text:
Why does editor reject when reviewers recommend acceptance?
I have recently received a response for a paper submission. The paper expanded on a conference presentation, and it was submitted to the journal special issue related to that conference.
All three reviewers recommended acceptance (one "definite accept", two with "minor changes") but the editors chose to reject the paper "in light of the reviews" without any additional reason.
Why might the editors have chosen to do this? Is it OK to ask them for an explanation of their reasoning, or even to ask them to reconsider?

The editors most likely don't like you for some reason not related to your paper.  If they didn't like your paper, they would have explained why.

I don't touch on the why question to much in my answer, as it is hard to be in someone's head :)  One possibility is a strong animosity with you (or your professor, or your department head, or …), but that doesn't seem very likely. Also, that is a poor way of behaving, even if one is to assume bad faith: why ask for reviewers if he is determined to reject it anyway?

The editors most likely don't like you for some reason not related to your paper. — Then they have a conflict of interest, and they should have assigned the paper to another editor.

Good journals tend to have an excess of things that they want to publish.

This so called editor needs to be educated about the difference about "in spite of" and "in light of".
You can accept a paper in light of good reviews, and reject in spite of good reviews!  "In light of" never means that something is considered which suggests one action, but then an opposite action is taken. It's basically a synonym for "due to" or "because of".

BTW you are talking about complete rejection, right? Because some journals have a standard revision phrasing that says something like "we cannot accept the paper in its current form, but we would be willing to consider a revised paper".

If the editors reject the paper "in light of the reviews", then there's obviously a misunderstanding somewhere. If the reviews were positive, how could a reject be based on them? On the other hand, if the reviews were unsatisfactory to the editor(s), why would they ascribe their stand to the reviews? You need to cross-reference the editors' rejection with the reviewers and obtain a clarification. One thing, this is not a rarity or oddity, it does happen sometimes.

First, a note: the editor (or editors, or editorial committee) is solely responsible for the decision to publish or reject a submitted manuscript. Reviewers are often (not always) called in and their reports provide help to the editor in evaluating the manuscript. But, at the end of the day, it is the editor who makes the call, so the situation you describe is possible and not necessarily unethical.
It is, however, very unusual, both for the editor not to follow the unanimous recommendation of the reviewers, and even more so not to explain their rejection any further. You can definitely (and, in my opinion, should) contact the editor to:

express your surprise at the rejection, given the contents of the reviews;
ask whether it may have been an administrative error (with the nice streamlined web-based editor interface, a simple misplaced click might have lead to the current situation);
if the decision is deliberate, ask the editor if he may expand on the reason behind the rejection.

Of course, be professional and polite.

If after contacting the editor you are not satisfied with the answer, the only way forward is to appeal the decision to the editor-in-chief or the full editorial board. Details on how to do so should be found on the journal's website. This should not be done lightly, but if you do not get a decent reply from the editor, it seems warranted by the facts of your case. You may, however, want to consider sending the manuscript to another journal, as it will take much less effort than the appeal…

Often these are "appealed" by sending the paper to another journal.  Downside is that it is time consuming to go through the referee process again.

To reject despite the reviewers recommended it, is not that strange compared to the even stranger fact that the cited reason was "in light of the reviews".

I should also point out that one issue could be related to being submitted to " journal special issue related to that conference".
While that is the perfect place for the paper, keep in mind that in a regular issue, an accepted paper appears in the first issue which has space. For the special issue, all papers must appear in that issue. If the editors ended up with 5000 pages of accepted articles, they had to trim them down and reject some despite the good reviews.
As your paper had good reviews, it should probably be easy to publish it in some journal, maybe the regular issues of the same one?

At least in theoretical computer science, submissions to special issues for conferences are invited by the guest editor, who is almost always a senior member of the program committee.  Invitations normally go to the best papers presented at the conference (according to the PC reviews).  So the suggested situation could arise only if the guest editor was negligent in inviting too many papers.

Even if too many good papers were submitted to the special issue, it seems strange to reject those papers, as opposed to accepting them to a regular issue of the journal (since  special issue papers are typically held to the same scope and quality standards as regular papers) or expanding to a second special issue.

If this theory is correct, "in light of the reviews" would be plain wrong.

@JeffE This is not the case in other fields.

@Blaisorblade: "in light of the reviews" might mean that the reviews were insufficiently enthusiastic, so it was ranked less highly than other papers submitted and rejected due to limited space.

I fully agree with F'x but would like to add the following. As stated editors are free to make the judgement they see fit with the journal reputation in mind etc. However, an editor should also weed out manuscripts that do not fit the journal's scope etc. already before the review stage. It therefore seems even more strange that a manuscript reeives such a drastic result from a seemingly good response from reviewers.
Another issue is that reviewers provide comments directly to the editor. It is thus possible that the review seems good but the reviewer may voice some concern that he/she feels the editor must act upon and which they therefore cannot voice in the open review. The editor can react to this. I would still expect the editor to then provide more open concerns so as to provide you with feedback.
All in all F'x's suggestion to contact the editor is the way to go. Describe that you do not understand the resulting "verdict" and that you would like to get more feedback so as to possibly improve a seemingly already good manuscript or possibly be given the opportunity to revise for a new final decision.

But if this were the case, one would not expect the reviewers to recommend acceptance publicly, and voice concerns privately. The public reviews would likely be of the "major revision" variety.

No, that is true but that is not what I am saying, only that you do not know what information the reviewers might give the editor "privately". Just speculating, there could be something that seems trivial that makes the editor see the paper in a different light; far fetched - yes. It is of course extremely unlikely that someone would say "accept" officially and then say "reject" to the editor. On the other hand I would not bet on it to never have happened.

Based on the description in the OP, I'd guess that the second-most probable reason is that some reviewer declined to review with a reason that the editor is using to desk reject.  (The most probable reason is human error and the editor meant to accept.)

I have a few potential scenarios in mind beyond just "They don't like you":

As Peter Jansson said, reviewers usually get a space to address just the editor, rather than the author, and in those comments there might have been a reason to reject your paper. Perhaps the reviewers suggested it's really not a good fit for the journal or something along those lines - the paper itself might not be flawed, but its submission to this journal might be. Yes, that sort of thing should show up in the review itself, but reviewers are imperfect people just like the rest of us.
The editor might have made a "Is this a priority?" judgement call and rejected the paper - "in light of..." phrasing might just be journal boilerplate. Don't underestimate the capacity of boilerplate language to generate confusion.
The journal's publishing schedule might just be full for a very long time, and so they may be rejecting anything below "My god, this must go in our journal".

One possibility is that the editors felt the paper was marginally relevant for their journal.  In that case, they might want to publish the paper if and only if it was exceptionally strong, which would allow it to overcome the relevance concern.  Three mildly positive reviews wouldn't be enough in that case; but if the editor had seen three highly positive reviews, they would have accepted.
From the author's position, this is annoying, but it makes sense from the editor's viewpoint.

