what if the test question is a paragraph or essay description?  Does an answer that contains the correct answer still be correct when there was other information that does not contradict the answer but is irrelevant to the answer?
That's not immediately obvious to me.  It seems to me to depend on how much irrelevant information is in the answer.

I have in fact had a heated argument with a student in the past on exactly that issue -- 4 cases listed, multiple choice "which is/are true? a; a and b; b and c; or a, b, c, d" -- having picked "a" when the answer was "a and b", demanded half-credit. She came from a religious high school, so I was never sure if it was a cultural issue or if she was trolling me on this and other items (e.g., 100% plagiarism in a report).

@DanielR.Collins, i would say that the form of your question was not multiple choice, but was T/F on each of 4 questions.  was that clear in the statement of the test question?

It was in an online context with a radio-button where exactly one of the specified combinations could be selected (among other explicit directions).

@DanielR.Collins, ah!  so the "a and b" was one of the answers and your student did not select it.

Right, that's it exactly.

The questions as formulated appear completely clear to me, and I'm surprising that the following seems to be a dissenting opinion:

No, it is not appropriate to lower the grade for an answer that contains more than is asked for. A clear distinction should be made between (a) correct answer supplemented by correct additional information, and (b) multiple answers only some of which are correct. The examples in the other answers pertain to type (b). If the additional information cannot be reasonably mistaken for a second answer, or it can be but this answer would be also correct, deducting points for including it is clearly inappropriate. A somewhat separate situation is if the given answer only contains the assumed answer implicitly: then the teacher may judge that making it explicit is an additional step that the student failed to do. This would be petty in many cases, but not inappropriate.
No, rejecting an answer that is better than the required one is clearly inappropriate, there are no ifs and buts here. The answer must solve the given problem under given, explicitly formulated constraints, if it does so, that's it.
No, it is unacceptable. It is part of professor's job to give a fair hearing to any student claiming that their solution is misunderstood. If there are contradictions between the sample solution and the student's one, the professor should either point out a mistake the in latter (ideal), or say that it's on student to explain what's wrong with the former (acceptable). But if there are no contradictions, the fact that they are different does not say anything about the correctness of either of them.

It is absolutely appropriate to lower a grade for an answer that contains more than asked for. Part of the direction of the question is to answer what is asked; providing more than asked is failing the direction. Two biggest problems with this are 1) It encourages students to "information dump" rather than identifying the key factors of the question. This is a lesser demonstration of knowledge, it skips the step of understanding which information is relevant. 2) It adds a considerable load to the evaluation of the exam.


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Is it possible to get application fee refunded from PhD programs that miss admission decision deadlines?
I'm sure I already know the answer to this question, but I feel compelled to ask.
With the passing of midnight a couple hours ago, the April 15 deadline used by many US graduate schools, by which applicants should accept/decline offers of admission (as decided by the Council of Graduate Schools) has passed. While I have made my choice, there is still at least one (pretty well-respected) school from which I never received a decision. Thus, in order to have waited out a decision from this program, I would have had to risk losing other offers (one of the conundrums that the April 15 resolution aims to avoid).
They were totally fine with taking my application fee back in November, but never seemed to get around to making a decision on my application (it's still pending online and there has been no response to emailed inquiries). I understand rolling admissions, but this is absurd. Is there any chance I will be able to get my application fee refunded, seeing as they did not keep their end of the deal? I guess I'm asking if anyone has ever successfully made this argument to a school.

You do not a have a leg to stand on, legally, morally or otherwise.  The thing you should actually indict them for is not responding to your emails. That is rude; I think you should probably accept that as an implicit rejection.  If they were still thinking of admitting you they would have checked on your status by this point.
The issue with your argument is that it doesn't actually follow the text of the resolution.  The binding part of resolution you cited says "Students are under no obligation to respond to offers of financial support prior to April 15."  So, schools have agreed not to withdraw an offer because you haven't accepted it before April 15th, and not to try to hold you to an offer you've accepted if you change your mind before April 15th.  The school in question has held to their end of the bargain perfectly, since they never made you an offer.
The resolution says nothing about the school having to make a decision before April 15th. Of course, schools are well aware that it will be much harder to get people after April 15th, so they make an effort to make offers earlier. However, this is not a deal, this is the department acting in their own self-interest.
Unfortunately, there's too much uncertainty in the process to guarantee you'll make all offers before April 15th.  After all, you have some plan for what your incoming class will be, you make offers to many more people than that, and you hope that you guessed the yield correctly.  If the people who've already been offered admission are waiting until April 15th to make up their minds, you're then left with a great deal of uncertainty as the deadline approaches, since it will be a big problem if your incoming class is such bigger or much smaller than you planned.  Thus, there often are people who you are not sure you want to reject, but not sure you have the money to fund.  In my department, we still have a number of people waitlisted, since we haven't filled our class yet.  Usually, such people will be formally notified they are on a waitlist; I think again, that's in the department's self-interest and helps clarify things for the student.  So, again, it's likely this is an implicit rejection, which for whatever reason they haven't bothered to formalize.

Top answer because it addresses my initial argument. Also, fair enough. As I said, I don't care about the decision at this point--I'm happily accepting an offer elsewhere--but it is a bit of the icing on the very opaque cake that is the PhD admissions process

Is there any chance I will be able to get my application fee refunded, seeing as they did not keep their end of the deal?

Graduate schools generally don't promise to make a decision by April 15, so it's not clear there's any deal being violated.  It doesn't sound like you have a case to demand a refund, but you could try asking for one and see what happens.  I doubt you'll get one, but it depends on what was happening behind the scenes in this department.  I can imagine you might get a refund if something went terribly wrong and the university is embarrassed by it.
Not responding to inquiries is certainly strange and unprofessional (assuming you were sending them to the right address), and waiting until past April 15 to make a decision would be extraordinarily late.  One possibility is that you have effectively been on a waiting list while the first round of offers got sorted out.  Other than that, I'm having trouble thinking of a good reason why this might have happened.  Do you know whether anyone else was admitted or rejected before April 15?  (You might be able to find discussions online.)  How you might approach this with the university depends on whether it's a widespread problem or something unique to you.

It's true that most schools do shy away from giving a hard deadline for decisions, but most (American) schools have agreed to that April 15th deadline for students to accept or reject offers. After that funding and slots are no longer guaranteed for outstanding offers. Given that, it is implied that if a school expects students to make decisions by April 15, they should provide something to decide on before that date.

