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Why transcripts instead of degree certificates?
I've been offered a few adjunct teaching positions recently, and the colleges have said that degree certificates don't count in verifying my credentials and that only academic transcripts are acceptable.
Given that I finished my degrees 20+ years ago, what is the reason for this?
I eventually managed to get my transcripts, but no one has ever asked for them before, my degree certificates were perfectly acceptable (including tenure-track positions in Australia).

Perhaps I'm reading inbetween the lines, but I think the OP's secondary question is 'how do I resolve the fact I don't have access to my transcripts if it's required?'.

@SSight3: You can explain the circumstances and ask the hiring institution to waive the requirement, or offer to provide something else instead.  This is usually possible, but may require the approval of some high-ranking administrator.  But you'd only want to do it if the required documents are truly unobtainable - if it's possible but merely inconvenient to get them, you're expected to get them.

@SSight3 For me, that wasn't a real problem. Both universities had the option of me paying extra to have my transcripts scanned and available electronically, which is what I did.

Most applicants for positions at US universities will have been educated in the US, so US hiring practices are based around the sorts of records that US universities provide.  And US universities don't really have such a thing as "degree certificates".   The paper diploma from a US university is considered purely ceremonial and not used for any official purpose; it often doesn't even have complete information about the degree (major, honors, etc).  For most US universities, the only official academic record they produce is the transcript.  Hence, that is what a US university expects when hiring.
Note that in some cases, a hiring decision may be based on more specific details about your education than the simple fact that you have a degree.  There may be formal requirements, coming from university regulations or accrediting agencies, that you have a certain amount of coursework in certain areas, and the transcript is the only way to verify that.

In comparison with degrees in many other countries, bachelor's degrees in the US are so flexible (with various concentrations, elective credits and so on) that it's very hard to evaluate a candidate simply on the basis of the degree.

Cool! Thanks for the information. Any comment on the long time since I did those courses?

@PeterK.: The time span is simply irrelevant.  If educational details are going to be a factor, then the hiring university is going to require verification in the form of transcripts from everyone they hire, regardless of time since degree or anything else.

Thanks again! I’ll leave it for a day or so to give the check mark, to see if someone else has a better explanation but this seems pretty good to me.

The UK also doesn't typically require transcripts, and a UK degree certificate is also unlikely to contain any significant information beyond "John Smith was awarded a BA in History from the University of Wherever on [date]".

@DavidRicherby I think Brian Borchers' point explains that discrepancy nicely: degrees in the UK are much more often "single honours", with a reasonably fixed syllabus, so "BA (Hons) in History from the University of Wherever" tells someone a lot more than the equivalent would in the US system.

@IMSoP Single honours, sure, but courses are often very flexible. Having quoted the example of history, that could typically be almost any area of history: John Smith might have studied almost entirely the colonization of the Americas, while Jane Smith studied mostly international relations in the post-war Europe. A "Mathematics" degree could be pure maths, or essentially theoretical physics, or statistics. So I'm not sure I really buy this argument. And something that's just become relevant to me: you can't find out online what the syllabus of my late-1990s computer science degree was.

And you can't find out what parts of that syllabus I actually paid attention to, because my third-year transcript just says "Paper 7", "Paper 8", "Paper 9", "Dissertation", and each of those three papers contained a mix of questions from multiple different courses.

@DavidRicherby, my UK degree certificates don't even list the subject. (Actually, it sounds like you might have studied the same course as me at the same university a couple of years ahead of me).

@DavidRicherby Yes. PhDs in Australia, when I did it, did not require coursework. So my transcript reads: "enrolled in a PhD, enrolled in a PhD, enrolled in a PhD, ...., awarded a PhD" which the certificate would have shown anyway.

At the heart, the approach chosen by universities is because a piece of paper, however elaborate, can be forged. It is much more difficult to forge the transmission from one university's degree verification office to another university.  So in some sense, the request is simply to make forgeries harder.
It's not part of your question, but worth telling stories around it. The kind of requirement you are encountering makes it much more difficult for people from other countries to satisfy the formal requirements. I have colleagues who were professors for 20 years and, when accepting a position somewhere else, where asked to provide a way for the new university to verify their PhD -- which they had obtained in the 1980s in Eastern European countries that no longer exist, at universities that no longer exist and whose archives were affected by years of civil war. I don't recall how that was eventually resolved, but it seems unlikely that the new employer ever got what they were asking for.

That is not just a "historical" problem. I know a refugee from the Bosnian war (classified as an army deserter by one side of the conflict, and an enemy combatant by the other side - not a good situation to be in if you want to live long!) who wanted to continue his academic career as a postdoc in the UK. The official records of his PhD were somewhere in the rubble of what used to be Sarajevo university before it was destroyed by bombing. A leading UK university allowed him to take a subset of their next round of MSC examinations, as proof of his academic ability.

Funny you should mention that.  My wife wanted to teach in the elementary / middle / high school system here in the US.  Even her transcripts were not enough: she had to get all her degrees (BSc, MSc, PhD) certified by a US authorizing agency before she could apply.  I haven't had to do that for college-level teaching.

But this depends on how the transcript is provided. It sounds as though two US institutions would send it directly - but if I request a transcript from my UK university, it will be sent to me. It will be sent sealed in an envelope that I am supposed to leave closed, but if I were capable of producing a convincing forgery of a degree certificate, I don't imagine a sealed envelope would be too much challenge.

@flyto: Universities abroad can send their documents directly to whatever entity wants to verify them in the US. At least that's what worked for me -- I just had to sign a waiver that my employer then used.

@WolfgangBangerth Yes. Mine also had the option of sending electronic copies of transactions directly to the US colleges, which worked for them. They received emails directly from my alma mater; I just had to provide the US college contact’s email address.

Accreditation to teach specific classes.
For example, the college I work at is covered by SACS.  With just an AS degree and a metric ton of experience, I can teach IT courses that don't count towards a BA/BS degree at a "real" University.  Linux administration, Advanced Java (but not intro to programming w/ java), MySQL, etc.  They qualify for vocational certs and AS degrees though.
In order to be able to teach specific courses - IE, "CGS1000" titled as "Intro to college computing" which DOES go towards AAs and 4 year+ universities, I have to either have a masters or terminal degree in a specific named field, or have X number of hourse (18 IIRC) of post-grad course work in a specific list of courses.  It is that last bit that requires a transcript, and it requires someone to evaluate the transcript, compare substitution codes by FICE codes (to see that your schools ABC123 mapped to what SACS calls ABC101), etc.
A good example of this is someone I work with who has a BS in software engineering and a masters in project management but he can't teach the CGS1000 course because he didn't have any educational technology related courses at the masters level.
Edit - explanation of terms
SACS - Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.  Accreditation body for SE USA.
AS - Associates of Science degree. 2 year terminal degree (nursing, X-Ray tech, Resp. therapy, etc).  Minimal gen-ed stuff, doesn't go to a University to become part of a higher degree
AA - Associate of Arts.  First half of a BA or BS degree, gened type stuff.
FICE -  Federal Interagency Committee on Education - defines a nationwide list of code numbers to reference schools and/or courses for cross-institution communication of academic info like transcripts, etc.

Thanks! An interesting variant.  I don't think that applies in my case - except that they prefer adjuncts with masters degrees, which could have been verified with the degree certificate.

What are SACS, AS, AAs, FICE, ...? Please remember that not everybody works in the same environment as you, and acronyms that are totally familiar to you are alphabet soup to people from different places.

@DavidRicherby - Would've though these would be more common with a US focused question, edit added for what they are.

@ivanivan Thanks. I agree the question is US-focused but answers should still be understandable to people outside that context who might be curious.


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How much will connections with the department chair help with grad school acceptance?
As an undergraduate (not studying computer science) I was fortunate enough to work in the lab of the CS department chair at my university for an extended period of time. This work resulted in me being added as a coauthor to one of her most recent papers. She also knows me well - I took an intro CS course with her, and during my time in the lab we would be in contact practically every day. I definitely plan on asking her for a recommendation letter when I apply for graduate school in computer science next year.
Although I know that going to the same university for undergraduate and graduate school is sometimes discouraged, I would quite honestly be very happy to return there, as I very much enjoyed working under her, she is well-known in her field, and some of her research interests are very close to mine. In any event, it would be nice to have a "safety net" of sorts while exploring other options.
I know that every university has different policies about admissions decisions, so no one can speak to my particular case. But in general, how much would you say that having the backing of the department chair helps in graduate school admissions?