Remember that the editor can have more information than the reviewers and is concerned not only with the scientific quality of the paper. For example, impact and interest is a major factor for some journals.
For example, it is possible that a similar paper on this subject was submitted at the the same time, and the editor decided to send both the papers to review. Upon receiving the reviews, the editor decided to go with the other paper.
Another scenario would be that the editor learned about a different paper (even in a different journal) which will be published in the near future and lowers the impact of your results.
These things can happen in high profile journals, and it does not necessarily mean the editor is doing something unethical or is acting on personal likes/dislikes.

Referees are also asked to judge impact and interest, not just scientific quality.  The standard response to getting two simultaneous submissions with the same result is to publish both simultaneously, to properly let the authors share credit for their independent discovery.

@JeffE in theory this is true, but there are many variations on this theme which are grayish. For example, if one of the papers was a couple of months earlier and the editor gives it precedence, or if the papers are in different journals. There are also different degrees of acceptance in some journals (e.g. strong accept=landmark paper; medium accept=standard; weak accept=limited interest), which leave some of the decision to the editor.


text:
How should a student handle possible misconduct in his supervisor's work?
Given that you just read your supervisor's dissertation because it is important for your research. As you have already conducted a fairly broad literature review about the subject some time ago, you start to notice that your supervisor's work appears familiar to you. While skimming through the relevant papers, you are able to identify some large parts of your supervisor's dissertation that were invented before. Those parts are not properly marked, and/or your supervisor's (suggested) improvements seem to be fairly trivial and insignificant - at least in your opinion.
Would you suggest to approach the supervisor with your findings?

From your description it is hard to say whether this is actually misconduct. It is quite common in science for results to be "rediscovered" - I think this is not misconduct but rather academic negligence. Are you sure your supervisor knew about the other work? Are you sure you understand all the subtleties in your supervisor's work and the previous work you are referring to?

Misconduct is of course a very serious thing. The problem you face is that you do not know the circumstances when your advisors work (or lack thereof) was made. It will also be hard to start digging into it to find out so I am afraid there is probably not much you can do. I do not think it would be wise to start spending time on this as a student either since it could seriously affect your thesis by distracting you and waste your time.
So what can be done? I would try to bring the question up with others. Discussing the different works and see if others pick up on the problem. Making people aware of what might be a problem can help you further assess the issue. I would tread carefully, however, unless you feel secure in opening up a can of worms.
I fully realize that this is far from a satisfactory answer from a moral point of view but it is pragmatic and I do not think it is your burden as a student to carry such weight. So the best you can do is to carefully expose the issue and perhaps later do something about it, if you still feel it is a serious breach.

I have only one thing to add: this discovery might be a reason to change advisor, if this is possible in your situation (e.g. early enough in grad school, if you can argue a better taste for another subject)

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
I have sit the TOEFL iBT for several times, Which one can I post: my most recent score or my best score?
I know that it's possible to pass the TOEFL iBT several times. However, it has been one hour since I looked for the answer on the web, but I don't manage to know if all the scores are sent to the university I apply.
In other words, if I pass the test two times, can I send only my best score?

No.  But why would you want to?

Because I'm bad. :(

Ah.  You did worse the second time, then?

Actually, I haven't passed the TOEFL yet.

In general, the only way for schools not to receive the complete record of test scores is for you to cancel the test score. Since nowadays the test scores are usually finalized once you agree to get the score, I think the answer is probably no.

I don't like this answer, but I'm afraid that it could be the right one.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
What is the US style to list the advisor's name of a master's thesis?
In listing my master's thesis in CV I came across this problem: Should I put the name of my advisor in front of my name or should I put only my name (I have my advisor's name printed in my thesis) according to the US style?

Should I put the name of my advisor in front of my name — No, of course not!  It's your thesis.

I don't think you need to be too formal here. Just include whatever information you believe is relevant, for example:

Master's Thesis: "Topic", at University X, supervised by Prof. Y.

Theses are different from regular publications anyway.

At least with the APA style, the advisor's name is not included.  The example from the fifth edition of APA (my 6th edition is lent out) is:
Almeida, D. M. (1990) Fathers' participation in family work: Consequences for fathers' stress and father-child relations. Unpublished master's thesis, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
With a hanging indent that I can't figure out how to do here.


text:
Does a PhD application decision letter give the reasons for the decision? Why or why not?
Out of curiosity, I am wondering if a PhD application decision letter gives the reasons for the decision?
If yes, why? If not, why?

In my experience in the US, I have never seen any sort of decision letter for an application (whether for Ph.D. or any position) that gives reasons for the decision. It may be different in other countries, but in the US at least, there are many good reasons to never give such information formally.
The actual decision-making process is never as clean and clear-cut as anybody wants it to be, and with the limited information available in applications and even interviews, there are going to be cases where people make mistakes or make good decisions for unclear or hard to state reasons.  Lots of good people may get turned down for reasons having nothing to do with them, such as just having too many good candidates in the same area.
If an institution gives real reasons in an official statement (as opposed to something meaningless and bland like "not an appropriate fit at this time"), then it is opening up the door for all sorts of potential problems and disputes, not to mention potential legal liability if something could be construed as relating to a protected category such as gender, age, religion, or ethnicity.  They also have to worry about seriously unbalanced people who may take it as a personal insult and begin some sort of stalking or harassment campaign (it happens!).  Not giving reasons may feel unsatisfying and cowardly, but it is an easy and safe path for an institution, and as such is generally official policy.
Now, if you have an informal trusted relationship with somebody who was involved in the decision process, then it is sometimes possible to get a strictly unofficial take on what may have happened.  You might learn things you didn't want to know about how sausage is made, however.

"If an institution gives real reasons "..." then it is opening up the door for all sorts of potential problems and disputes, not to mention potential legal liability if something could be construed as relating to a protected category such as gender, age, religion, or ethnicity."  Well that sounds like the exact reason for enforcing an open process.

Unfortunately, the realities of bias are likely to be largely unaffected by an open process.  Consider, for example, the differences found by this study in PNAS: qualifications are often evaluated differently without the decision-makers being consciously aware of what they are doing.  What would be needed to actually affect bias is some equivalent of Orchestra blind auditions.

@PålGD Even if an open process were to reduce bias, it won't necessarily reduce claims of bias; frivolous claims can be just as expensive to defend.

No, there is usually no specific reason given.
What would even constitute such a reason for rejecting someone from grad school?  People sometimes imagine that there might be a clear-cut explanation, perhaps numerical.  "The applicant pool was strong enough this year that we were able to set a GRE verbal cutoff of 165" or "We prefer applicants who have taken eleven courses in their major, but you've taken only eight" or "You lost out to someone who published one more paper than you did" or "We accept applicants from Yale only when we run out of applicants from Harvard."  That's generally not how admissions decisions work.  Instead, the judgment is holistic, based on the entire application, including intangible aspects like how compelling the letters of recommendation are.  There's not much to say beyond "We got many strong applications and managed to fill the incoming class with applicants who impressed us even more than you did", and there's nothing to be gained by spelling that out.
Of course, there's occasionally a simple reason, when you really can refuse to admit someone because of something specific.  However, that reason is sometimes insulting, and it would be dangerous to give the impression that the applicant could be admitted in the future if they just fixed this one thing.  (It's rare to see an otherwise wonderful application with one utterly unacceptable aspect.  Instead, if you're unacceptable in one respect you're likely to be at least questionable in others.)  It would just be adding insult to injury to say "Well, your application probably wasn't good enough overall in any case, but here's one aspect we found particularly appalling."
I think what applicants often want isn't an explanation of the decision so much as constructive advice.  Should they give up on the idea of attending graduate school?  Do they need additional preparation?  Are they not presenting themselves in the best light?  It's completely reasonable to seek this sort of advice, but preferably from a mentor.  Brief comments from admissions committees are unlikely to be useful.