Generally application fees are not refunded, so it is unlikely they will do so in your case. You may have a winning case legally, but no point in going to court over something as small as an application fee. And the universities know it, so the threat to go to court is not credible.
I have never heard of anyone getting the application fee refunded.
Not hearing from them is almost certainly a rejection.

Of course no court--that would be a waste of everyone's time and money. And I don't much care about the decision at this point anyway. I'm mainly just put off and would love to hear if people have ever found a recourse ;-)

Legality and the school being unprofessional aside, academia is a small world. I would not risk the exceptionally small chance that 4 or 5 years from now people at that university remember my name as it was the first time they dealt with that request, only to essentially make a point.
This doesn't answer your question proper - there is always a tiny chance something unexpected works out as you desire.

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Is this a correct way to look for one online collaboration in this situation?
I'm a PhD student working in theoretical and mathematical Physics. I'm particularly interested in one subject and would like to do research on it. By now I have studied some relevant papers on the field and I'm quite familiar with it, but currently I know no one also acquainted with the subject to discuss about it and because of that I'm finding it hard to identify what can be done to contribute. Particularly I find it somehow hard to come up with ideas and so on when I have no one to discuss about (that's perhaps one weakness, but maybe just lack of experience).
Now, I'm going to participate on one online event on which the subject will be discussed among others and on which there certainly will be other people interested in the same subject. There will be one Slack channel and then I would like to know: would it be fine to post a message there saying that I'm interested in that particular subject, that I'm currently a beginner, and that I'm looking for some online collaboration on it?
Intuitively I see no harm in doing that, but I feel this might be something "nonstandard" and that could be seem as bad form by other people in the community.

I'm not sure what you see as a possible down side.

@Buffy well I don't know exactly how people see this kind of stuff in general and I'm afraid this could in some way "damage" my reputation. But perhaps this is something that people see as something quite natural in the academic world, and that is what I'm trying to find out here.

I have no clue what Slack is, but generally, an online tool alone probably won't have a significant effect on anything related to your reputation (as a researcher) in the physics community.

The negative aspect of Slack is that they aren't good about privacy and confidentiality. So, working a project using Slack as a primary communication tool has issues that must be addressed.
But for a simple discussion of a topic, especially one with no security or proprietary concerns, it is about like any other tool.
If you use it, however, don't sell yourself short or minimize your familiarity with the topic. Certainly say that you have read some of the important  papers and want to get more involved. Asking for collaboration is a good thing. Certainly better than remaining isolated.
And, others with more experience than yourself seem happy with Slack for this use.

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COVID Effect on Enrollment
I've been wondering how COVID-19 will affect enrollment in US universities.  Typically, in economic recessions, which will seem to accompany COVID-19, university and college enrollment tends to go up.  Fewer people working generally means more time for going to school.  Will this pattern apply to the current situation, at least within the US?

People sign up for college much more for socialization with and access to a certain demographic than for learning. I'm expecting enrollment to tank. But I'm not sure if questions like this are on-topic here; there will be no way to tell if an answer is right until 2022 or so.

The underlying assumption in this question is that US universities will be open, that's not a given.

Negative press coverage about universities will reduce enrollment.  Disruptions to high schools will reduce traditional-age enrollment.  People who are laid off from jobs will be more likely to enroll.
The main action we can take is to communicate to prospective students that we encourage them to enroll as soon as practical.  Students may believe education is not available to them.  Informing them will reduce the severity of enrollment declines.

Interesting response!  What is your reasoning for negative press coverage about universities.  Why encourage prospective students to enroll as soon as practical?

@drsnark I don't think it's necessary to recap the negative headlines.

If you mean the criticism about universities being bastions of liberal indoctrination, then that makes sense.

@drsnark No, what media have you been viewing?

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Papers written with the sole purpose of finding flaws in someone else's paper
This question is based on a paper I came across a couple of years ago written by a famous professor who had developed a method to solve a certain problem. His method was not the first or the only method but it has some advantages and it is widely used in industry.
The paper I came across was written with sole purpose of finding flaws in a method for solving the same problem that someone else had published 15 years later.
Regardless of who was right, is this the proper way to deal with a flawed paper? This seems a bit weird to me. Do journals even normally publish such papers? Aside from citing the (presumably) flawed method, he also specifically named the authors in the abstract.
This worries me a bit because I plan to publish another method of solving the same problem soon, and although I have confidence in my work I don't think it's bullet-proof. I feel that if such a paper was written about my research it could have a significant negative impact on my future career if that was what popped up when you googled my name.

There are at least two parts in your question. Re the paper you ran into and which seems to have shocked you, what do you suggest as a "proper way to deal with a flawed paper", other than publishing another paper rebutting the claims of the first paper? Re your own paper, your main worry, by far, should be to make it 100% "bullet-proof". If you can do that, why should you fear any subsequent publication about your own? If you cannot, do not publish.

There was a guy named Einstein who published his findings about flaws in a method developed earlier by another guy, Newton. Are you suggesting that Einstein should have refrained from publishing those flaws, or that the editors should have declined to publish his criticism, or that Newton should have refrained from publishing his own work out of concern that it may not be "bullet-proof"...? This is just an example of course, the same thing has happened thousands of times and is simply the way science works.

How could one write a paper showing that another paper is wrong and not cite the authors and name them? If you want to avoid people writing papers saying that your paper is wrong, don't write papers that are wrong!

@DanRomik: I am very ignorant in History of Sciences, but wasn't Newton's work bullet-proof for the criteria of science and rigor of his era? Einstein just had better bullets...

Thanks for all the answers. It makes it a bit more clear. The problem solved here is some numerical problem that can be solved in countless ways and there are many papers published on the topic. The main thing that seemed weird to me was that the paper called out the authors by name instead of their method and it made it seem personal to me. Furthermore, both methods yield identical solutions, so they are both 'correct' methods, the 'flaws' I mentioned are really just cons of using that method.

It depends. If a method is well-known, but flawed (be it widely used in industry or not), then someone should point out its flaws. Not only is this the right way to progress science, but - depending on the applications - not doing so can be downright dangerous - let's say the method is used in clinical trials, or to hedge risk. A paper that dismantles an old one strikes me as the right approach, naming authors necessary as the method is associated with them. If the new method might replace the old one, the proper rebuttal would be publication - ideally in the same journal.
Where is the 'It depends?' The new paper should be civil, fact-based, and not personal, of course. It's about using a method properly, not about disparaging competing researchers. Additionally, if a new paper - like yours, say - is only an alternative method, not one that corrects errors, then the old paper should be part of the literature review, and the merits and dis-merits of the new paper highlighted, as well as situations where one or the other performs better, should this apply.
Papers like this certainly exist, and can be famous. Here is an example by David Kreps (Stanford GSB), which cast doubt not on a particular paper, but on an entire then-popular sub-discipline. It was certainly not written for any purpose other than academic curiosity, and a desire to question the current state of the art. While this is not exactly the same situation, I think it compares in spirit.