You're right, it's sometimes discouraged to get a graduate degree from your alma mater, but it's not as highly discouraged as getting a Ph.D. from the same place you got your master's degree. It really depends a lot on the culture of the department. When faculty are going over your letters of recommendation, test scores, and statement of intent, they're trying to mainly assess:

How likely you are to succeed in the program
How closely your interests align with faculty (i.e Can they help you? Can you help them?)

People can seem amazing on paper and turn out to be a disaster as a graduate student, and vice versa, and faculty will tell you they're taking somewhat of a gamble each year when they admit new students based on application materials alone.
If you've got someone on faculty who can vouch for your intellectual abilities and your fit factor in the department (and you clearly do), then I would say you're very likely to be in a favorable position over other applicants in that department. My department accepted a master's student who had just graduated with their bachelor's from the same department two years in a row.
As far as other programs go, it's extremely beneficial that you have co-authored a published article and would have a letter of rec from a department head. Not a guarantee, of course, but a massive help in any case.

not as highly discouraged as getting a Ph.D. from the same place you got your master's degree. — [citation needed] My experience as a faculty member is exactly the opposite.

Agreed with JeffE. We use our Master's program to test out students who might need a bit more polish before we accept them in to the PhD program.

With respect to getting accepted into your current institution, it matters a lot.  If she recommends you, you're definitely in.  With respect to other institutions, it depends on whom she knows.  Recommendations can get you very far, to the point that strong recommendations from well known faculty pretty much trump all other aspects of one's application.

What's probably more helpful from knowing the chair of the department is that she probably knows other professors from other institutions whom she has met at conferences, workshops, etc. Talk to her about your options and use her as an advisor, rather than a boss in this situation. She should know that it's not usually a good thing to stay at the same place for your grad work and she might be able to say, "Yes. I know such and such professor at this university who would align with your interests. Let me talk to him/her and see if they're interested in hiring a grad student." That sort of recommendation, where you are applying for a specific position and it's no longer a cold call is far more useful than just applying blindly with good recommendations.

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Reference request: Student-selected grading schemes?
I am interested in student learning. However, because I work in a university system, I generally need to assign a grade (A through F) to the students' work. So I need to assess student learning.
I generally use a variety of assessment techniques : quizzes, projects, exams, class participation, etc.
At the beginning of each course, I publish in the syllabus how the grades for each of these assessment techniques will be combined to form the final grade for the course.
Because students respond to each of these different assessment techniques differently, I'm wondering how fair I am being when making a blanket application of them to the student body.
What I'm wondering is: do there exist studies on allowing students to determine the weighting on their assessment, or even the form of their assessment, and whether this affects the students' learning outcomes?
I have found this paper, but it seems mostly to ask whether a pass-fail grading scheme is better than an A-F scheme.

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How to demonstrate potential for securing external funding in faculty applications?
Many faculty positions ask applicants to demonstrate potential for securing external funding. For a fresh PhD who has only co-written some grant proposals, how can we demonstrate this potential? I really appreciate any thought.

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What is the average tenure-track duration in the USA?
I am a postdoc and will be up in the tenure-track job market in the near future. Just want to know what the average duration one has to work on tenure-track. Is this duration negotiable or there is a strict rule for this duration?
Thanks!
--Dave

Probably highly field-dependent.  Also, I'd be interested not only in the average, but also in the spread.

I always thought that it was a standard of 6 years. Maybe actual professors here will beg to differ with me.

This is a good question! I also wanted to know about this. What if I have been working as a Research Assistant Professor in some university? It is a non tenure track assistant prof position for the last two years. Can I still try to negotiate the tenure track duration when I have an offer? Of course, it depends on that university to go further in the negotiation, but is it at least feasible in some cases?

Keep in mind that when people say "6 years" they usually mean "5 years, and then you apply during your sixth year". So you really only have 5 years to accomplish things for your tenure application, because anything that isn't done early in your 6th year will be too late to be included.

There's quite a spread: where I am it's seven years (sometimes extended to eight when someone has a kid), but I've heard of other places where it's as short as four. Six is probably the median. It's not unheard of for people to go up for tenure early if they think they're likely to get it and their department chair (or other relevant people) agree.

What do you mean by people go up for tenure early. Is it on the person to decide whether s/he wants to go for tenure?

@John, yes, tenure-track people can "demand" early consideration. This has potential to seem "uppity", so is not good to do unless one has had a bit of a "coup" in terms of research results, or has an outside offer. Otherwise, it is considered "dignified/modest" to wait until "the usual time"... nevermind that we're all sort-of told that we all have to make singular contributions, which in another world would warrant early tenure consideration. A genuine risk in asking for early tenure is that if it's denied the letter writers may be annoyed at having to repeat a year or two later.

My university has two formal processes for going up early: one is "outstanding achievement", a.k.a "I'm awesome !", and the other is "prior service" which means that if you've worked elsewhere (industry/academia) you can (at hiring time) try to negotiate an early tenure clock which is then called "prior service".

Thanks! So one can indeed negotiate the tenure track duration at the time of job offer!

I'm speaking from anecdotal evidence, not personal experience, but: I think it would be unusual to try to do that if you're coming from a postdoc. People I know who have negotiated for a shorter tenure-track duration are those who already had spent time in a tenure-track job and then moved to another.

@MattReece: I know of at least a few places that regularly give some "prior service" time for postdocs in math, though most places don't.

@NoahSnyder: Me too.  I think math is a bit unusual in that postdocs do independent research and also teach, so their experience is more like that of a regular faculty member.

Indeed, math postdocs are also often "technically" assistant professorships and not postdocs.

@John: one can only negotiate an early tenure application at some universities. At others, it is not flexible.  You also have to try to judge the culture of the institution somewhat. If you would be a rare exception by applying for tenure early - which is likely true at many non-prestigious schools - that should make you pause before you ask for it.

AFAIK it's usually six years, but people can get extensions due to major personal events like the birth of a child.  There's usually a limit on the total number of such extensions someone can get.

I've heard of a (very top) school/department that is fine with promoting everybody to Associate Professors, but the real tenure decision comes about three years after that, and you really have to be an international star to be granted tenure. So in effect, the tenure track is about 9 years.
On the other hand, I was thrown out of the tenure track after three years after my 3rd year review. When you negotiate your contract, make sure that it states the full term, rather than "annually renewable".

The probationary period/tenure-track is commonly six years, with review taking place throughout the 6th year. (Materials are typically submitted by the probationary faculty at or before the start of the 6th year and a decision announced at the end of the 6th year.) Part of the reason for this timing is the following:
"Under the 1940 'Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,' this [probationary] period [tenure track] may not exceed seven years."
See http://www.aaup.org/file/RIR%202014.pdf
The probationary period, as pointed out above, might be effectively extended due to prior tenure-track service at another institution, but this is negotiated at the time of hire, so the faculty member has some say in it.
It is also frequently extended due to child birth and personal or family medical issues because such accommodations are required BY FEDERAL LAW (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_of_1993).
University employers have an incentive to extend the probationary period because probationary faculty are paid less, can be more easily fired, and (therefore) can be more easily controlled.

The "standard" at Tier-1 Research universities in the United States is 6 years. This is, in principle, negotiable if you have prior experience that is comparable to what an assistant professor does. However, I always think it's inadvisable to do so. First, if you satisfy the criteria for promotion and tenure at a point earlier than your sixth year, then you can ask to go through the tenure proceedings. Departments that recognize that you're right with your request will accommodate this. In other words, you don't lose very much by not negotiating an earlier tenure date.
Second, if you previously negotiated that you should go up for tenure after, say, your 3rd year, but you've run into trouble getting funding or getting results published, then you may not get tenure and have to leave. In other words, you lose a lot by negotiating an earlier tenure date.

At many institutions, including mine, there is no flexibility whatsoever to apply for tenure early. The year that a tenure track faculty member will apply is in their original job offer letter. There is some chance of delaying it due to family leave, but no chance of applying before the year stated at hiring time.  The argument that you only disadvantage yourself by applying early is very true, though: if you try to apply early, you are implicitly saying that your application is not even close to borderline, and so it may be judged more stringently.

@OswaldVeblen -- but I am sure there are ways to apply for tenure when you have an offer from somewhere else, or if you department believes that you may get an offer from somewhere else. Every other procedure would simply make no sense at all.