At my UK institution it is now required that all applications have a reason for the decision, which is communicated to the applicant. This is meant to ensure and document a clear decision making process for quality assurance purposes.
However, these officially documented reasons are often bland, boilerplate and uninformative. The useful information usually requires direct comparison with other candidates (for the relative ranking), which is exactly the information the institution can't release by law.

Could you at least provide some of the reasons that do get listed, for informational purposes?

(1) Doesn't meet academic standards. (2) No suitable supervisor available (ie, already have too many students). (3) Unsuccessful in competition for limited funds. Note that this last one is becoming less common, as in most cases there is now a separation of the academic offer from the studentship offer; ie, in many cases an unfunded place may be offered.

Here are the only sorts of "reasons" I've ever seen in US decision letters.
Acceptance: "We were impressed by your qualifications."
Rejection: "We had many more qualified applicants than seats."

I just wanted to add that the latter is giving the reason for rejection, at least in many cases.  Sometimes there is something in an application that gets it tossed out in the absolute sense; but more commonly, the applications which get rejected are simply not ranked as highly as some other applications.  IF we take the question to mean "Do applications explain why other applicants were ranked more highly?" the answer in North America is certainly no: how do you do that without revealing confidential information?

@PeteL.Clark: In a sense you're right, of course.  But in another sense, it sounds like the kind of letter you might get in response to an application to join Tautology Club.


text:
Should I avoid using footnotes in a statement of purpose?
I intend to use some footnotes (in a restricted manner) in my statement of purpose for PhD applications, but I am not sure if doing so is suitable.
Though I cannot see any reason against doing so, for safety I still want to ask here for the advices from more experienced you.

Personally, I am a big believer of footnotes. They enable additional information to be added, without distracting the reader from the main argument. However, others will not share my position. One test I like to apply before adding a footnote is: can I include the footnote text in the main body? If I can do so without hindering the reader, then I tend to do so.


text:
How should I ask for library services for literature review?
Early on the research planning process, I would like to make use of the services offered by public libraries. Including online library services, what is the best way they could help a student researcher who is currently preparing a research proposal for a specialization?
Would it be wise to send them an email or give them a phone call, so that they could come up with a list of possibly useful and related research papers at their disposal?

If you mean "is it outrageous to ask a librarian to collect research papers for you," then no, it's not outrageous; some librarians do that, though rarely the librarians working in public libraries.
For most university students (at least in the US. You're in Indonesia so the system may vary,) they go to their school libraries because the collections are much closer to their fields of study. The librarians are also more proficient in handling academics-related questions. If you do have an affiliated university, I'll check with the librarians there first.
If you don't have one, then I'll next try to contact some librarians of state-funded or nationally funded universities (especially if you are a tax payer.) Most of these public schools open their libraries or provide limited consultation to the public. It would also be valuable to ask if they have any kind of borrower program or consortium you can join: later you may need to download a lot of journal articles and having an access to their server can save you a lot of money.
If both of these are no goes, then you can try the public libraries. However, the librarians may not be available to fetch articles for you. Instead, you may ask them for resources (pamphlet, booklet, website) on how to perform a literature search (I'm assuming literature, but they can also show you other curated forms such as microfilm, legal archive, etc.) Most public libraries do not subscribe highly professional/specialized journals due to the high price, so realize that your scope can be limited somewhat.
If all of these yield no results. I'd suggest at least pay a graduate students or instructor for 2-3 hours to give you a general rundown/tutorial.
As I have said, most librarians will not be able to do the search for you. And it's better for you, as the researcher, to have the first hand experience and control of the process. At the very least, try ask the librarians about database you should search, how to select keywords, how to export and keep results, what bibliography software is available, reference books on writing literature review etc.
Lastly, the quality of help you are going to get is proportional to the clarity of your vision about the work. The more concrete you can describe your work, the easier for them. Things you should consider are as follows:

What is the topic?
What is(are) the main question(s) you want to answer? -- in this
part, be very explicit about time, location, and other important
qualifier (think
5W1H)
How far back in time do you need to go?
What is the purpose of the document? E.g. For a blog, for a grant
proposal, or for an assignment?

I don't believe that a public library would be a useful resource for an academic literature review.  You are likely to be better supported by a university librarian.  But, I am not sure why you would be relying on a librarian to assist with obtaining resources for a literature review.  My recommendation is that you develop the skills and knowledge to efficiently and effectively conduct a search for relevant resources, as opposed to relying on somebody else.  You presumably have more background and knowledge in your substantive area, and this is something you will be doing throughout your academic career.  Even if a librarian or somebody else culled sources for you, the burden is still on you to ensure the review was comprehensive.

I agree with this 90%. I know of some librarians that do literature reviews professionally, usually for "high-end" researchers that have more pressing matters to attend to, or medical researchers who also have a substantial practice obligation. They can be quite good!


text:
How can I export my Google Scholar Library as a BibTeX format?
In the My Library of Google Scholar, is there a way to export all of the citations, whether to BibTex or something similar?

Here is a little python script that emulates the copy paste of bib entries of all references in My Library and appends them to a file.
It utilizes Selenium and chromedriver to open and navigate the browser. Initial run requires manual login. Then it goes to My Library, selects all, clicks on bibtex export, copies and appends the bibtex entries to a file, and goes to the next page until it crashes.
This way, I was able to automatically export all bibtex entries of the starred articles in my account on Google Scholar. Note that the code is far from being clean, many things are hard coded. But it got the job done for me when I needed a solution rather quickly, but there is huge room for improvement!

This is very cool. Thanks! One thing I had to do was hardcode the path to chromedriver even though I moved it to the script's directory. driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='/Users/adamg/tutorials/GoogleScholar/chromedriver')

As of August 31, 2016, this functionality has been added! See this blog post: https://googlescholar.blogspot.com/2016/08/organizing-your-scholar-library.html

The problem with this approach (My Library) is that it only exports a single screen-full at a time. It's possible to Export All of your "My Citations" but that is different than "My Library"

I can only add that you can download citations one by one:

in Settings > Bibliography Manager, check Show link to import citation into BibTex.

With that, you can probably write a script (maybe using Scholar.py) that downloads all your citations.
An example URL is:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar.bib?scila=u_35RYKgDlwC&output=citation&hl=en&ct=citation&cd=1

You can use the scholar R package. I copied this answer from this  tweet, in R
install.packages("scholar")
library(scholar)

ID <- "Put your id from pic below in here"
pubs <- get_publications(ID)
write.csv(pubs, file="citations.csv")

There may be another package which allows you to write out bibtex.