Whether papers like this will be published depends on the journal and the editor. It usually is preferable to show how a problem can be solved correctly. However, it might be well justified to solely point out weaknesses in existing work.
Keep in mind that very few things are actually "bullet-proof". The more you know about a method (new or old) the more this will become obvious. Most methods have their limitations. Newton's laws are still "pretty good" although Einstein and others have shown their limitations.
If you have confidence in your new method, you will probably highlight the advantages it has over existing methods in your paper. However, you should also be open about the limitations of your own contribution. Be clear about what your method can and cannot do and where and when it is applicable. In being honest about your own work you are making a true contribution to science. However, if you’re starting to have severe second thoughts about your method, it might be better to double check what you're doing. Talk to other people in your field and openly discuss your concerns before publishing.
As long as you don't over-egg your own contribution you will be close to bullet-proof. It won't be bad for your reputation or career if somebody were to find a weakness in your work and improve your method or the knowledge of the field. That's part of how science works. You can only make contributions to the best of your current knowledge and move on when you have new information. The only thing negative for your career would be to ignore new evidence and trying to hide past mistakes.

+1.  The more reflexion and honesty in the original publication, the less room is left for "competition" to point out any unpublished limitations of the method.  Hopefully not enough room to make a purely corrective article publishable.

That someone tries to find flaws in your work does not mean they are trying to be "mean" or to belittle your work. It means you did something that seemed to be good and important enough for someone else to bother trying to investigate and improve it. Then the rational reaction is you should feel honored instead of sad.

I have come across such papers.  One notable one was written to show that the proofs in a handful of highly cited papers are wrong.  He then proceeded to fix them.
In general, I think every paper that solves the same problem MUST highlight the weaknesses of existing methods.  Now, whether the 'highlight' is done with tact is up to the authors.  Some are arrogant and their comments serve to show how 'smart' they are.
In conclusion, yes such papers get publish because they contribute to the body of knowledge.  How a paper is presented may irk some reviewers/readers, but if the contribution is significant, I doubt anyone cares.

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How much does the choice of professors on my thesis committee matter?
Would potential employers (for academic or non-academic R&D positions) care about who is on my thesis committee?
Basically, I'm asking if there is any benefit in having more well-known professors on my committee who would provide me with little guidance, as opposed to assistant professors or research professors who are not well known but could possibly provide me with some guidance.
I'm asking because I have been discouraged by fellow graduate students from including a research professor on my thesis committee. Their reasons are that if a potential employer looks him up online and sees that he is not a tenured professor they may think that I tried to put together an 'easy' thesis committee.
The reason I would like to include this person is that he was the only member of my qualifying exam committee who read my paper carefully. He seemed to have a good understanding of my research and after I passed the exam he emailed me a list of suggestions for my future work. I think he may serve as a better committee member, although I could probably discuss my research with him even if I leave him off the thesis committee list.

For academic positions, what is relevant for your application is your letter of recommendations.  Who is on your committee does not matter (except the head).   Your job applications will not even list the members of your committee---this will only be seen by someone who looks at your thesis.
In academia, it's common that non-tenured (sometimes even non-tenure-track) faculty are on PhD committees.  This is not viewed in any negative light.  You want the most relevant people on your committee, so they can give you the best feedback, and will have a better sense of what you are doing to be able to write you recommendation letters.  Often your supervisor can suggest who to put on your committee.
I imagine that non-academic employers will care even less, as they are (typically) not interested in your research.

The exact composition of your committee will probably weigh much less than the results you get (and any publications out of your thesis). Help in doing the work is more important than some final ceremony.

I do not think it should matter that much! Keep in mind that a lot goes behind the scenes when choosing committee members (joint funding between your adviser and members, future funding possibilities..). Also, in many depts. there will always be some lobbying i.e., Prof. X works with Y and Z all the time such that X is the adviser of student A which makes Profs. Y and Z be part of A's committee. Then for student B (student of Prof. Y), Profs. X and Z become members of B's committee.
I now for certain that some of my friends mentioned that they have met with their committee members for at their comprehensive exam and 30-45 min before the final defense. In other cases, committee members seem to be very involved and require a monthly update.
It is really up to your adviser to choose. He knows who will understand or can relate to your problem, who can help you in certain areas of your research if you get stuck, who has certain equipment in his/her lab that you can utilize in your research, who will be a headache and who is less likely to ask for additional testing, analysis etc. Even if you decided to go with certain profs. The adviser usually has the upper hand (most of the time) in picking the committee members.
I agree with Kimball that committee members can be helpful in drafting recommendation letters and networking.