The standard response at my institution when this is attempted is for the administration to wish the faculty member good luck at the other institution. It isn't worth their trouble, for the vanishingly small number of faculty from my university who get a better offer somewhere else during their tenure track period. The situation would be different at an elite school where faculty are more likely to be lured away. But most universities are not elite, and at last half of all tenurable faculty members are below average for a tenurable faculty member :)


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Why is dental school a separate thing from medical school?
I have always found it peculiar that terminal degrees in medicine (in the US, at least) are awarded in two forms. On the one hand, we have the MD (and the DO), a holder of which can go on to practice all sorts of medicine, ranging from pathology to radiology to oncology to family medicine and so on. On the other hand, we have the DMD and the DDS, holders of which can go on to practice oral medicine, and, as I understand it, little else.
Why is this so? What is it about oral medicine that has it being taught in different institutions than all the other branches of medicine?
(I don't know how this stuff works outside the US; answers contrasting the US system with other countries' systems of medical education could be very informative.)

Historical accident.  No rational reason exits for separating these strongly from each other, or from veterinary school or research biology for that matter.  It just happened to happen that way, like so much else in the world.

Well, the teeth do operate somewhat independently of the rest of the body, so there's some logic in saying that specialists in the teeth might not need the same broad medical training required of MDs.  And curricula could diverge from there.  There's also the fact that historically, dentistry (and surgery) were considered entirely separate fields from medicine.

Podiatry is also separate, I think.

the dentists professional society regulates entry into the dentistry profession for the protection of the public and the maintenance of member income.
the doctors professional society does the same.
neither one is interested in admitting the others students to their respective profession.


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Can departments sanction students who do not take sufficient precautions to protect their work?
One of my colleagues was teaching an introductory programming course this past spring. He discovered several students cheating by taking code from a public GitHub repository, which contained all the answers for this class. This repository already had an issue opened on it by a professor from another large school, who requested that it be taken down because his students were using it to cheat. No response.
Fortunately, the student left some identifying information in the comments, which we were able to use to determine that he attends our school, in our department. We attempted to contact him to request that he remove the offending code--unfortunately, emails to both his departmental email and his GitHub email went unanswered.
The department has a student code of conduct which states that students must take "all reasonable precautions" to prevent others from using their work. While this student is clearly in violation of that, we can't exactly fail him out of a course he passed over a year ago, and failing him out of course he's currently taking seems petty.
We've considered escalating this to the department, but we're not sure if the department can actually do anything about this. Can a department in the US punish a student for helping other students cheat even if the student is not taking the class where the cheating is occurring? If so, what should be done? If not, might there be anyone at the school that can do anything? This is a large, public state school.

Related, but doesn't deal with what to do if the offense has already occurred:https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/34134/how-to-deal-with-student-putting-their-homework-on-github?noredirect=1&lq=1

Does your school have a Code of Honour?

@CaptainEmacs Nominally yes, but it's fairly vague: basically just says you will do your part to uphold fairness/justice/honor.

Related: the last part of my answer here.

@ff524 Augh, I felt like I'd seen something related, but I couldn't quite figure out where. I certainly see the merit in that point of view, though I'm not convinced about the relative merits for (sometimes somewhat canned) problems for intro courses.

My opinion on this is always the same: instead of spending time chasing students who don't comply to more and more complicated code of conducts, avoid reusing the same assignments every year, and be the first to give the solutions.

I don't see why this is a misconduct and why it's the student's fault. Was the solution created by the lecturer   when the student in question uploaded it? Was the material protected by anf form such as a notice, not for further distribution? Can point exactly why you think the code is offending?

Does your code of conduct specify penalties? If the most severe penalty it specifies for this is failing the class, then there's not much you can do. But really, in the age of the internet, professors should always assume that solutions to past years' assignments are available. For a programming class, maybe the professor should post past years' assignments, and then it will be easy for them to check whether anybody copied from them.

@PeterShor Since posting this question, I learned that it is possible at this school (and has been done in the past) to retroactively fail a student out of a course for helping others to cheat in it...but this seems like a punishment that should be reserved only for the most flagrant cases.

Can a department in the US punish a student for helping other students cheat even if the student is not taking the class where the cheating is occurring?

I don't know what you can do legally, but morally I think it would be wrong to try to prevent the student from making his/her coursework from past years' courses public. Making the work public could help the student market themselves to prospective employers, and has multiple other benefits for both the student (ego boost, impressing friends, fulfilling an altruistic desire to provide a useful internet resource they worked hard to create, gaining valuable experience using github, and more) and the internet (people from all over the world could download and use the code). Who are you and your colleagues to say that your selfish needs of not having such code available for download online because it facilitates cheating by your colleague's students are more important than the needs of the student and others who can genuinely benefit from the student's work? I think your premise that the student is doing something wrong is simply incorrect.

If so, what should be done? If not, might there be anyone at the school that can do anything?

Yes, something could be done; you and your colleague could free yourselves of the harmful mindset of trying to control what your students are doing with coursework they worked hard to create after they finish taking your classes. As Massimo Ortolano suggests in the comments, stop taking the easy way out of giving the same assignments year after year and then blaming others for how easy it is for your students to cheat, and instead put in the work to give original assignments.

+1, absolutely. Also, github seems to goad people into making their repositories public: If you start a private repository while you're on a university plan and then lose your university plan, you are faced with the choice of paying for your own plan, deleting your repository, or seeing it become public. This is actually a great way of nudging people towards open source (while also perhaps being a source of income for github); the slight collateral damage to teachers who don't bother coming up with new assignments is worth it in my opinion.

I suppose you're right. It'll probably take me a few years to completely shake my current mindset though--I'm a (relatively) fresh grad student who came out of a chemistry undergrad, and there's a completely different attitude towards this kind of stuff there. Thanks (and thanks to @ff524) for the different views.

I strongly disagree with the first part of this answer. The moral compass is not foremost to point to promotion of the student's efforts. It is to point to engendering full respect for the Student Code of Conduct. By example, the student can make a portfolio of his/her code and show it to prospective employers privately. Your premise that students have a preeminent right to promote themselves and to boost their ego in a way that entirely ignores an established, respectable code of conduct is misplaced.

@JeffreyJWeimer you are entitled to your opinion, but I find your position needlessly authoritative and inconsiderate of student’s needs to build their careers and market themselves publicly in today’s competitive world. It also stands in stark contrast to the much more enlightened view expressed for example by ff524 in this answer. As for the student code of conduct, “respect” for it should be earned by said code of conduct making only reasonable, ethically justifiable requirements of students.

The idea that adhering to a Code of Conduct that requests all reasonable precaution against others using one's work violates, restricts, or unduly limits the ability of students to build their careers by marketing themselves is a false dichotomy. Enlightened "views" are just opinions standing in stark contrast; they offer nothing else (except perhaps grounds to build a false premise). The big picture is that work done under a set of guidelines is to respect those guidelines, not ignore them just because another opinion (i.e. a supposedly "more enlightened view") implies the right to do so.

I've accepted this answer since it contains probably the best counterpoint to the original supposition. However, I would like to note that, since asking the question, I've come to appreciate that, depending on the exact course/material/teaching style, it might sometimes not be possible to avoid giving the same (or similar) assignments at some point. I think in that case, Buffy's answer gives the best possible solution.

@chipbuster: Here's a possible solution: give everyone last year's code, but make the assignments harder, so it's not that easy to take last year's code and make it work on this year's assignment.

@JeffreyJWeimer as I said, I respect that your opinion about this issue differs from mine. I make no claim to have any sort of monopoly on the truth here.

Actually, yes, a department can sanction a student for posting his or her work online. But a better question is should they, and under what circumstances.
For situations such as this, I think the intent of the student is essential to know. But it is difficult to learn the intent. It is possible, of course, to speak with the student about intent, but if it was improper intent you aren't likely to learn much.
As other posters have said here there are a lot of valid reasons for students to post their own work online, so, in general, it is probably a mistake to forbid it, though it is possible to make online posting a general issue in the institution's or the professor's published rules.
However, the best solution is to use assignments for which online searching don't help enough to make the effort worthwhile, as others here have also said.
One possible, even recommended, solution is to allow the student to use any sources that they can find, but to cite the sources precisely, whether it is wikipedia or anything else. This can have several beneficial outcomes, including having students learn about proper citation.

Wish I could accept two at once. I think the citation solution is probably the best solution in the case that creating original assignments every semester is infeasible.

@chipbuster Exactly. Teach students about the Code of Conduct, the Copyright Policy at your university (you must have one right?), the Fair Use Guidelines to the Copyright Law, and Patent rights. Teach them so that, when they move forward next year, they appreciate why they will not post their code on GitHub for the classes that follow.