In Ubuntu you need additional packages for the R scholar package to be correctly installed: sudo apt-get install --assume-yes libudunits2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev

I couldn't find a way to export all citations from My Library (it seems to only work one page at a time), but it's possible to save all citations from the edit mode of My Citations:

Log in to https://scholar.google.ca
Click My Citations
Click the leftmost checkbox on the bar at the top of the list of citations:

Click Export > BibTeX and choose Export all my articles then Export

You should get a browser window with the BibTeX file of your citations that you can "Save as..." or copy/paste to a text editor and save.

That's helpful. Also, you can set the number of articles displayed per page to 20, so you can at least get a BibTeX for 20 articles at a time.

@Adam_G The number of items per page can be set higher than 20 by appending &pagesize= to the URL. For instance to set it up to 100: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=<Your ID here>&hl=en&pagesize=100.

@plannapus - Very interesting! But it seems to only work for My Citations, and not My Library.

@Adam_G indeed, as I never use that page I never noticed. In theory, to control the number of results on that kind of page one needs to append &num= instead of &pagesize= but it seems to be still an hard-limit set at 20. I'll look deeper just in case but it seems you're right.

As far as I know Google does not offer a user interface to do that. Actually they still do not offer an API to interact with your results.
However, if you can handle code a little or you know someone who does, I found this.
As they say, you: Can extract publication title, main online URL, number of citations, number of online versions, link to Google Scholar's main cluster for the work, and Google Scholar's cluster of all works referencing the publication.
Since you have this information you can write another script that puts what you need into BibTex.

Disclosure: I work at SerpApi.

You can use google-search-results package to extract data from Google Scholar citations. Check a demo at Repl.it.
from serpapi.google_search_results import GoogleSearchResults
from more_itertools import first_true

client = GoogleSearchResults({
    "engine": "google_scholar",
    "q": "coffee",
})

data = client.get_dict()

print("Links")

for result in data['organic_results']:
    client = GoogleSearchResults({
        "api_key":
        "demo",
        "engine":
        "google_scholar_cite",
        "q":
        result["result_id"],
    })

    data = client.get_dict()

    link = first_true(data['links'], lambda link: link['name'] == 'BibTex',
                      None)

    print(f"""
    Name: {link['name']}
    Link: {link['link']}""")

Output
Links

    Name: BibTeX
    Link: https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar.bib?q=info:re9ssrU-exUJ:scholar.google.com/&output=citation&scisdr=CgUgMydbGAA:AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSezaQALOlFVjCLJgcTVUPBVLhAC4P_&scisig=AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSezSdi7qdJVVpppb0Qjy9URFYAVvDb&scisf=4&ct=citation&cd=-1&hl=en

    Name: BibTeX
    Link: https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar.bib?q=info:9WouRiFbIK4J:scholar.google.com/&output=citation&scisdr=CgXJdXzTGAA:AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSe_tPBybZ8u8VTSEOl_bwnW6MesS32&scisig=AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSe_q2vGhtlDC1qD-MUihajS43pIwqJ&scisf=4&ct=citation&cd=-1&hl=en

    Name: BibTeX
    Link: https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar.bib?q=info:xY3q9qnkN54J:scholar.google.com/&output=citation&scisdr=CgXhmeGHGAA:AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSe_zIPHELNrzNBJx7LANjv2IOpiu0c&scisig=AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSe_98jnDbvzh1pjf3N-yQyeXjJ2Ymt&scisf=4&ct=citation&cd=-1&hl=en

    Name: BibTeX
    Link: https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar.bib?q=info:fGeQlvu-2_IJ:scholar.google.com/&output=citation&scisdr=CgXtSK1OGAA:AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSfAWesoBxkblC33sy6Mwvap1ZhRO4s&scisig=AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSfAZCH98TGUSWB69hUOtQPECUPTBby&scisf=4&ct=citation&cd=-1&hl=en

    Name: BibTeX
    Link: https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar.bib?q=info:Zu7aKNjvAUwJ:scholar.google.com/&output=citation&scisdr=CgXIa_eGGAA:AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSfArPmBDyaM3SUXrjLBzYMWDMRXpUv&scisig=AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSfAsZ2ayvj7ugoRdygul9ot981uovl&scisf=4&ct=citation&cd=-1&hl=en

    Name: BibTeX
    Link: https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar.bib?q=info:pIjQPO7__AYJ:scholar.google.com/&output=citation&scisdr=CgVPosX6GAA:AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSfAzmhcfCJHuCELZ7mYASR3OXkOtGR&scisig=AAGBfm0AAAAAXoSfA1gD689aqgRLYIrefzXFAp-b3ohf&scisf=4&ct=citation&cd=-1&hl=en

    Name: BibTeX
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If you want more information, check out SerpApi documentation or live playground.

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


text:
Is it unusual to apply for a degree without finishing your current one?
Consider the following situation: a student has started a bachelor's/master's/PhD at a lesser-known university program but feels that he would benefit from a more prestigious institution with better professors, equipment, and learning environment.
He decides to apply for a bachelor's/master's/PhD (the same degree as his previous level) program at top schools, planning to abandon his current program if he is accepted.
Is this unusual or frowned upon? Is the fact that the applicant has already started a program likely to hurt the applicant's chances? (Do the answers to the above questions depend on the current level of the applicant?)

How is this different than transferring? This is common in bachelor programs.

Speaking strictly from the US, this is defined as a being a "transfer student" and is extremely common. How common? Well, it's a federally reported statistic called "Transfer-Out Rate". I am fond of the CollegeResults.org tool, which defines this stat nicely (emphasis mine):

The percentage of students who began in the 2006 cohort of first-time,
  full-time, bachelor's or equivalent degree-seeking freshmen at the
  institution and transferred to another school without earning a degree
  at the initial institution. Reporting of transfer data is optional for
  colleges and universities that do not consider preparing students for
  transfer as part of their mission. (IPEDS)