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How to still get something out of my masters degree - overwhelmed in lab, coursework not helpful
I am halfway through my 2 years masters now. I am doing my masters abroad in Asia and slipped into a bit of an unfortunate situation.
I originally studied general science as an undergrad and during this time I discovered my nack for programming, machine learning. I had no previous research experience. I was especially interested in the application of machine learning in neuroscience. After listening to the advise of one of the Neuroscience professors at the university I am doing my masters now,I decided to do a masters in CS to get a more in depth-knowledge. He guaranteed me a spot in a laboratory in the CS department that works together with his lab, and also happens to be one of the best in the country. So far, everything was ideal.
Well, once I began my degree and entered the lab, I was given a big government project related to machine learning and neuroscience and was assigned as a leader. Everyone knew I had an interest in neuroscience, and no-one else  wanted to work on this, so I was just assigned. It is a large scale research project, involving a lot of money with no concrete definition and I have to come up with a feasible research idea myself.
Well obviously, I have been extremely overwhelmed, have 0 guidance and assistance. Coursework here is also very unhelpful, the general mindset is, "don't care about your classes, learn trough your research". On top of this I am required to take a class out of each field within CS, hindering me in actually specialising within AI, and further burdening me as I have very little background knowledge in most other areas.
As mentioned before, I have no-one teaching me, guiding me nor assisting me. I am expected to know how things work already and publish a paper. There is great pressure for this from my lab-mates and professor and I am frequently met with disapproval as I have no results yet concrete research to present. Besides my main project I am supposed to improve some previous published work, this is solely Machine learning based but is again very challenging as I started from scratch in terms of coding knowledge etc. And again all by myself.
So for the last year I have been trying to not break down completely, working on the Machine Learning related project and thus improved my coding skills. But also lost all my motivation, ambitions and self-discipline along the way.
Regarding the project I am "leading", I keep being pushed to doing mainly machine learning research, which makes sense as my professor can only assist me with that. But I have by now 0 interest in the pure field of Machine Learning, am immensely frustrated and feel foolish as any idea of mine is dismissed as too simplistic. This makes me lose my motivation even more.
Not once in my life have a been so disengaged, apathetic and undisciplined as a student and I really really don't like it. Our professor only really cares about advising, once we are actually about to publish a paper. My other lab-mates all interned for one year before entering, but are in general incredibly smart and capable; publishing papers at top-tier conferences as a masters student is the norm here - not the exception.
My original approach has been to accept my situation, fake my way through and just write out a master thesis in the end and then escape. But  looking back now, I definitely didn't learn as much as I could have, partly due to the lack of guidance but also my lack of motivation. And I absolutely dislike my attitude and seeing how much I changed from being a good, passionate student to what I am now.
So my new plan is, just doing the research I am interested in: Machine learning applied to neuroscience. Read papers, papers, papers, take online classes and brush up on knowledge I am lacking. Since I care about this field, I might actually be able to make myself work again.
This also means though, if I ever do end up wanting to write a paper, I will  not be able to get any guidance, same applies for my master thesis. In the end this is similar to the first approach, only with me trying harder.
The other alternative is to just drop out. Recharge my batteries, and reapply to a program that matches my interests better. However I am scared of restarting and then realising I am still not able to actually work and study properly. Or the knowledge gap might be even bigger. Also in that case I will lose my generous scholarship, so funding will become an issue and I will live a financially more unstable life.
If I continue the way I have so far, I will still probably end up graduating , but it really feels like I will have wasted 2 years of my life and I am more than certain that I won't continue to work in this field, seeing how I am unable to motivate myself.

Please provide some feedback once you make a definite decision. It may help others.

My decision:
So after reading the advise, considering my mental and physical health I decided to do the following. I first talked to my superiors, explained my situation in detail, how I feel about everything, and inquired whether there will be any difference if I take this to our professor. Basically the conclusion was that the situation cannot really be changed simply because everyone is swamped in tasks, my project cannot be reassigned nor taken away.
So honestly, if things don't work out for the project than the responsibility lies within my professor and I will just do what I can do considering my current situation and condition.
I will finish my degree somehow and take a break from academia, there is always a chance to return later on. Quitting and changing to another institution isn't really much of an option because of financing. And actually, I am already at a world class institution. So basically I just decided to give in, but put my health first and well being first. I will not push through this at any cost, but I will try my best with a calm mindset and less pressure since others and I agree that the reason that I am in this mess is not really my mistake.

I totally suggest you step back and drop
out. I am not sure whether this seems natural to others but what you describe looks completely out of line. A masters student is supposed to merely take first steps under direct scrutiny of a competent professor, as well as take specialized classes. From my understanding you’re thrown into managing funds, designing complex research strategies to generate high-profile papers with zero experience and background. In such a scenario I wonder what exactly are the local professors doing with their time. This is a recipe for disaster, compromising public funds, the institution, and your sanity. A very dangerous situation, in my view.
I suggest you leave as soon as possible before you break down, and search for minimally competent guidance elsewhere.
Mind such low brand of people may try to sabotage your chances elsewhere, so stay as far as possible from them after you leave. I suggest you seek a world-class institution for you masters training. Because it is training and guidance you need at this stage, not being wasted bare.
Good luck


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Applying to PhD programmes in multiple universities
I want to apply for a PhD. I applied to 2 universities before and got rejected. Is it OK to send my PhD proposal to multiple universities at the same time in the hope that I get approval from one of them?

I applied to ~40 positions to get a PhD :/

Back when I was applying, there were no personal computers.  So I had to type each cover letter individually.

Yes it is OK and normal to apply to multiple schools.
But you should tailor your PhD proposal for each application so that you explain why you would like to study in the specific environment offered by that school (e.g. particular academics you would like to work for, courses you'd like to take etc.).

Yes.
In the United States, it is expected that applicants are applying to many schools at the same time.
I applied to around 10 simultaneously, for example.

It should be pointed out that in the US, the synchronization of applications results from most graduate schools operating on a similar annual admissions schedule.


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Should I be worried of being accused of cheating?
So I just took a very simple, all-multiple choice test. I will straight up say I did not cheat, put bags phone etc across the room from where I sat, and the test was very easy. I marked all questions that I’m not sure of with an asterisk, and then when I went over the test papers, I wrote down the questions in the palm of my hand so I could check for answers immediately after handing in the test and getting out of the room. This is something I suddenly wanted to do so I know what I did wrong immediately and get a slightly clearer idea of how I did. I probably should’ve just asked the TA for an extra scrap of paper to make it transparent but I didn’t think of it at the time. I handed in the test and waved him goodbye. I’m not sure if he saw that stuff was written in my palm when I waved at him, but he just said like have a good one. Now that I think about it, this is far from cheating but probably an ambiguous move that might stir up misunderstandings. Just in case I took a picture of my palm with the contents to show that the contents are not like cheat reminders, just a list of the questions I didn’t feel confident about in the test so I could check them later, but still I’m worried that misunderstandings will crop up later and I will be swept into confrontations. Should I be concerned about my academia integrity standing?
Also it’s not an exam, not sure why the testing tag shows up like that. It’s a normal quiz.

I don't understand why you think you will be accused if you haven't been already. Showing the questions to others might be a violation, of course.

Oh...I didn’t think about that...geez, my understanding of cheating is limited to using inhibited methods to score unfairly on a test...never thought that taking down test questions might be considered a breach as well. Short answer is I don’t know. I didn’t think it would be because we’ll students can just memorize the questions and replicate them again outside right? But I don’t know if I’ll get into trouble for that. Sitting in Canada Ontario btw.

Thank you. I didn’t show them to others at all — I would never do something like that or ask someone to do something like that. I just checked them after I got out and washed them off. Reason I’m asking is it somehow doesn’t feel right after I did it so just wanted to ask, if you were the TA/Proctor for example how would you see this behavior.

Also it’s not an exam, just a normal quiz, I don’t understand why the tag shows up as exam.

Tags have synonyms. If you use a synonym, the main tag name is what appears.

Slightly misleading I would think in my case.