If don't see the problem - the students who reused the code were caught for their plagiarism: If you lift code directly from a public repo, you are likely to get caught be a plagiarism scan.
If the students are just using public repos to get a grip on the shape of the solution then they are just doing what thousands of professional programmers do every day. This is why StackExchange was invented. We actively encourage our students from googling stuff, adapting others code is how most programmers learn to code.

First ... Can some form of punishment be carried out? With the statement as phrased in the Student Code of Conduct, perhaps a case might be built. The case would ask whether the action by the student is truly in violation of the guideline/requirement to take all reasonable precautions to prevent others from using his work. At its core, the question is whether the action was done out of ignorance or with intent. As this is a civil case not a criminal one, only the latter has grounds to move the case forward at all. Along with the question of can some form of punishment be carried out, the companion question is what is suitable punishment. Since you have not asked, I will not venture.
Second ... Should such an action be initiated? That is a question to ask of your Provost and your Legal Affairs Office. At a minimum, they should be made aware of the issue and offer you advice on their stand.
Third ... Will this happen again? You bet!
Finally, even when assignments are changed to try to get around this problem, resources exist that will tempt students to just "copy and paste" an answer. I therefore also suggest explaining to the class the reasoning behind the Code and bigger policies such as Copyright and Patents. The intent is to teach students so that they do not fear that they cannot look outside for resources or must otherwise hide their actions behind a mantle of secrecy. It is to teach them the right way to do what they want to do anyway.

Okay, I'll admit I was a little irritated when I wrote this question, but expulsion seems way overboard. I think your last paragraph is quite good though, and something that we don't cover enough.

@chipbuster You did not ask what penalty. You only asked CAN a penalty be applied. Where you thinking perhaps of slapping the student's wrist? In any case, I will remove the statement about expulsion.

A fair point. When I wrote the question I suppose I was hoping there would be some intermediate solution between failing the student retroactively and slapping their wrist, but I guess no such thing exists.

@chipbuster: at our school, what we often do for cases like this is put a statement of what happened in their file, so if they ever do anything like this again, people will know it is a second offense, and they will get a more severe punishment. (And of course, talk with the student, explain why what they did was unethical, and tell them that the note is going in their file.) Unfortunately, this won't work unless there's some central authority who is keeping the files.

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


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Using Paper under review as a Scientific Report in PhD application
I have submitted a paper at a conference and it is currently under review. Can I use this paper as a 'scientific report' (asked to assess candidate's writing skills) for a Ph.D application ?

So long as this is for an internal evaluation process that doesn't involve any form of "publication," it's hard to see how this could be a problem. You retain rights as the author of a paper, especially if it hasn't been published.
If you have concerns over whether it is allowed, you can always ask the conference organizers if it's acceptable. On the other hand, if you are concerned whether the department you are submitting to will accept it, ask the department.

Submit it as a preprint in ArXiv and cite the corresponding document (I am assuming it has the minimum quality to be submited here). Producing preprints is a good practice (specially for countries with limited access to co$tly journals).
In my opinion: do not cite "submitted to TOP JOURNAL" papers. Only Tyche knows what is going to happen with that submission (e.g. maybe the referee is your arch enemy).

I believe this is more of a "writing portfolio"-type submission to establish the candidate's abilities, not a demonstration of publishing record.


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Preprint citations + Paper citations =?
Given that in many areas the peer-review process is quite lengthy (even a couple of years), it often happens that, by the time the journal version of a paper appears, the preprint version (e.g. arxiv) has accumulated a couple of citations.
My question is: do citations of the preprint count as citations of the journal version?

Count for what? There is no legal or formal status of citations, only people using (usually incomplete) data to make decision, in a variety of contexts. The most prominent database in mathematics, MathSciNet, does retroactively count citations to the preprint in at least some cases. I do not think that Web of Science does that, but I cannot tell for sure.

@BenoîtKloeckner I meant "count as" (as  you later answered yourself in your comment), this is, "citation of the preprint=citation of the journal version?"

Your comment to Peter Johnson's answers seems to answer my comment; you should probably have given this context in your original question. To write "count as" did not answer it: in some respect the preprint citation may "count as" the article citations, in some other they may not.

The only person who can answer this question is the person asking for the number of citations.  Yes, they count, and no, they don't, depending on who's asking.

Is there any reason why someone would deliberately not want to count citations made before formal publication?  Counting citations is a little silly in itself, and once you're doing something silly I can certainly imagine bureaucrats imposing even sillier rules about precisely how to do it, but I can't think of any good reason why a preprint citation shouldn't mean just as much as a paper citation.  Am I overlooking anything?

@AnonymousMathematician Very late response, I know, but I have one speculation. Some preprints get published almost as-is, some only after massive changes. In the latter case, the claim the preprint was cited for might even have been removed. It's certainly possible that some don't see that as a proper citation anymore, and since there's no easy/automated way to tell if the published version would still be cited they might want to go with the one-size-fits-all solution of not counting preprint citations at all.

The answer depends on what you mean by "count". If we consider whether they should be counted as citations: yes definitely. Afer all, the citations reflect how your science is read and then cited by others. It is then clear that these "count".
A problem occurs when using the citation counts provided by different services such as Researcher ID through Web of Science. Then it is not certain that the "in press" version is counted. I, for example have papers where in press citations exist. In Web of Science, I can actually see them but the connection is not automatically done so I would have to add them to the appropriate paper count manually. I know it is possible to write to Web Of Science and have references corrected or coupled. I, for example have another paper that occurs in four posts because people have written the wrong volume number, the wrong year of publication etc. Since I am senior and these extra citations are not critical to me I have not tried to get them corrected but they can of course be more important in an early career case.
Other services such as Google Scholar may work differently. I have opted for providing measures from services to which I can link and thereby have others verify my numbers. So in the end this becomes a technical problem, the citations certainly count.

Thanks. So, if you had to report to some instance the number of citations of a paper, would you split those for the preprint and those for the journal version or just report the journal version's?

I would add them but it is always possible to add, for example, "(x cited as in pres)" after the number if you want to. The point is as long as the total reflects reality (how many times your paper is cited) it is fine. It is not ok if the total cannot be verified. I have had references dissappear from ISI when they have done something to the database so these services are not perfect.


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Exam design: give maximum score per question or not?
When designing an exam, would you mention the maximum score per question or not? Is it common practice?
In my view this promotes cherry-picking. This could be seen as a way to  prioritize or to satisfice  (leaving questions open since "they are not worth it").
Is there any scientific proof/pedagogical insight this is a "must", "nice for students " or "making it easier for students"?
Any thoughts on this (from professors and students)?

Why would you give a question greater or fewer points than you value the answer?

I have never seen a test that didn't say how many points a question is worth. To be honest, I find the idea of hiding question values quite bizarre and borderline unethical.

@AzorAhai For what it's worth, I have never had an exam where the distribution of points was given (so the 180° opposite of your experience). I have to say that my last exam dates from 2000 (and it was an oral exam without any written preparation, which I believe these days is also considered a "no-fly-zone" :-) )

@GertVdE I think oral exams are much more common in Europe than the US, so I have little perspective on those.

@AzorAhai: I find your comment a bit too assertive. My experience is that from grade 1 to Ph.D., I never had an exam where the points-per-question were declared. I survived (and other thousands and thousands too) without trauma. And talking about "bizarre", I find the assumption that most teachers are unethical in their marking quite bizarre.

Examinations are time-limited, so time is a scarce resource that students need to economise.  Stipulating the marks allocated to exam questions has three main purposes:

Objectivity: The stipulated marks creates a more objective assessment, insofar as the weightings on the questions are fixed by the stipulated marks.  This prevents students from being unfairly penalised by subjective re-allocation of marks.
Time allocation: The stipulated marks allows students to economise their time by allocating it in a manner that gives appropriate levels of time relative to the marks available for the question.
Implicit expectation of detail: Ideally, marks should be allocated roughly commensurately with the time the question will take to complete if done properly.  This gives the students an understanding of the proportion of time that each question should take, and so it allows them to diagnose whether they are taking too long on a question.  This also means that the allocated marks gives the student an implicit hint as to how much detail they are expected to give in a question --- low mark questions usually do not require large amounts of detail.