For instance, The University of South Alabama is reported as having about 16% of students transfer out to another institution before receiving a degree. The University at Buffalo (New York) posts about a 20% transfer rate.
So, as the write-up for the statistic suggests, some schools even offer specific degree tracks designed to transfer. In the state of Wisconsin, the entire "technical college" offers such programs. In Florida, these are called "junior colleges" and offer similar tracks.
Even at Universities designed without this as their intent, there is always a percentage of people who transfer in and out at an undergraduate level. As Nate Eldredge points out, this is not nearly so common at higher levels, but it happens often enough and is hardly taboo.
The Upsides
Sometimes it is desirable to plan to transfer, such as getting started at a nearby location while you make preparations/plans to go elsewhere (I did this myself, starting in a tech school and applying to my target University just the next semester once I had family/work preparations in place). Many people spend 2-3 years at such colleges, taking all the classes they can towards their higher target degree (usually called "general degree requirements") - usually because it is more convenient and often vastly cheaper (a person can easily save tens of thousands of dollars in tuition this way). Class sizes are often smaller. The difficulty level of the material varies, but most "introduction" classes look a lot an awful lot alike after a while.
The Downsides
If you are looking to go onto higher degrees, especially to a PhD or competitive Masters program, recommendation letters and research experience (when possible) are highly desirable if not absolutely necessary. If you will only be at an institution for 2 years instead of 4-5, then you have a lot less time to find and build these connections! Surely you can do it, but I know I've personally found it took me about 2 years to find the right connections that seem to have "stuck" and suit me and what I want to do (after figuring out what I actually want to do, naturally). If I had completed most of the degree before coming to my present institution, this might mean I'd have missed out on such opportunities to do some real work with these people.
Most institutions have requirements of "credits done in residence", so you can't just do 4/5ths of a degree at Podunk Clown School Of Higher Learning and transfer into Harvard for a semester and get your diploma. Which is unfortunate, because that sounds like it would make for a great B-movie.
Some administrative complications can come into play too. If you decide to retake a course you did poorly on or failed in a previous semester, the rules about how to do this and whether or not it's possible vary depending on where you took the class. Retaking a class you took originally at School A is not always possible or straight-forward once you are in School B.
How GPA is calculated also differs in this same way, as some institutions only calculate grades earned in residence, others combine them, some don't transfer 0 credit classes (like if you failed a class) and others transfer all grades even if they don't give you credit for the course towards your degree!
The complexity can be a real head-ache sometimes, but they are generally annoyances to be overcome rather than deal-breakers.
Big Warning
Credits earned at one institution aren't automatically accepted anywhere else! Indeed, at some colleges they offer two versions of a class - one that is likely to transfer, and one that isn't; the one that can transfer costs more but is otherwise the same course! This can be a minefield, so if you want to make plans or consider transferring, talk with your target school's Admissions/Registration/Records and whoever would be in charge of a transcript evaluation first!
This process varies hugely by US State and even between institutions within the state (even when they are State schools in the same system!), but suffice it to say that this is an extremely common problem in America and you have to be careful and plan accordingly.
Admissions Considerations
Finally, you asked about how this might effect perceptions of you in terms of admissions or otherwise. The most important thing I've seen is that once you've had a semester or two at any college, most colleges no longer put much weight into your high school grades, SAT scores, etc - if they even require them at all. So it is very common that people will not do great in high school, go to a local or otherwise non-competitive college for a few semesters, get really get good grades, and then apply to more competitive institutions. Most Universities understand that proven experience in a college setting is a far better predictor of academic success than any high school transcript or standardized test can possibly be, and then put little weight into anything they have to say. This can backfire on you, of course, if you didn't do well at your last program but did better in the past.

I answered largely the matter of undergraduate education and how it might effect higher-level degrees, but not at all how it is to transfer between Masters or PhD programs. I know this happens and has pros and cons, but I do not feel qualified to answer as I don't have any direct experience with such situations.

This may or may not be worth including in the answer, but some universities, prestigious ones in particular, don't accept incoming transfer students at all. (I'm not sure offhand if Harvard is one of them.)

@David: Googling for "Harvard transfer" shows that they do accept incoming transfers. Princeton, however, does not.

In the US this is generally known as "transferring".
At the undergraduate level it is very common, and institutions usually have standard procedures for admission, awarding credit for equivalent courses already taken, and so on.  Students may transfer for a variety of reasons: to attend a more prestigious place, or to find a program that's a better fit for their interests, or just because they'd rather live in a different city.  Transfer applicants are not necessarily advantaged or disadvantaged compared to new freshmen, though the applicant's record at their current institution will be taken into account.
At the graduate level, it is less common, and tends to happen when a student is actively unhappy with  their current program.  It tends to be handled on a more ad hoc basis and it's hard to say whether such applicants are generally at an advantage or a disadvantage.


text:
Should I withdraw my paper if I find another paper published with the same idea?
I submitted a paper and it is currently under review (submitted on 10th March and conference is on 15th October, I'll be notified on 15th July). However, now, in May, I see a paper has just published dealing with the same problem as mine. They indicate that their solution is better than mine. If my paper is accepted, do I have to withdraw it, as it seems to be out of date?

Are you saying the other paper is referencing yours? I otherwise do not understand how they indicate their solution is better?

No, I means we are dealing with the same problem, but their solution is better than mine

OK, then withdrawal can be a viable solution, if you are sure your solution or paper does not provide additional information. you should probably contact the conference and ask how they view the problem. It is not unheard of that two papers are published on the same issue when unknowingly developed in parallel.

Was there any preprint of the "best" journal paper you describe available BEFORE submitting your paper? If yes, your paper lacked a proper related work section and thanks to that, it may probably be rejected. If not, there is no way for you to know there was a better solution than the one you propose

I submitted the paper on 10th March. At that time, I didn't know there was a journal like that way. Now on May, I read paper on IEEE and see the journal.

Have you googled the article name or author's name of the better paper to see if any other public earlier versions of this paper exist? Journals also usually say when the article was accepted. When was that date?

The journal was submitted on June 2013 and accepted on May, after that it is available on IEEE

I think @badroit advice is good. If your paper gets accepted you should cite the journal paper. But make 100% sure that there is not any earlier version of the journal paper, either accepted in a conference, in arxhiv, or even in the authors' homepage.

I'm puzzled at how they indicate their solution is better than yours.  Did they see your work?  Or is this your assessment?  In any case, independent validation is useful, and you should document that that is what you (unintentionally) have, as well as inform the editor.  The editor will decide, and perhaps suggest mentioning the other paper.

It's a slightly grey area but assuming the journal paper in question was not publicly available before the submission date of your conference, I think you are fully entitled to publish the paper if accepted. It's a parallel result, which means there was (verifiably) no wrong-doing on your part. If accepted, in the "camera-ready" submission, you can add reference to the journal paper with a note that their results were developed in parallel (with mentions of the dates involved in a footnote, for example). You get your publication, the authors of the work get their citation, and the conference themselves know that there was no wrong-doing involved.
So again, you don't have to withdraw, but you can if you want (e.g., if you don't want to be associated with a weaker form of the result, or if you are a really nice person and feel that the slot at the conference might be better used elsewhere).

tl;dr: Let the editor decide.

I recommend that you resist any pressure to add a reference to the other work. If it was not available before you submitted, your work is independent but if you reference it people may assume you were influenced, even if you state otherwise.

I disagree with @PhilipGibbs.  It would be a disservice to the readers not to inform them of the existence of the other paper.

With today's search technology it is very easy to find other related papers. That is no longer the purpose of references. References can be used to to give a summary of similar prior work as an introduction that sets the stage for the new work, but there is no need or obligation to tell the readers about papers that were written at the same time and had no influence.

Having ideas in parallel happens often in science. You are a very ethical person, but if you haven't provably seen the other work before (as - this is important - the deadline seems to have been before the publication of the other), you deserve your credit for coming up with this idea. I personally like to reference as completely as possible and so I would agree with the OPs idea of mentioning the parallel development in the final revision. Talking with the editors is also good advice.


text:
Is it fair to punish absent students with a one-question exam?
I recently came across a post (that I won't disclose because it contains the professor's last name):
Attendance in this course was regularly low, so the professor used a one-question exam to punish students who weren't attending a class. Those who weren't in class would have obviously failed this exam, and those who were in class (presumably) would have all gotten A's. The final remark on the note on the door was "maybe we'll do this again some time".
Let's assume a few factors about the course and this one-question exam, since we don't actually know how they're implemented:

The course has an attendance policy (3 days max missed before your grade starts dropping, for example)
This one-question exam has an impact equivalent to a homework assignment (could drop your overall grade by 1% if you get a 0).
By the language of the original post, this is not something the students would have expected to happen; this means that the policy would not be outlined in the syllabus.