I'm going to just guess here that there won't be any problem. If there were, you'd likely have been challenged when you left the room. I'll also guess that no one even noticed.
You seem to have a decent sense of what is allowed. If you are challenged, just tell it like it happened and your thinking about what you did at the time. No one but your instructors can judge, but I think the issue is past you. Probably fine to just relax.
But note, also, that none of my statements are definitive. Too hard to make firm statements from a distance.

Thanks, the statements pretty much do echo what I feel about the situation, no one noticed etc., but I wanted to check with an objective third party as well. And thanks for the tips on further steps, I’ll be sure to keep that in check.

@RosaryLightningX you should go ahead and accept this answer so Buffy gets the points.

@DaveKanter, actually, while I like a few points, it is good to let questions sit a bit to give others a chance to give even better answers. Oops. too late. But note to the OP, it is possible to change the accepted answer later if you see something you like better.

@Buffy I hear you.  Just wanted to make sure that didn't go undone as Rosary is a new poster...

Thank you both for your insightful advice :) it gives me a lot more confidence about what to do next. Both answers sufficiently helped me with this problem and more.

Also, in addition to other reasonable answers, a key point is not only to "not cheat", but to avoid any appearance of cheating, as much as anything because this distracts other students, but, yes, also because an appearance of cheating is what gets people into trouble. That is, don't cheat, and avoid small actions that may give the appearance of cheating.

Yes that’s exactly what I’m worried about, thank you for pointing that out. Normally I would probably pick something more smart to do like ask for a scrap paper to do rough work and ask if I can keep the paper after the test is done, but today I don’t know if I was just tired or what...and now I feel so punished fretting over something that I didn’t need to if I was upfront about it. Definitely not repeating this next quiz.

If you're really worried about it than ask the TA.  Simple as that.  That said, if you were in trouble for this I have to believe you would have been contacted by now, so you probably don't have much to worry about.  In the future it's probably best if you're not sure to simply ask what's allowed.  That removes any suspicion from you right off the bat.

Thank you, yeah normally that’s what I would’ve done but I guess lack of sleep and bunch of midterms disrupts common sense occasionally. Probably too late to ask the TA now but thats what I’ll do for sure next time another quiz comes.


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Blockage management for projects
I am currently a Computer Science undergraduate in my final year. I think this question applies to more than just Computer Science students, so I'll make it as general as possible.
Throughout my student years, I have always found it very difficult to establish when to admit I am blocked in the implementation of a given task/assignment.
My question is: when is the correct moment to admit I'm on the wrong track and ask for help? I do not want to bother my colleagues (or even worse, teachers) with very general questions such as "How do I do that", nor do I want to take a path and find myself in the situation where I cannot even express the question because of how tangled the road to that point was.
I wonder if the time after which I have to ask for help is quantifiable, something like "If it lasts longer than 3 hours, ask for help". If there is no general rule for establishing this time, what are the factors that must be taken into consideration?

Over the course of learning (i.e. your life) you learn strategies for problem solving. When you encounter a new problem you go through your known strategies to find a solution. If one occurs to you, fine. If it doesn't, perhaps a reasonable modification of one of your strategies will work. But if that doesn't get you home then you need help. So ask.
But you will do better if you do two things. Don't ask for the answer, but, instead, for insight into how to find the answer. And then, incorporate what you learn into an expanded set of strategies.
In programming, many of the strategies are well known. Testing, edge cases, etc. In other fields there may also be well known strategies. Quite a lot of education is to expose students to these various ways of looking at problems.
But in general, it is better to ask than to thrash. And there is no reason why it shouldn't be the teacher he or she may actually be the best person to give you the minimal hint that lets you get yourself over the block. Other people are more likely to just give you an answer that will advance your thinking power much less.


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How to cite when I want to use a direct quote in the same sentence as an in-text citation with no parenthesis in APA?
For example, I want to describe a paper with a direct quote from it. Would this be OK:
Pieters and Wedel (2007) “revealed goal  control of attention even during a few seconds of self-paced ad exposure with an eye-tracking experiment” (Pieters & Wedel, 2007, p 224)
I use APA 6th edition as the guideline.

That is incorrect according to the APA Style Blog. The correct way would be

Pieters and Wedel (2007) “revealed goal control of attention even during a few seconds of self-paced ad exposure with an eye-tracking experiment” (p. 224)

NB: there is a period after the p.


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Applying for a different PhD, should I say I am already in one?
I am considering on applying for a different PhD position in a different university and even different country, but I don't know if I should mention I am already in one, and I'm planning to leave it, or just address that as a research assistant position, what should I do?

When applying for a job, be honest. Just assume that people will find out eventually, because most of the time they will. Say you got accepted, and your new advisor happens to talk to your old advisor on a conference. Now (s)he has the impression that you were dishonest. That is bad.


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Is this an academic discourtesy?
I co-wrote an original short paper with a senior colleague on the history of science. It was submitted some months ago, and was reviewed and rebutted several times before it was finally accepted and is now in print. Its topic is somewhat controversial. During the review process we had to battle to be allowed to 'air' our opinion about one particular issue.
To our surprise, a few weeks ago the same editor (with whom we had engaged at length during the review process) then published a short article in the same journal, one quarter of which ALSO mentioned the original topic we had drawn attention to and had indeed battled over.   No mention at all of our original published work was made - even though we had published only a few weeks before, and we had had to negotiate in detail in terms of what we said about specific topics.  Is this an academic discourtesy? It feels somewhat dishonourable - especially since our work put forward an original, highly-relevant viewpoint and is very recent.

Ethically speaking, the editor only "really" became able to consider incorporating your article after it was published.  Yes, she knew about the article during the review process, but it would be unethical of her to take advantage of this early access.  So if you view it as "an article published a few weeks after ours didn't mention us", it seems unsurprising, since that isn't much time to add mention of new work.  It's even possible that the editor had already submitted their article before yours was published, in which case there is no way they could mention yours at all.

Thank you for this clarification.  What I certainly know is, the editor's article was definitely NOT submitted before ours was as this is documented in the publications themselves - the information about submission is made public, in print, so I know exactly who submitted what,  when.   We were surprised by the fact that we had been told in the review process that the anonymous human subject we wrote about would not wish to be made the focus of our article …. and yet the editor him/herself (who told us this) then promptly produced an article on just that same topic!

Welcome to the world of the kind, altruistic editor and sometimes reviewers... Learn from this and good luck.

Disregarding the fact that the editor has seen your work, this is a case of another researcher not citing relating work. Maybe take a look at https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/49208/recently-published-paper-does-not-cite-my-very-relevant-work/49211

If I understand your question and comments correctly, the sequence of events is this:

The editor handles your paper at time X.
The editor submits their own paper, with a submission timestamp after X.
The editor does not cite you.