In your question, you seem to be taking the view that it is bad for students to economise their limited time, and that this incentivises students to eschew answering entire questions.  So long as there is sufficient time available in the exam, this should not be the case.  (A useful rule-of-thumb I heard for exams was that the course lecturer should be able to complete the exam in 1/3 of the time limit for an undergraduate exam, or 1/2 of the time limit for a postgraduate exam.  This should be done under conditions where the course lecturer first "forgets" the answers to the exam, and has to figure them out in the time limit.)

If you don't reveal an unequal breakdown you open yourself to the (IMO) legitimate charge that a student spent a lot of time on a low value question and couldn't complete the exam properly. This will lead to resentment which does no one any good. Students often aren't at their best or most rational in exam situations. Panic can lower performance dramatically.

If you are issuing an exam where different questions expect answers in different level of detail, this should be made clear explicitly in the exam, not just communicated via how many points a question is worth.

We were explicitly taught in school (Europe/Germany) to apply time-allocation strategies during written exams and to check for each question difficulty to us compared to point value.

@Wrzlprmft also, the level of detail expected is not always inherent in the phrasing of the question. "Define epitransisoregional tetravolitional precardioepistomology" could be expecting anything from a one-liner "ETP is the process by which an organism achieves superhedronal trisummithood" to a ten-page exploration of five centuries of theoretical and empirical research that led to last year's breakthrough, which is contained in a six-chapter appendix.

"Define epitransisoregional tetravolitional precardioepistomology" could be expecting […] a ten-page exploration of five centuries of theoretical and empirical research that led to last year's breakthrough, which is contained in a six-chapter appendix. – Not by any common definition of definition.

@Buffy: Playing devil's advocate, on the other hand, I have students for whom the expectation/possibility of assessing problem point values and strategizing around that would be added cognitive load and stress and trigger a panic.

Regarding the last sentence of this answer, in my university it's common practice to have another teacher complete the exam, and they also use the 1/3 of the time rule for undergrads (not sure about postgrads). In the experiences I've had as a teacher I've been doing the same with good results, even with colleagues who are significantly more knowledgeable than me.

The whole concept of time limits is antiquated. University exams should be able testing that you learnt the material well, not testing that you can write down as much as possible in a huge blur of super fast writing (which also unfairly favours students with good English writing and handwriting skills). In the real world, quality is (usually) more important than speed and employees aren't expected to be able to summarise an entire module worth of knowledge in 2-3 hours. Ideally exams should run all day long and you leave when you feel you are done.

@JBentley: I actually tend to agree with you here.  The answer here is crafted on the assumption that it is dealing with an examination, rather than an assignment of the kind you are referring to.  I also think that time-limited assessment is over-rated.

If the maximum score per question is not disclosed, a dishonest professor can retroactively change the scoring scheme to advantage or disadvantage particular students.
As an (exaggerated) example, suppose that Professor Wormer really hates Blutarsky, one of the students in his class.  Wormer gives an exam with 10 questions but does not say how many points each question is worth.  When the exams are handed in, he sees that Blutarsky has correctly answered every question except #4, which he got completely wrong.  Wormer then decides that Question 4 will be worth 91 points, and the remaining questions will each be worth 1 point.    Wormer can claim that these were the point values he intended all along; Blutarsky may be certain this is a lie, but he has no way to prove it.  Blutarsky flunks the exam, fails the course, loses his draft deferment, and is sent overseas as army cannon fodder.
By announcing the maximum score per question on the exam, the students can be assured that this particular sort of malfeasance won't be possible.
(Of course there are plenty of other ways a malicious professor can abuse grading authority, but eliminating a few of them seems desirable in any case.)

This also protects the instructor from possibly false accusations of the type of unfairness actually practiced by the professor described in the answer.

This is funny but obviously complete nonsense. Hyperbole doesn't help your argument here because this is simply not a realistic scenario, exaggerated or not. There are other, much more tangible reasons to announce the points up front than fear of favouritism. The whole answer is a straw man.

I was going to +1 this except for the draft-deferment example which hasn't existed in generations.

For confused non-US readers, the characters in this answer reference characters in a film called Animal House that is somewhat iconic in the US and made little impact internationally.

@Konrad Rudolph: Hyperbole doesn't help your argument here because this is simply not a realistic scenario --- I agree this is not realistic, but it's probably a lot closer to what some paranoid students might actually think is possible, and what some litigious-type students might actually suggest in complaints about the teacher, than some inexperienced teachers might realize.

This is false in some cases: the marks are hidden from students. It was not claimed that the marks per question are hidden from the exam board or other personal prior to marking.

@Dilworth It was not claimed they weren't. At least where I am it is also not common to present exams to some exam board or other university staff (except TAs , but not mandatory) after designing it.

I've seen professors use a "100%/0%" extreme grading scheme on homework assignments and even on quizzes.  It provides two benefits: 1) Students are motivated to avoid skipping 5-10% of the subject matter.  2) Far less effort to grade.  I think using such a scheme on a high-value exam would be obnoxious, but using it on quizzes is not abnormal. And yes, students don't like it.

@Josef, indeed, that what I said: this answer is false in some cases. Not all. It is false for those departments where there are exam boards: Professor can't decide retroactively on the marks per question in these cases.

@KonradRudolph It's hyperbole, but it's not nonsense. It's an extreme example, but absolutely NOT nonsense. Saying it's nonsense that an instructor may deliberately manipulate grades is startlingly naive. It absolutely can and will happen. Just because the example was humorous doesn't mean it's an invalid point.

@barbecue Manipulation happens in other ways. The way outlined here simply does not occur. At all. That's not naive. By contrast, this answer and some of the comments are evidence free scare-mongering. You can't just posit ludicrous scenarios and then dismiss every criticism of them as naive. That's called a “moral panic”.

@KonradRudolph in my academic career it happened quite a few times that weighing of points for answers were changed retroactively, because for example some questions did have almost no right answer and the teacher probably thought this question was too hard for the class and changed it to a low number of points, or adjusted the grading curve by providing a 100% grade already at 90/100 points. This could in principle have been used to keep a favorite student from failing.

@Falco And did preemptively announcing the point distribution change that? As a former TA I can tell you with confidence that the answer is no: question points do get changed retroactively (with good reason!) even if they were labelled in the exam. Of course this only works as long as it doesn’t disadvantage anybody.

@KonradRudolph you have a point, labeling beforehand probably does not prevent a change in points.

@KonradRudolph way to make up imaginary things that I never said... I had two simple points. 1. Manipulation of grades absolutely can and does happen, and if you think it doesn't you're hopelessly naive. 2. Using a hyperbolic example to illustrate a point in no way affects the validity of the point. This is basic logic which I'm quite sure you are very familiar with. Now if you care to tell me why either of these is wrong, feel free. But don't make up some BS claim that I never said and then accuse me of causing a "moral panic."

There’s nothing wrong with cherry picking because (presumably) not all parts of the course have equal importance.  Indeed one could argue that assigning greater weight (and declaring this weight) to questions connected with “core concepts” will better recompense students who have mastered these important concepts rather than less important parts of the material, all the more so as exams are typically time-constrained.

It is true that telling how many points each question is worth would allow "gaming" the exam. Ok, but not telling, that is, keeping the grading system secret, is quite strange and dishonest, since you are not telling the target that the students should aim for.
Anyway, I think it's not a serious worry, if (as @Solar Mike sugggests) the lower-weight questions are commensurately easier.
In my own practice, both for undergrad and graduate courses, as well as Written Prelims, I just make all questions equally weighted (and the questions, perhaps grouping together smaller questions) are reasonably comparable in time-required-to-respond.
Although your concern is obviously legitimate, I think this issue is, yet-again, one of those where to really squelch "gaming the system" would be inappropriately punitive for those students who are earnest and acting in good faith.

I think questions should be weighted by importance of knowledge, not level of difficulty. (Within Reason)

I think the term gaming is far from appropriate here, even if put in quotes. Approaching something in a tactical manner is not “to exploit loopholes […] in a way which defeats or nullifies the spirit of the rules in effect […]”. Students inevitably approach exams in a tactical manner and exams need to avoid that individual students can gain advantage from this (e.g., by ignoring a part of the course that happened to be not relevant to the exam at all). This does not apply here. Every student benefits from the information the same way.

The "gaming" will not be possible if the points are a fair representation of the amount of work/difficulty of the questions. In other words, gaming can only happen with unfair point distribution, which in turn would be unfair even without any gaming attempts.

+1 for equally weighted questions. In my experience, exams are often made to be only just doable in the time, so by putting weights on there, you have to do the math to compare your guess at the solving time versus their relative point value... it just makes the exam that much more stressful. If each is equal, I just read over them and can easily spot which ones I know best and which ones I want to start with to get as far as possible before time is up.