What if the course didn't have an attendance policy and the professor is simply annoyed that students aren't attending the class? What if this one-question exam was only worth a point or two instead of a whole homework grade?
Is it fair (ethical, if you will) to use this kind of tactic to impose additional punishment on students who don't attend lecture?
Clarification: Students who are absent (if intentional, extraneous circumstances aside) deserve to lose the points for the work they missed. However, this tactic is being used to additionally punish students solely for being absent; this is also why I posed different assumptions about attendance policy.

Whether or not it was a one question exam, a one hundred question exam or just an I'm taking attendance today thing doesn't change anything. The end result would be people who didn't attend on that day would not get credit for their work. The concept that the exam is dropping the grade may seem different, but it appears to serve the exact same purpose as taking attendance in a normal fashion, without a test involved.

@Compass I would agree, but minimally. There were numerous lectures in my Chemistry in Society class that I did not attend because 1. I knew the material from AP chemistry in high school and 2. There was no exam/quiz/group work and nothing due that day. In the event that the professor specifically crafted an assignment designed to punish me for not attending a lecture that I did not need to, I would be pretty upset. Though I do agree that if there were work that needed to be done that day, absent students deserve to lose the points. This is about additional punishment.

I think it's a matter of opinion. I don't understand any kind of compulsory attendance at college-level courses.

Unless it was made clear beforehand that attendance is mandatory and lack of attendance could affect your grade, this seems unethical.

"Is it fair to..." - What do you mean by "fair"? Professors can set whatever rules they like for their own course. Also, -1 and flag because the question appears to be a rant, not a genuine question.

@Superbest Completely disagree with your vote and flag. This is a straightforward question, with no rant attached. The question posed is whether or not it is fair (ethical, if you will) to impose penalties on students for absences, in different contexts - whether or not the course has an attendance policy or not, and how large the penalty is. Furthermore, I am not a participant in this course nor have I ever been in a situation where I was penalized outside of what was outlined in the syllabus, so I don't see how this could be a rant. I'll edit to clarify that for the future reader.

If your question is "Is it ethical for professors to punish missed attendance?" then you should ask that. The only thing I can see about your case that is special, is that a non-attending student has a chance to avoid the penalty by knowing the answer to the question. Generally, my problem with your question is that it's hard to tell what you are asking. Is it a general question about requiring attendance? Or is it a specific question about encouraging attendance with quizzes about lecture content?

@Superbest I'm sorry, but I am at a loss as to how the question is not clear. The question is bold, at the bottom: Is it fair (ethical, if you will) to use this kind of tactic to impose additional punishment on students who don't attend lecture? (emphasis mine). I've highlighted some potential circumstances that may arise in different courses for the purpose of discussion; i.e., whether or not the course has an existing attendance policy, and the 'worth' of the punishment (e.g. absent students lose 1 point or a whole homework grade). Honestly I don't know how to make it more clear...

I think a more interesting question is why attendance on the course is so low to begin with.

@NeilKirk As I mention in a previous comment on this question, there are some valid reasons (IMO). I don't know what the lecture in question is about, but I can give first-hand experience on why attending certain lectures is a waste of time for a particular subset of students. However, that's not really relevant to the current question. Perhaps you can ask your own question "why is attendance so low in certain courses?" I would read it :)

Some people learn by attending class, some learn by listening to lecture recordings, others learn by reading the lecture notes. I've personally done all of the above for different subjects. There's really no reason to punish people for how they learn.

Did I read the question to say the students missing only lost 1%? That seems like a tiny percent to complain about.

@simonzack But somebody has to attend class in order to get lecture notes, or recordings. And by not attending class you might miss something important just because the person who takes notes for you doesn't write it down. But then, I guess that that is your fault for not attending class, isn't it?

@Village To reiterate, we don't know what kind of actual penalty is applied to the students. The professor gave a one-question exam; we don't know about the attendance policy, nor the actual impact this 'exam' has on the absent students. I made assumptions for the sake of discussion. The point is that there is punishment at all; some (including myself) find that unethical and unfair to the students. Others believe that it's a normal part of academics, and this is why I asked the question. The Academia.SE community seems to lean toward this being unprofessional.

@ChrisCirefice "The Academia.SE community seems to lean toward this being unprofessional" < -- I think this is assuming too much, as there are way too many things we don't know about this situation. For example, if the instructor made it very clear at the beginning of the term that attendance is expected from the the students are expected to attend the lecture, I would call the students behavior is "unprofessional"... On another hand if it is just the professor becoming frustrated with the attendance, without making it clear that attendance is expected, I tend to agree...

@NickS Thus why I said seems ;) I'm assuming that the professor just came up with this on the fly as a method of getting students to attend lecture, and that it was not something outlined in the grade distribution for the course. I'm glad that we have had a good discussion about the different scenarios that this could apply to and how 'ethical/fair' this would be in each.

@ChrisCirefice At the end of the day the students are expected to attend classes, and by not attending they might miss important materials or information...Also, the attendance issue becomes more obvious in small classes, and my guess would be that this happens in a small class. What happens then if noone shows for a particular class... Where do you get notes from? Or do you expect the instructor just to waste a class because no student showed up?

@NickS In my country there's nobody to take notes, the lecturer uploads his own notes, and the lecture cam uploads it's own recordings. I've never ever missed anything important, and if it's really that important, it should be in the notes. You are portraying attending lectures as something necessary, but that's what we're discussing here, are we not?

The Internet knows. There are relevant details which you have omitted. Clearly, the prof is a morning person who is sticking it to students who don't naturally follow that schedule.

@200_success The whole reason I 'obfuscated' my question was so that the professor wouldn't be identified... He might not care, but it's nice to try to respect others' privacy, even if the rest of the internet already knows.

Please take any extended discussion to [chat].

Seeing this as a punishment is only one way of looking at the issue, as it can also be seen as an incentive to attend.  You post your understanding of the original post, without allowing others to make up their own minds about what the intent is/was behind this professors use of the pop exam.   Thus, you are asking for people to determine ethical status without all available information.

Related : In case of in-lecture quizzes, is it unreasonable to fail students who are late or absent?

I think that this is unprofessional, and is leaving the institution open to all sorts of action (up to and including legal proceedings, if it impacts on a student's progression, for example). For example, what if a student is unavoidably absent?
If it's only "worth a point or two", then I don't think it's worth antagonising people in this way. The sarcastic note left on the door simply underlines how poorly thought-out this whole thing was...

"For example, what if a student is unavoidably absent?"<- Well the standard procedure for exams would apply in this situation.