If this is the case, then the editor should certainly have been aware of your paper at the time that they submitted their own, and thus been able to cite you.
Failing to cite you thus seems likely to be a case of scientific dishonesty.  There are, however, certain circumstances where failure to cite might be acceptable, such as:

Other papers similar to yours are already cited (e.g., "phenomenon X has been noted a number of times, including [cite, cite, cite]")
You are somehow misinterpreting the date stamps

From what you've written, however, it seems unlikely that one of these cases applies, and more likely that you're dealing with a case of dishonesty.


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Joining a professor's research group that is full
I am starting my graduate studies in CS this fall. I had 1 particular professor in mind whom I wanted to work with. Before joining, I had a few emails exchanged where prof. asked to setup an appointment once I join to discuss projects.
Last week after joining, prof. told me that advising won't be possible in the fall since his group is already full. My research interests align very strongly with his, so I really want to work with him.
What I am not sure of is whether the group is actually full or he is not interested in working with me anymore. Any advice on how should I approach him again to inquire politely about possible openings in the future will be really helpful.  I am also taking his course to gain more knowledge and expertise as well as to demonstrate my interest. Would this be a good segue to discuss advising opportunity in the future?

Ask him who's doing similar work and might be able to use you? Or try again  at the end of the fall term to see if anything has opened up for spring.

Probably, he is sincerely full up, and conscientiously wants to avoid overloading himself beyond what he thinks he can do a good job with.  //  Taking his course sounds like a positive step.  Also, take a look at his papers to see whom he collaborates with -- perhaps you'll have some luck and find there's someone local.  //  Finally, take a good look at what sorts of general exams you need to pass -- perhaps you won't actually be ready to dive into a research project right at the beginning anyway.

Yes, it is a good way to get to work under him. By taking the course, Prof. will get to know you. However, you should do well above average in his course to increase the chances of joining his research group. I'd suggest that around mid-point of semester you mention that you still want to join his group on Spring. There is no point on hurrying things up yet, specially because he already said that his group is full.


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Do authors have to be politically correct in article-writing?
My colleagues and I have recently submitted an article in a biology-oriented journal about a new technological system. While describing the interaction between the different modules of the system, we used the terms "master" and "slave", as it describes the communication protocol in a very comprehensive manner.
One reviewer raised an issue that these terms were not suitable for publication in an academic journal, without proposing an alternative wording.
We understand that writing a text aimed at being read by a broad community of people imposes a high degree of decency, and that's of course what we always tried to do. Given the context it is extremely clear that these terms are used to describe an interaction between to electronical devices, and are in no way a reference to slavery. We are Europeans, and have never heard of any controversy on this. Also, the "master/slave" terms have been and are still widely used in engineering lingo.
So we have two questions regarding this situation:

Is there an alternative wording that we could use, still expressing clearly the same idea?
More generally, do authors have to write politically-correct articles, even though this not a very well-defined notion and can significantly vary from one region of the world to another?

We don't really want to enter into a long discussion with the reviewer on this particular point, so the latter question is more something of general interest about what one should have in mind when writing an article.
Edit
Thanks for the numerous answers and comments, this is really helpful. Since I can choose only one answer as the good one, it's the one that proposes a useful  alternative. We believe that the most problematic word in this case is "slave" and not "master", so we'll propose the terms "master/worker" as a replacement for our article.
In addition, a thought I had in the meantime is that using these terms as adjectives instead of nouns may help a little bit. A "slave device" may be a slightly softened wording than simply a "slave" (though not resolving the issue). More importantly, I feel that "master device" and "worker device" are expressing the general relationship between the modules in a clearer way than simply "master" and "worker".
For the more general question about PC, it seems to be still an open question. As suggested in one answer, this certainly desserves some changes in our writing practices now and then.

Also, the "master/slave" terms have been and are still widely used in engineering lingo. - seems like you answered your own question. If it's widely used in the literature, then this reviewer seems to be an outlier.

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I'm voting to close this question because it turned into a collection of "master/slave" substitutes (easily found on google, with validity largely dependent on personal preference) and arguments pro/contra political correctness in terminology (again, a matter of opinion, with plenty of examples on the net, e.g. see django flame war)

@DmitryGrigoryev I don't believe that is a good reason to close a question. The answers should be deleted instead.

What about "male" and "female" electrical connectors then?

And I've always found it odd that it's acceptable to speak of "dumb terminals" (and other devices).

Do authors have to be politically correct in article-writing?

No, they can choose to use loaded words that might detract from the point of their article.
Alternatives used in computer science are master/worker (in one of the most influential CS papers of this century) and supervisor/worker.

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The second paper says, "The Supervisor-Worker pattern inherits many of the Master-Slave pattern’s benefits.", such that they're explicitly defining these terms to not be equivalent.  The first paper's a bit off, too, but it's more subtle; they probably should've used "controller" or "dispatcher" rather than "master".  Master/slave is more about a control logic, while controller/worker is more about division of labor.  The two are closely related, but not interchangeable.

It's not an issue just for these specific examples, but rather a more general issue.  We use terms like "master/slave" because they precisely fit the situation; it's a reference to a power dynamic, where the master has complete control over the slave.  When we switch terminology, it's because we mean something different; for example, a "worker" isn't a more polite term for a "slave", but rather it's a role that implies performing duties rather than being controlled.  For example, we have "worker threads", but not "slave threads".

Ellen: Is it just me or does @Nat's quote from your own link explicitly invalidate your answer? It seems to me that they are very clearly saying the phrases are not alternative words for the same thing.

@Nat is completely right, that second paper is not replacing 'master' and 'slave' in terminology, it is introducing new terminology for a different concept. It is proposing a new kind of architecture called the Supervisor-Worker pattern which is distinct from the Master-Slave pattern. The second paper specifically states...

"Based on the Master-Slave pattern and the separation of concerns, one part will just collect information and the other part will control it. So you need a different design from the Master-Slave pattern. To ensure that all the information is processed in the right way and actions are done at the right time acentral knowledge-base and a central management unit are needed. This central knowledge-base and the central management unit will be protected from malicious hosts. The Supervisor-Worker pattern, which is built on top ofthe Master-Slave pattern, provides this infrastructure"

@Mehrdad Thank you. I hadn't read enough to see that. You are right: That paper distinguishes between the two; there are other papers that do not (such as the first one I cite).