@Evolor You may be interested in the Ebel scoring method, which is used extensively for multiple choice exams in medicine (at least in the UK). The idea is that questions are weighted by importance and difficulty, and the total of those weights gives the pass mark. Students can get any subset of questions correct, but the number of correct answers they need is calculated from both importance and difficulty.

As a general rule, I think it's good to maximize transparency in your procedures to the students.
This includes clear expectations for coursework, grading formula, etc. They should be able to compute and double-check their current grades at any time. Likewise, having points stated on exams is standard and expresses a truth that there's really no good reason to skip out on. It's an added signal that you're being fair, equitable, and transparent.
Moreover, it forces you to plan out in advance exactly how you will be grading it later on. In so doing, you might realize that one or more questions are problematic to grade to a certain scale and change them. (Or that the total for the exam could be changed to something more convenient.)
That said, I don't think that it's a mortal sin to not have it. If the instructor is for some reason very short on time in their first semester, making an exam at the last minute, then maybe they'll figure out the points later (again, the transparency is in regard to any currently well-defined procedure). On the other hand, an even better gold-standard would be to have a complete grading rubric and/or answer sheet worked out in advance.

In my view this promotes cherry-picking. This could be seen as a way to prioritize or to satisfice (leaving questions open since "they are not worth it").

You pose this as being a problem, but I don't see any problem. If you design the exam in a way that gathering 51% of the points is sufficient to pass, then there will be people that get 51% of the points and pass, be it by cherry picking or by not knowing nearly half of the material.
If you don't want people to pick the questions they like best, I guess that is because you want people to know the subject more broadly (and less in-depth) rather than knowing only a part of it (but very in-depth, to get full points on those questions). If that is indeed your true aim (rather than preventing cherry picking), then you can design your exam to reflect that. You could ask a larger number of questions to cover a broader section of the material, or make points easier to obtain (making the questions easier) and requiring they gather 90% of the points to pass.

More than that, there needs to be enough time for everyone except the absolute weakest candidates to complete the paper.  This is not always the case in exams.  It has been a number of years since I was at school and uni, but we were taught quite specifically to "triage" questions to help ourselves get as good a score as possible.  If we didn't know a question, or if we felt we would have to spend longer on it, we were encouraged to move on and come back to it later.

My thoughts: this is based on the norms in your department. Simply ask your colleagues what they do and what students in your department are used to. Then do it.
As for myself, I give the marks for each question because this is the policy in my department. I have never seen any student gaming the exam though. They all try to do everything.

During my academic trajectory, I always answered the easiest  questions and with more score firstly and never considered it "gaming". It is just a time investment.

Well, in my exams marks are distributed mostly evenly, so I would know this. In any case, I did not considered this gaming. I was replying to the OP

This is one of the cases where it's easy to set out a strong but simple ethical case. I can't imagine that a department would ever penalise an instructor for labelling question marks. If others in the department don't do this then you can be the one to start it, basically risk free.

The subject has nothing to do with ethics in my opinion. Providing marks for each question is not more or less ethical than anything.

The policy where I am is that the points for each question are shown.
This is fine, because (and only an example):

small questions can be worth 1 or 2 points,
short answer questions can be 2 or 5 points,
longer questions ie involved calculations, can be 5 or 10 points,
essay type questions can be 10 or 15 or 20 points

All of these can be adjusted or combined in many combinations to provide an exam with a variety of questions which still challenges the students.
Note 5 or more small questions can be grouped to make one larger question worth more, but then the question is are those “sequential”? Ie if you get the first part wrong then all the other parts are wrong or are they 5 disparate questions clumped together so the exam author can say “all questions carry the same points”...

You should give the marks for each question - it informs the student as to how much time to spend on a question.
See this related question. If the maximum mark had been anything other than 1 point, it should be clear to the student that something more than a yes/no answer is expected. If the maximum mark had been 10 points, it should be clear to the student that a full paragraph of explanation is needed.

If you are issuing an exam where different questions expect answers in different level of detail, this should be made clear explicitly in the exam, not just communicated via how many points a question is worth. In particular, the question should make clear whether a question expects just a yes or no as an answer or an explanation (unless one of them is the clear implicit default).

@Wrzlprmft I think the point that Allure is making here is that this "clear implicit default" of the level of detail can be communicated through the number of points a question is worth. I'm not necessarily saying that's good practice, though.

Agree with YiFan. Also the assigned marks go more than that, e.g. ten minutes from the end of the exam, it makes more sense to work on an unsolved problem worth 10 marks than an unsolved problem worth 1 mark.

@YiFan: By clear implicit default I mean something like this: Unless stated otherwise, students are expected to provide a rationale for their answer on basis of the content of the lecture, even if the answer is superficially just a yes/no question.

Aside from the fact that exam rules should be transparent in order to be fair to the students, I would outline that the ability to prioritize work in order to maximize the number of points is not just an irrelevant side skill. It requires accurate self-assessment with regards to the knowledge a student has on each particular topic. A student which knows their strengths and weaknesses will be able to better adapt to the work they have to do, and make better choices regarding their career or field of study.
I don't see why you think this skill is worthless and should not be rewarded (or even punished).

With phrases like you fear "gaming the system", I presume you worry a student may skip something that is essential, but maybe can't be worth a ton of points?
Required Fields
If may be possible to declare a question a "required field", just like many forms do.  So even if it's only worth 10 points, and the student has decided they'd be happy with a B or C, if you want to be SURE that a student can (for example) definitely demonstrate they know which example shows plagiarism vs correct citation, then I'd mark that question REQUIRED.
examples of various similar strategies over a whole semester...
I used to do a similar thing in my English classes.  The research paper itself was "only" worth 20% of the grade, but my syllabus and assignment sheets made it clear that a non-passing grade on the research paper would mean the class requirements were NOT met, and it was an automatic failure.  Basically it was a GATE, not merely a quantity.
Other profs in my department had similar "gated" systems.  In order to achieve a C, a baseline level of requirements must be met.  In order to achieve a B, those had to be met AND the next level of requirements.  An A required all of the things.  This was to prevent people who were "naturally good writers" from skipping over the process and class-interactions.
BlackBoard (our LMS) allowed assignments to be hidden unless the student had achieved other dependent requirements, and I think there were a few Econ professors who used that to good effect -- you had to score X on a comprehension test to open up the assignment details. You had to have submitted a draft before the link to submit the final would open up.
Rubrics!
If parts of your exams are mini-essays or paragraphs, make sure you have a clear rubric - a guided checklist of what you want.  This helps you focus on the content (were all terms used accurately? Did they give the key exception?) and not get distracted by good or bad style.
TL;DR
Back to your exam:  Discuss with others in your department about the norms and expectations, but feel free to explore alternate formats besides pure numerical, as long as they are fully disclosed.  Set students up to succeed, but make sure that you're also getting the proof you need as an instructor to indicate sufficient mastery.

Failing to provide the mark value of questions sabotages both your students and yourself.
Exams are provided to determine how well a student understands the course work, with questions weighted by the import of their subject matter. If the value of the questions is hidden, it...

prevents students from prioritizing questions on higher-priority matter; Time management is a valuable skill - "cherry-picking" the most important tasks in a time-constrained situation is essential for students to learn, and not to be discouraged.
adds randomness to (potentially critical) exam results; It is unreasonable to expect students to reliably guess your thought processes on question valuation, and will inevitably require some degree of guessing. This disproportionately harms students who are slower test-takers, as well as reduces their autonomy. Note that this can easily lead to resentment.
reduces the information you gain from the exam; Did Alice skip Important Question A because she didn't know how to solve it, or because Worthless Question B was easier, and she had no way of knowing which was more valuable? Does Bob intuitively understand what concepts are crucial, or was he just lucky?

There are very few, if any, situations in which the benefits of hiding question values outweigh the numerous costs.

Interesting answer. However it is biased and makes bold claims that are dubious about what is "reasonable", what are "the goals" of exams, etc.

@Luc force of habit from other SEs where standard practice is to highlight main answer, fixed.

@Dilworth I see no "bold claims" nor do I see anything "dubious."