There was one module I took at an English uni, where the lecturer was terrible (and barely spoke any English), most of us skipped his lectures and put extra time in at the library instead.
If he had pulled a stunt like that, I suspect he would have spent the next year sleeping with one eye open.

@MarkKCowan Regardless of the lecturer being terrible, I am assuming the lectures were required as part of the curriculum?  Generally, absences are dealt with in the student handbook and/or are addressed in the course syllabus if I am not mistaken.  Also, in this day and age, sending the professor a quick email about the absence wouldn't hurt.  Giving a quiz such as this to someone who is habitual in absence.....or someone who consistently leaves early, would be understandable in my opinion.

@NZKshatriya: attending lectures wasn't mandatory.  We were being graded on our ability to understand physics, not scribbly writing and Russian.  Punishing people who don't attend is stupid, some people self-study and some have timetable clashes so can't attend every lecture.

I went to the first class of a programming course, realize I already knew everything, and showed up only for the midterm and final.  I got an A+.  Attendance would've been a complete waste of time.

Note that at many Universities the "grade distribution" has to be announced in advance, and changing it later in the term needs often to be approved by chair.
This closes the door for this type of idea, and opens the ground for appeals by students.
On another hand, while the exams dates for final exams and midterm exams need to be announced in advance, we are often not forced to do the same for work which is worth a small percentage of the mark. Even if I don't use it, I have the flexibility of having few Quizzes during the term, without the date being announced in advance, as long as they are not worth too much and, most importantly, as long as I announce this at the beginning of the semester.
And I had colleagues which announced at the beginning of the semester that there will be two surprise quizzes during the term(of course technically they were not surprises anymore), each questions worth 1-2.5% percent. And the students know in advance that by missing a class they might lose on those percentages...

"(of course technically they were not surprises anymore)"...Well, I think you've just stumbled into the surprise test paradox!

Also known as the "Unexpected hanging paradox".

In my experience, many professors build a little wiggle room into their syllabi for this reason.  For instance, professors may assign 10% of the course grade to "class participation".  It is then up to them how they assess this.  Some take attendance every day; some take attendance only on a few days; some use this sort of "fake quiz" approach.
I know of one professor who included "Quizzes" as a category of points on the syllabus, and specifically announced that these quizzes would be the kind you describe: unannounced, trivially easy quizzes designed solely to check for attendance.  She would have such a quiz on days when she noticed low attendance.
I think the degree to which it is ethical or allowable under policy guidelines depends on hwo transparent the process is and how much the grade penalty is.  If, for instance, the syllabus allots 10% of the grade for attendance/participation, I think it's totally legitimate for the professor to assess this via trivial pop quizzes, as long as the penalty for missing them all is no more than 10% of the overall grade.  Taking the points out of the "exam" portion of the grade would be less defensible, but in practice I don't think it would cause a major stir unless the penalty was large.

Having a daily quiz that counts for meaningful points can be a very effective way of getting students to pay attention to the course and learn the material day by day rather than trying to cram before an exam. This is different from simply requiring attendance, because students have to attend class and have to learn the material to pass the quiz.  This provides students with frequent feedback throughout the course.  It also fits well with the general principle that grades should be based on demonstrated student learning and not on arbitrary factors.
There are certainly situations where students are unavoidably absent from class.  Thus its necessary to have some kind of policy for "excused absences."  For example, you might accept excuses provided by medical professionals or the college's Dean of Students.  You might also give students a reasonable number of "free passes."
Having such quizzes as part of the course design from the beginning is an entirely reasonable thing to do.  On the other hand, introducing these quizzes half way through the course as a way to punish students for not attending class is difficult to justify and will likely be seen as unfair by the students.

"Seen as unfair".  When low attendance becomes an apparent problem during the course of the semester it is entirely reasonable to put in place a mechanism that encourages attendance. After the news of the first quiz circulates, people will know they need to show up. If college is to prepare for real life then students need to get off the "no fair" position and on to the "I better shape up" one. Adapt and thrive; whine and perish. The prof can always decide that the first quiz gives a + grade bump only: so people are not punished for not showing up, just not rewarded like ones that did show up.

I've found that "excuses provided by medical professionals" are problematic.  At my last institution, the student health center decided to stop issuing excuse notes.  They would see a lot of students who had minor illnesses and didn't need medical treatment, but rather than just stay home in bed they would come to the health center to get an excuse note.  This wasted the health center staff's time, clogging their waiting room with unnecessary (and possibly contagious) patients.  So they decided to stop doing it, and I can't really blame them.

Agreed with Nate. If someone has a cold, it's ridiculous to expect them to go to the doctor for absolutely no reason at all other than to get a note. Going to the doctor for such wastes the doctor's time (increasing overall healthcare costs due to extra [wasteful] demand,) wastes the student/employee's money and/or their insurance company's money, potentially spreads the cold to others in the doctor's office, etc. with no benefit at all. On the other hand, it might cause the student to come to class while contagious instead (which is part of why schools are a breeding grounds for diseases.)

No. It is a sure recipe to fill the room with zombies playing videogames or working on homework for other classes.

To answer the actual question: I don't feel the professor's approach is ethical, because he seems to be caring more about attendance rather than the learning experience his students are getting. I explain more on this below.

I think @NeilKirk asks a very good question in the comments of the question.

"Why is attendance so low in the first place?"

In general, with the exception of the occasional sickness or special circumstance, the answer is that in the students' opinion, it is not worth their time to attend. This could be for a number of reasons:

The class is covering information they really don't care about. (one reason some teachers try asking their students what they want to get out of a class). If this is an elective class, they should probably be taking something else instead. If this is the situation though, it's probably a required class. So, why is it a required class? Why should they care? Telling them how this class is valuable will solve some of this issue. I'm assuming the value from taking this class isn't only the earned credits and grade.

Shortcuts are available I had this as its own section, but it falls into the category that the students don't really want to learn. If there are ways to get a good grade without going to class and without learning anything, some students will take it.

Going to class doesn't get them anything more than they could do on their own Maybe they see the value of the information, but they just don't get anything out of being in class. Why go, if you learn just as much as if you stayed home and read a chapter of the book? Some people naturally learn better by themselves, and there's not much that can be done about that, but if this is a problem for most, or more than a few, of the students then the professor should really be considering changing the way they teach their material - the students just aren't learning anything more from the professor than they could from just having the resources the professor provides.

Incorrect personal judgements While the judgements being made are typically by the students, many of these could also be caused by the professor and all attempts to help the students avoid them should be made. The students may have judged the class content or difficulty incorrectly, making them think they that they will easily be able to make up what they miss in class. They may have judged their own abilities or knowledge incorrectly. They may have thought getting some sleep was more important than class that day. etc..

The last bullet is what the professor in question seems to think is happening. He is trying to punish those who make "incorrect" decisions by affecting the student's grades. It is one way to get what he wants (attendance up), but I personally doubt the problem is mostly caused by this. If it is, then I think there are better ways to solve the problem. That said, I could consider this an ethical solution, if the students were warned in some way and if the real problem was then attempted to be corrected.