In the absence of a compelling reason to not use politically correct language, authors should make reasonable attempts to minimize offending readers. Given the information you provided, there does not seem to be any reason not to use master/slave. The words, and even the context, do not seem inherently offensive and have an established usage in many fields. I suggest including in your response letter a statement that you do not see the established use of master/slave to describe communication systems as being offensive, but if the editor requires a change, you will be happy to comply (assuming you are).

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This particular journal, and this particular reviewer for this journal, have every right to establish their own standards for language.
It's common for standards around language to change, by region, and over the course of time, for a variety of reasons.

Therefore, yes, you should expect to occasionally need to change your word choice based on a publisher's preferences. It doesn't sound like anyone is calling you a bad person, or penalizing you for this word choice. They are simply asking you to change it.
Adding a personal note on this particular terminology: I'm well aware that it's common in technical environments. But, given that my own recent ancestors were held in a condition of slavery in the not too distant past, I've always personally found it a jarring and unwelcome reminder of a painful period of history whenever I've encountered it. I can't speak for anyone else, but I have to admit I count it only as progress if it is finally being phased out.

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No.
If the paper is a technical paper and the techical terminology is clearly defined and widely accepted (as the terms 'master' and 'slave' are) then they should not be substituted for 'politically correct' terminology.
For those who are familiar with the existing terminology, having new terminology introduced would take additional effort to be continually mentally subtituting said words for the 'correct' terminology.
Similarly if you are writing a paper about 'brainfuck', you should not censor the word 'brainfuck' simply because a reader might complain about the paper containing the word 'fuck' many times over.

+3. Each plus for every single paragraph you wrote. It takes useless aditional effort to connect terminologies and at some point the connestion will be lost. The nice example is: How many people do connect 3D-print and rapid prototyping?

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Is there an alternative wording that we could use, still expressing clearly the same idea?

Leader/follower. I also like Ellen's suggestion of supervisor/worker; that is aligned with some modern tools (e.g., Tensorflow and Python's multiprocess module).

Mode generally, do authors have to write politically-correct articles, even though this not a very well-defined notion and can significantly vary from one region of the world to another?

You need to meet the standards of the journal you are applying to.

In US-based journals (and possibly elsewhere?), you may run into this specific concern again: people have been arguing over master/slave for over 15 years. Thus, I think you are right to avoid wading into this argument with the editor.
Fortunately, within computer science, I can't think of many similar examples -- the only one that comes to mind is perhaps gendered language (i.e., if you have examples involving people, there may be complaints if all your people are male, or if the competent ones are male and the incompetent ones are female). There is also the example of the NIPS conference being renamed NeurIPS for politically-correct reasons.

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As you may have noticed from the other answers, the particular question of whether the 'master/slave' terminology is appropriate has quite some history. Unlike the other answers, I will not tell you whether you should use this controversial terminology, but instead point out some aspects that should help you in forming a decision on your own in this and similar cases.

Do authors have to write politically-correct articles, even though this not a very well-defined notion and can significantly vary from one region of the world to another?

A pitfall here is to make the decision primarily based on some ideological principle related to political correctness. If you agree with the reviewer, then there is no problem. But if you do not, you risk enlarging your problem to ideological warfare with a reviewer. Be professional, leave your ideological baggage behind and focus on the actual work in question.
I think an argument that you could make is something similar to "This terminology has an important place in the paper, as it enhances the clarity and links our work to existing literature, and the fact that some people might consider the terminology inappropriate is of secondary concern." Do double-check if you buy your own argument yourselves, if not, then perhaps you should listen to the reviewer after all.
You could reply to the reviewer with this argument in full form, or you might even try to reach a compromise, if that is an acceptable result to you. For example, you could suggest replacing the term in most parts of the paper, but include the controversial term in the introduction only, such that readers are more easily able to consult the standard literature for the term.
In the end, it is probably in your best interest to bend, rather than break. I do not think you should just accept the reviewers' judgement without question, but if the reviewer insists even after hearing your viewpoint, it is probably better to let go and just do what the reviewer wants.

OP is unlucky to have written a paper with such terms now. The terms were socially perfectly acceptable until not long ago, when the discussions about reframing problematic language started.
Now, while not generally a friend of overbearing language control, I have always felt that the master/slave terms were quite on the boundary of what's appropriate, long before #politicalcorrectness became an issue; these terms always made me slightly cringe, despite them being understood as perfectly technical terms, and me not being US-based.
Possible replacements might be: server/client (probably the wrong way round, though); command/execution; controller/execution.

What does being US-based have to do with it? I don't know of a single culture that hasn't had issues with slavery in its past.

I think some would say the slave in this context is particularly loaded in the US because slavery here was severe, widespread and still very recent (the effects of slavery are still very much felt).  It's not a 'historical curiosity' for much of the US population but something that shaped their family history and personal experience of the world.  Maybe this is true in some other countries as well, but I can only speak from a US perspective.   Personally I favor the terms master/node or leader/worker. Both are generally well understood and unambiguous in a software context.

@AzorAhai It was mentioned somewhere in the threads that US would be particularly sensitive. I wanted to emphasise that no US background (Europe) was needed for noticing that the issue is sensitive.

So they are no longer acceptable, but says who? Who has the authority to say what is "no longer acceptable"? What is the burden? What if I file a complaint that the word "paper" deeply offends me, and they should no longer use it?

What's wrong with enslaving a computer? Or more so, a secondary device? All human connotations are simply irrelevant here.

@zsv The publishers have the authority to say what is no longer acceptable. Some people understand that there is a complex social system that tries to work out what's reasonably offensive, but that's complex and not absolute or uniform, so if you must, live with the fact that he who controls the printing press controls what's printed on it.

@Zeus You can't enslave a computer in normal usage; by most definitions, a slave is a person. If the human connotations were irrelevant, we could also call them a/b or box/cat; but when you use master/slave terminology, it's because of what those words mean, and you can't get just part of what those words mean.

I'm not sure that the 'essence' of the word is that it is a (kind of) person, as opposed to the relationship to the environment (i.e. the state of 100% subservience). But either way, the "problematic" part is that "slavery is bad", and my argument is that for computers (or other inanimate objects) slavery is not bad and, in fact, normal and sometimes desired. We do take part of the meanings all the time when using words in different contexts.