TL;DR
In some cases, not mentioning all the grading details can be acceptable

Aside from all the very good answers already given, I'd like to provide another point of view. You did not mention where you teach (or I missed it) and many answers assume classical university.
From my experience in the French "classes préparatoires", the points for each question were not given explicitly; take a 4h math exam for example: we had like 3 big problems, each worth some given amount of points and consisting on many questions that built on one another. But in each problem, the questions were not stamped with individual amount of points, you were simply required to assume that "later questions are worth more points".
Of course, this is a particular case and I don't know if this apply to you; these exams were a preparation for the engineering school, which select students on a contest system. It was not expected of you to finish the exam, in a way clever cherry-picking was encouraged so that you can maximise your amount of points.


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Approach the professors about making the course more "relevant"
I'm currently studying Industrial Engineering in Spain, one of the broadest degrees here that includes the subjects of Calculus, Fluid Mechanics, Electronics, Materials and Programming in C, among others.
However, there's one subject, Introduction to Computers, that I think has an outdated course. While this is a personal opinion, I do some extracurricular projects based on robotics (electronics + programming) and I see that there's a huge difference between the subject and what is being used in the industry.
In this subject we are being taught really low level computer operations and iteration, learning how to reinvent a wheel that probably no one of us will ever need to reinvent in our career.
How should I approach the professors about making the course oriented to the current years? I know I will not benefit from it, but at least my fellow mates would. As most courses here, it was probably written 15/20 years ago and hasn't changed much in the time being. Besides that, another related question would be, is teaching outdated material the norm in most universities?
A small example of what I mean: We had a programming exam with the Outdated LibraryTM, in which I decided to write the function map() as found in arduino. This made my code much easier to program/debug and faster to write. Most of the other students don't know something like this is even possible and need to go over each individual operation manually to map the different conversions.

In Spain you don't have elected representatives in the didactic council/academic senate or any similar institution? Because in Italy the professor cannot completely decide the program of a course, it is decided by a council so talking to the professor wont change anything per se, you'd have to ask your representative to point this out during a council session.

@BenCrowell , I completely agree with that, the more we understand the better. However, with limited time and resources, I think that we should learn something oriented to the industry at the cost of not learning some great -but not used everyday- theory. Besides, we're being taught how to do, for example, bitwise operations in C while most of my classmates cannot even program in C.

@Bakuriu, that concept doesn't even make sense in here nowadays from the university structure... although it'd be great. Maybe there was at some point. Also there are some variants. My idea is talking with the professors and leaving the task of changing it to them if they see it fits.

There is always some tension between teaching considerations in computer science and other fast-moving technology fields, and modern practice.
Since the field itself moves so fast, it is not necessarily desirable for a computer science course to really be up-to-date. Even if you taught students up-to-the-minute programming libraries and paradigms in their freshman CS101 course, by the time they graduate, many of these libraries will be outdated anyways. Furthermore, developing new course materials (or updating existing materials) takes a considerable amount of time and effort.
Also, modern programming paradigms are often too complicated to introduce to complete beginners. A deliberate decision is often made to miss out on "up-to-date" in favor of "simple for newbies."
The usual goal, therefore, is to teach students fundamental ideas and concepts that are timeless. The context in which these ideas are taught will probably become outdated pretty quickly. It's understood that students won't use this specific context again, because it'll be obsolete by the time they graduate; the hope is that the ideas stick, so that the students can understand the new programming paradigms they will be expected to learn on their own in the workforce.
For example:

ASCII is dying, replaced mostly by its vastly more complicated superset, UTF-8. But UTF-8 would be crazy to teach in full, with all its byte-stuffing practices that mean different characters take different numbers of bytes, and all the combining characters and normalisation and so on. ASCII has the fundamental idea of characters-as-numbers, which is a useful (and timeless) principle, even if the exact encoding itself is getting more complicated.

Source: Teaching programming: Modern or Educational?
Having said that,

This seems "stupid" and is demotivating to students who are aware of current practices
In practice, teaching ideas and concepts is more difficult than teaching specific technologies and syntax. So often students miss out on learning the "timeless" ideas - which were really the whole point of the lesson.

In answer to What can you do about it?
You can certainly tell the professor, "I did XYZ as part of my project, and I think it would be interesting to share with the rest of the class." I often supplement my "fundamental" courses with "modern" concepts, and I love when these supplements come from the students themselves!
You can always ask the professor, "How is concept ABC used in practice, today?" I love getting this question from students - it gives me an opening to talk about fun stuff :)
But understand that teaching outdated material is the norm in many cases. There are good reasons for this; there are also good reasons not to do this. It's a difficult balance to strike.

See also: Why don't they teach these things in school?

This answer is absolutely great. While there are some points I had considered (like trying to teach timeless concepts), there are many other valuable ones, like pointing out this argument has been going on for years and that there's not a simple solution as I naively believed. Thank you so much.

I am wondering why the Q&A linked in the previous comment was closed as "Not Constructive". It seems that what makes sense in Academia  (e.g. this question and answer) is not constructive for SO users?

@scaaahu Every SE site gets to define its own scope. The scope of Stack Overflow excludes "soft questions" like that one, just like the scope of this site excludes shopping questions while they are perfectly on topic on [softwarerecs.se].


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Qualifications for textbook authorship
Are there any requirements for writing a textbook that is accepted by (reputable) colleges?
Today, I got the odd idea in my head that it would be fun to write a compilation of the techniques and theorems I had learned relating to discrete mathematics.  As I find it fun to let my imagination run wild with these sorts of ideas, this compilation transformed into a tutorial, and from there transformed into a textbook.  I quickly decided I wasn't anywhere near qualified to write a textbook.
Fun daydreams aside, that made me wonder: What are the qualifications typically found in textbook authors?  Is a Ph.D. in the field a "must," or do some people write textbooks who hold Masters degrees (yet not a Ph.D.)?

Well, for one thing, if you don't have an advanced degree, you probably don't teach at a university, and hence don't have the opportunity to teach the kind of course for which one might consider using your book. That would make it challenging to write a good and useful book. I think when considering a textbook, most people would want one that the author has taught from at least once!

What's a "textbook"?

Hmm. @JeffE: that's a bit hairy, but let's just say a textbook is any book that could be listed as "required" for a college-level course. (I'm thinking mainly in the STEM fields; writing classes probably would need a different definition)

Why do you need it listed as a required book? I would understand your question, if you ask from a publishing perspective (would any respectable publisher talk to you?). Many non-mathermaticans use math books (engineers, programmers, physicists, chemists etc) and those MUST be very different ones. If you write something useful, someone may use it. Why cannot you just write a tutorial, and when thousands of people call you at night that they want it in print, think about this question?

What are the qualifications typically found in textbook authors? Is a Ph.D. in the field a "must," or do some people write textbooks who hold Masters degrees (yet not a Ph.D.)?

There are no rules for this in terms of minimal qualification. Why would there be? Readers want good books. Publishers want to sell books. Who cares if the author has a PhD or not?
In fact, trying to get deeper, it's often difficult to define precisely even what is meant by a "textbook" in the intuitive sense you probably mean.
For example, would books in the O'Reilly Media series be considered textbooks? Would instructional e-books? Etc.
As such the answer depends widely on the publisher or the book series (if any) you wish to contribute to.
For book series, there is typically an editor in charge who will make a judgement call on whether or not you are qualified and whether or not you can contribute something good to the series.
If dealing directly with a traditional academic publisher (I'm thinking of the likes of Springer), you (and your book proposal) will again be evaluated by their editorial staff before they agree to a contract. Likewise, they will only publish the book pending review by a number of experts that you propose.
But again, it varies widely.
In summary: I think if you have enough genuine material for a textbook -- material that people want to read -- you could find a reasonable publisher even without a Masters/PhD.

And publishing a popular-level text, while it doesn't win you academic points,  is likely to pay better ...


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Why ask for GRE score on the form?
This might seems like a silly question, but I don't understand why grad schools ask for GRE score on the application form. In almost all instances, they also require official score to be sent to them before they even start reading application anyway. So is there a reason why they ask for self-reporting of those score?
Also, is there any harm in not putting the score into the application? As in let's say the GRE being taken too late, and the score is not known at the time of application.
(talking about both revised general and subject score)
Thank you.

It's to make the application form easier to review. That way, all the fields on the application form can be printed in one handy package, which could then be sent to a program chair for easy review.
No one in the admissions office wants to have to gather and collate transcripts, GRE reports, and other application information into one printout (or file) just to be able to send the package somewhere for review. Moreover, when reviewing, no one wants to shuffle through a bunch of papers just to find the information they are looking for. This way, GRE scores are always right there on the left-hand side, in Box 10.
In a word, it's for the sake of convenience. It's much easier on everyone at the university if you simply type your GRE scores into an application form where you are already typing so much other pertinent information.
As for why you have to submit the official results, too, that's simply to verify the scores you self-reported.

This answers has pretty much everything I wanted to say on the matter. Well=stated.

Ah this certainly make more sense. Thanks for the answer. I just wished they would only ask for the score report after they admit you though, since $25 per report is a pain.

In most cases, the GRE scores go the the university admissions department, not to the department in which you are enrolling for graduate study. The graduate adviser will read your application and determine whether or not to accept you (your GRE score is one of the metrics that he/she will use). If you are accepted by the department, then the University orders all the official paperwork for verification. If you have the scores, i would put them on the application.

Can you elaborate a bit more on this point? Because I know that they usually order official school transcript after they admit you. But in this case, they ask for official score report to be sent in before they even look at application form.

I can't speak to your exact circumstance, but in my experience it works as outlined above. In short, this is just a hoop they make you jump through; one of many in your grad-school career. If you don't have the scores yet, just note that and if you are close enough, go meet the department chair and speak to him/her. That will have a more powerful effect on your admissions than anything else.

You said "If you are accepted by the department, then the University orders all the official paperwork for verification" which seems to imply that the univ only ask for the official report after they decide to admit you. But it is not the case, as pretty much any school in top 30 would ask for it before they even look at your app. Which is why I don't understand your answer. Can you clarify on that part? Or by "this is just a hoop they make you jump through" are you saying they just make things difficult out of spite?


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How to deal with rote "publication shopping"?
I spend a lot of time peer-reviewing paper submissions to conferences, workshops, and journals in my field.  Sometimes I end up getting assigned a paper that I had already rejected from another venue.  Usually the authors of the resubmission have at least attempted to address the flaws pointed out in the past reviews. But sometimes the paper is submitted in much the same form. That is, the authors have failed to correct the major errors and gaps identified and agreed upon by the reviewers. They may not even have bothered to fix simple mistakes such as typos (even when the reviewers helpfully itemized these).  It seems that these authors have no understanding of or respect for the peer review process.  Rather, they are adopting a rapid-fire approach of submitting the same paper to different venues in sequence (or in parallel, for all I know) until they luck out on a suitably unqualified or neglectful reviewing panel that happens to clear it for publication.
What I normally do when I receive such a resubmission is to copy, paste, and resubmit my previous review.  After all, if the authors haven't bothered revising their paper, why should I spend any extra time re-evaluating it?  But I wonder if that's all I should be doing.  Does it make any sense to alert the journal editors/area chairs about these time-wasting shenanigans?  Do serial "publication shoppers" ever get blacklisted, or at least a stern talking-to?  Or is dealing with the same submissions over and over again just an inevitable and unmitigatable part of the whole peer review process?

@user2390246, there may or may not be similarity.  When I read the one you pointed to, my reaction was that it was probably illicitly submitted in parallel and one journal took longer to process it.. There certainly wasn't much time between the two.  So .. I think it's great to cross-reference, but I hope this won't be closed as an exact duplicate.

I don't know about any sort of formal blacklist, and it would be a bit hard to deal with because someone may be listed as a coauthor but have so little to do with it being resubmitted that they're truly blameless.
I've encountered serial submissions before, including cases where a draft is completely unchanged (with ample time between rejection & resubmission).  In some cases these are rejected by the program chair(s) without review and with stern words to the authors similar to what you said: they waste and disrespect the reviewers' efforts.
Bottom line: Consider a preemptive rejection with the program chair(s) rather than simply repeating your review.  But if that doesn't pull the paper, I would submit a review saying I have reviewed this before, and the paper is unchanged.  Because ignoring past reviews disrespects the efforts of the reviewers, I recommend rejection.

Resubmitting a paper without addressing even the most reasonable reviewer comments is rude. In this situation, I think it is entirely appropriate for you to inform the editor about what is going on so that the editor can reject it without wasting any more reviewer time.
Unfortunately, they are likely to keep sending their paper off until someone makes the mistake of accepting it. (I have experienced this.) However, I don't think much can be done about this. Ideally there would be a blacklist of papers (rather than authors) which would ensure that near identical submissions would be flagged as such.


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Should all recommendation letters be research- or teaching-related?
I am applying for junior faculty positions at research universities.  Most job postings request three references (either just names and contact details, or actual letters of recommendation), and I've already secured these from the three full professors who can best attest, in different aspects, to my research and teaching skills.  One of these professors was my thesis advisor, and the other two are faculty at other universities with whom I have worked closely.
A few job postings ask for five references.  Now, I could approach two further senior academics who could also vouch for my research and teaching abilities, though there's no one I have worked with nearly as closely or as recently as my three top references.  I have no doubt that they could supply positive references, and while their names alone might carry some weight, they wouldn't be able to write about me in as much detail.
On the other hand, I do have some notable collaborations with professors on work other than research and teaching—namely, on outreach and knowledge transfer activities.  That is, we have cooperated on projects aimed at disseminating scientific knowledge and research results (not necessarily our own) to the general public and/or industry.  Would getting a reference from one of these professors be of benefit for a faculty application?  Or would most selection committees be looking exclusively for research and teaching references?

At least in physics, many departments lament that they don't do enough in terms of outreach or industry collaboration, so I expect that at least one such letter could be very beneficial. In other fields the balance might be different.

I see relatively little value in having additional letters that all speak to the same topics. If you think that the existing letter writers already cover your research in positive enough light that your research credentials are unquestioned, then having additional letters cover other areas is certainly a plus as it shows you breadth as a professional.
It would probably help if the other letters could at least very briefly mention the topic of research so as to not look like you're scraping the bottom of the barrel in coming up with more letters. This could be done by these letters containing statements of a form like this:

I have known Dr. Psychonaut for several years and have in particular observed her greatly grow in her research since I first met her. I have also seen her give a number of marvelously executed talks on her research. That said, I know that several of my colleagues are already writing letters that address her research credentials in great detail; I will therefore rather focus on a separate area in which I have collaborated with Dr. Psychonaut -- namely, knowledge transfer -- and for which I know that my opinion is unique.

What I'm trying to say is that the letter should be written in a way to make clear that the letter writer could be talking about your research, but consciously chooses not to because they have this other thing they know and only they can talk about. This avoids the impression that there are only three people who can comment on your research and teaching, and that you needed to go out of your way to find a fourth and fifth letter writer.

Maybe it's my European attitude toward recommendations, but I'd consider a sentence like "marvelously executed talks" too much of an exaggeration.

I guess that depends on the actual execution :-) I didn't mean this to be the point of the sample text.

When enrolling for a Masters program while working full time, I asked my boss to write a recommendation letter. In that particular case it was not only welcome for evaluation (as your boss should now you better than most of your teachers in grad school) but also it implicitly states that I am authorized by my boss to enroll in that course (which precludes a concern for admittance processes where obviously the candidate will not be full time committed to the program).

While the main thrust should be on research and teaching (with emphasis determined by the nature of the position), it is certainly helpful most places if some of your recommenders say that you are a great collaborator, great to work with, not overly egotistical, etc. Also, someone dedicated to the general academic pursuit and helpful to students as well as colleagues is much appreciated.
People will be looking for, among other things, a colleague who will add something positive to the life of the department. A person who never leaves his/her office is less of an asset.
So if the research and teaching angle is well covered, yes, the more personal things are worth being commented on. However, this can be done by all of your recommenders in various degrees of emphasis, rather than some for one and some for the other.


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What national agency in Russia codifies research ethics?
I am coordinating the funding proposal for a joint Austrian–Russian research project.  The proposal needs to briefly discuss compliance with relevant ethics regulations and guidelines, preferably not just at the institutional level but also the national or international level.  For the Austrian side this is easy, as I already know that the relevant guidelines are the Austrian Agency for Research Integrity's Guidelines for Good Scientific Practice and the European Commission's Ethics for Researchers.  But what are the corresponding guidelines in Russia?
That is, are there any national agencies in Russia that issue ethics regulations and/or guidelines for scientific research in general?  If so, what specific publication of theirs should we be reading, accounting for, and mentioning in the proposal?
So far the only somewhat relevant agency I've found is the Independent Interdisciplinary Ethics Committee on Ethical Review for Clinical Studies.  However, this body seems to be concerned only with clinical research, and the project we're proposing doesn't involve clinical research.

Surely your Russian collaborators should know this?

Probably, but they're currently busy writing other parts of the proposal and I want to get this section out of the way now. In any event, having the answer posted publically here will no doubt help others who are in a similar situation (particularly in a pre-proposal phase).