This post does not answer the question.  It is rather a commentary, and a personal opinion at that, on the history of the "issue" of (political) correctness (of course, there is no such thing as a time before this became an issue — society has always had norms and taboos, which are a function of time and place; many words we find normal today may have been unpublishable in the Victorian era)

@gerrit Actually, the answer proposes a few answers different from those given by others. Since it is encouraged to explain one's answer, I chose to offer a background why 'slave' might be considered a problem. I thought it might be useful to come from somebody who is sensitive, but not fanatic about the choice of words. We are in a period which renegotiates what is acceptable language/behaviour/attitude and what is not. This cuts freedom of expression in favour of being less offensive to vulnerable people. In lockstep, the offence threshold has gone down. That's why we face renegotiation.

@vsz Who has the authority to say what is "no longer acceptable"? — Nobody; this isn't a question of authority. The referee indicated that they find "slave" unacceptable, for reasons that have some merit, even if you don't agree with them. The referee is (by definition) a representative of the paper's target audience. So It's reasonable to infer that a significant fraction of the paper's target audience will find "slave" unacceptable. — What if I file a complaint that the word "paper" deeply offends me, and they should no longer use it? — Most likely, people will dismiss you as a troll.

It depends on the publication that you're writing for.
In American academia, I think the answer is "Absolutely yes you must bend over backwards to be politically correct."
I'm not an academic but I once was approached by a publisher to write a textbook on building web sites. The project ultimately failed, and one factor was that the reviewers were obsessed with political correctness and found offense in things that it never even occurred to me where questionable. For example, at one point I was trying to describe how to show tables on a web page, and so for an example I grabbed a page of government statistics. The statistics broke the sample out by "white", "African-American", "Native American", "White Hispanic", "Non-white Hispanic", maybe a couple of others. Two separate reviewers independently said that the reference to "non-white Hispanic" was "inappropriate humor". I didn't see the joke. It's a category the government regularly uses when breaking out ethnicity. But apparently someone found the label offensive and I had to use a different example.
I don't know if it's more or less extreme in Europe.
But as for all writing, you have to accommodate your audience if you want to be published and read.
In this case, someone mentioned "supervisor/worker". I think that's a good alternative. Or "primary/secondary" if that's not misleading in context. If all else fails, you can always say "type 1" and "type 2" and then explain what you mean, which is cumbersome but I'd think should be completely safe.

In the 21st century, the belief in the concept of "races" and the obsession with categorizing people according to "race" is a very American thing. I don't think there's any European government that produces statistics about racial membership, and I have the impression that European publishers would find the idea to use such tables as web design examples weird and somewhat distasteful.

@Uwe So you agree with my point: People obsess over what you and I consider trivial matters, like skin color, and either notice it too much, i.e. racism, or make a show of noticing that other people notice it at all, i.e. political correctness.

I do not agree with the idea that government statistics concerning racial memberships are a nice subject for web design examples in a textbook.

@uwe I guess that illustrates the point. I have trouble understanding what is objectionable or offensive about saying, for example, "2% of the population of the United States have Norwegian ancestry." It's a simple statement of fact. If you went on to say that even that is too many because Norwegians are smelly and stupid, that would be a different thing. But to simply state a statistical fact? But apparently you find it offensive and inappropriate to say. I'd call that political correctness.

"I''m not an academic but ....."
Not sure what your qualification to answer on the topic is then? This is largely a workplace issue, and I just don't understand what insight someone who hasn't worked in that field could bring to the table,

@Shayne Umm, because, as I stated in my answer, I am a writer and I was asked by a publisher to write a college textbook and I ran into exactly the sort of issues being asked about here.

This is not at all standard across academia. Either across countries, institutions, fields or journals. Usually because no-one feels comfortable challenging a request for political correctness, the strictest standards 'win'. It seems to me that keeping your head below that pulpit is a good idea. There are sometimes trade-offs: master/slave vs supervisor/worker seem to be doing the rounds, so lets use that as an example.
To my mind:

master/slave implies both perform the task, but one additionally orchestrates and takes precedence over the others.
supervisor/worker implies that only the workers perform the task and the supervisor orchestrates.

Both are valid models but being force to pick one over the other has consequences including readability. However these are tiny. I'd say the biggest risk in a similar vein: you are implying 'supervisors' (a huge fraction of your target audience) are not 'workers'. You are not wrong about the potential impact on readability, but I would caution that if you are relying on your reader inferring this from your wording you have bigger problems than which. In practice they only form labels, and either will work perfectly for that role.
However, falling foul of a reviewer by refusing to adhere to their language preferences will give them cause, and justification other won't question, to prevent you from publishing.
This seems like an easy choice to me; it doesn't matter how readable it is if it won't get read.


text:
Where to publish very long experiments with updates?
In most cases, an article is not supposed to be updated after publication, especially with the addition of new data.
However, for very long-lasting experiments (say, more than three years) it may be interesting to publish an article presenting the experimental setup with the data available at the moment, with the ability to add new data later on with an update of the figures (e.g. with addition of new data points), without changing the methodology of acquisition or data analysis.
To give a few examples, the pitch drop experiment was started in 1927 and is still running. In Sociology, observations can span over decades while being analyzed with the same methodology. In Biology, a setup monitoring the behavior during development from birth up to adulthood would have each single run spanning months or years. In all these cases the setup/methodology may be worth publishing well before the planned end of the experiments for some good reasons, like telling the community that this particular experiment is actually running (and provide an expected date for the availability of the results) or simply to have a recognition of the work (developing the setup/methodology) for students or young researchers with a paper for their track record.
So, is there a journal that have a format to publish this kind of work in this way? Or are the authors doomed to make several, distinct publications? In the latter case, could the long-lasting nature of the experiment be a reasonable argument for editors and reviewers to accept the first article as a methodological article including only the preliminary data that are available at the moment?

Particle physicists publish papers about instrumentation that has not been used yet all the time.

@AnonymousPhysicist Actually I had smaller-scale teams and setups in mind, but this is an interesting example of a community that publishes the setups without the data. However, from my limited knowledge of this community I believe they publish the results in subsequent publication, not by updating the initial one.

Also publishing in a sort of sequential episodes is possible. On the title of the experiment 1; on the title of the experiment 2; and so on. But each one must be self-containing and in a way closed.

@Alchimista Thanks for this comment. Would you have a reference in mind?

@Ratbert lot of papers are structured like that. You can look at the free papers on imaging the M87 Black hole. Or, on much littler scale, in organic chemistry you might have "On the reactivity and functionalisation of cyclosomethingsinine #". The M87 papers were published all togheter. But things like the second example can appears at months or year intervals.

If your idea and setup are worth a paper, it is just matter of finding the right journal. Note that in principle there could be a set up worth of a pater in Nature. We don't know what you have in mind and its importance.