Given the third assumption listed in the question (that this policy was not outlined in the syllabus,) then I would say no, it is not ethical. Regardless of how much of the final grade it is worth, assigning grades contrary to the grade distribution in the syllabus just because the professor doesn't like that some people were absent is not ethical (and likely violates school policy.)
On the other hand, instructors are usually allowed to create policies that penalize students for not showing up, such as having a portion of the course grade be due to unannounced quizzes or even having quizzes every class period. However, these policies must be announced ahead of time. While I personally find such policies annoying and not particularly useful in most scenarios, as long as the expectation is given to the students up front that not coming to class might (or will) impact their grade and by how much, then I don't see an ethical problem with it (and it shouldn't violate policy, either.)
The main issue here is that, whatever policy the instructor wants to use, it needs to be decided up front and included in the syllabus, not created on-the-fly in violation of what someone would reasonably expect by reading the syllabus.

IMHO it is not fair to impose penalties for non-attendance unless there is a clearly-signposted policy that attendance is required. I don't know how this varies across the world, but in some UK universities lectures are technically optional - the point is to learn the material described in the syllabus, and if a student can achieve that better with private study and textbooks than by attending the lectures, that is up to them.
(most students would be foolish to rely exclusively on this approach, but that is their problem, and doing badly in the final exam would be their punishment if it has not worked)

Fair? Absolutely not.
If you inform students beforehand that class attendance will count for a certain percentage of the grade, then yes this is absolutely fair. But you asked "What if the course didn't have an attendance policy"
Well, in that case: How exactly are the students supposed to know that failure to attend will affect their grades negatively? It is both ethically and probably legally wrong to deduct marks from grades based on arbitrary reasons (a professor not liking attendance levels).
Most higher level education classes specify the criterion for getting grades. This is to enable the students to work systematically towards getting a certain grade.

At my institution we have a strict "no-absence" policy. If you can't attend a lecture for whatever reason, you must apply for a leave to the dean. Failing to do so may result in failing the respective module and since many are only offered every other year this may result in a decisive prolonguation of your studies. I personally know cases where people quit due to such issues.
Anyway, neither the dean nor the secretary can really have an eye on every single student all the time. So there is need for methods as you describe to compulse students to attend lectures and at the same time punish those who didn't. Since I find the quiz you describe, aiming only at those who were absent, highly questionable, to say the least, I quickly give you an overview of how we handle it at my institution.
There are several approaches at our institution:
Some lecturers simply don't care. It's your task to pass the exam, not theirs. If you miss many lectures, you lack a lot of material which will surely be in the exam. If you had good reasons for your absence (illness or the like), the others will easily share their material with you (besides that in such cases you told the secretary and he then informed the professor, so they knew in advance). If you, however, were absent with no reasons (laziness, sleeping late, whatever...), others might refuse to help you out.
Others let students do a quick oral resumee of the last lecture. First to compulse students who were absent for good (or not-so-good) reasons to catch up the material as the professor will continue where he ended the last time. Secondly it quickly shows if the students understood the material and if not, the lecturer can give additional help.
My own method is a quick three-questions-quiz at the beginning of each lecture. If you don't answer at all, you fail, three failed quizzes lower your grade by one point (we have a system of 1 = worst to 6 = best grade, so one point is already quite a high loss). However, if you didn't understand a topic and therefore can't answer my question, you can write down what you didn't understand and then still pass it. Like this I always have an overview what the students understand best and what not. By the number of people not being able to answer a question I can also determine the quality of my lecture. If a certain number (I say: more than 2) hasn't understood a certain topic, then it's most probably my fault and not theirs.
These methods have the big advantage of being fair to everybody. It's not a punishment, but a motivation to attend every lecture and to catch up material you missed.
Beside that the grading of a module is transparent and clear to everybody from the very beginning. We, the lecturers, have any freedom we want in how we handle it, but we have to announce it at the beginning and cannot change anymore later.

What is it that we want to achieve/check by having an exam? In my world it is what the student is capable of doing/what the student know.
How the student has achieved the information is (in my world) irrelevant.
So the only fair exam is the one that tests the skills/knowledge the students have to the subject. That cannot be tested by asking just one (silly/irrelevant) question.
So to answer the question: No it is not fair to ask a question like that! The professor will have to ask the questions about the subject. If the students that have not attended his class knows the answers they should pass. If they dont know the answers - they should fail. And that goes for the students who has attended the class as well!

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text:
How hard is it for someone who already has tenure to find a tenured position elsewhere?
I am in my second year as an Associate Professor (with tenure) at a top research university (listed among top 20 in US News & World Report in my field). My publication, teaching, and service records are all very good to excellent. I have also received numerous awards such as Sloan Fellowship and NSF's Career Award. In general, I am happy with my current institution, but sometime wonder if I can move to more prestigious university. There are other personal reasons as well that makes me ponder about such possibility. Would it be a good idea to apply other universities for someone at this stage of their career? How do search committees feel about hiring someone who has a tenure?

"Poaching"—"stealing" a tenured faculty away from one department to another by offering a more lucrative package—happens in academia with some frequency.
Obviously, if the position you're interested in applying for is a tenured position, then there might be a chance that the search committee will consider already-tenured candidates for the position. However, it is not a guarantee that this will be the case. (It depends a lot upon the candidate and the relative "fit." Also, a candidate who is fairly close to retirement may not be at the top of their priority list—simply because that means the search may have to be repeated in a few years anyways!)
One other thing to keep in mind—the working relationship you have with your current faculty may be significantly strained if you handle this the wrong way. You may want to see what you can find out on a confidential basis before committing to applying for positions. Once you've sent it out, it's out there—and could cause problems for you if word gets back to your present department.
You may therefore want to have a discussion with your department chair, but I would strongly recommend not using "these schools are more prestigious" as a reason for applying to them. If that's the only reason you're doing it, then you may want to reconsider, as switching schools is a time-consuming and nontrivial process.

Of course, it's only stealing if the thing being taken is someone's property. Which people aren't.

It's rare that a search to fill a tenured position proceeds along the usual lines (post an ad, interview candidates, make an offer). Because of the delicacy involved in poaching, it's usually a lot more "under the radar". Which is to say that if someone hasn't approached you yet, they might not be interested in what you have to offer.
Having said that, one strategy (if you're really interested in moving) is to drop hints in the right places with the right people. Contrary to what aeismail says, I'd argue that "moving to a much higher ranked place" is probably the ONLY reason to move that won't create hard feelings (in that people usually can understand the desire to move up the rankings). Even then, the shift should be significant, else moving between universities that are similarly ranked doesn't make a lot of sense unless you have other reasons (geographic, two-body, etc).
I realized I didn't answer the question in the title. The short answer is: it's very hard, but not impossible. It depends much less on the availability of positions in general, and much more on the specific match between the institution and you.


text:
Are there cheaper alternatives to ACM and to IEEE Xplore digital libraries?
The faculty in which I am currently working is planning to subscribe to the ACM Digital Library and to the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. I am not pretty sure how much are the real costs of the subscription because for example in:
http://librarians.acm.org/sites/default/files/ACM_DL_PricingGuides2014_NoTabs_V19_Academic.pdf
it appears something about tiers; I suppose that for a small access to this material oriented only to students that are doing their bachelor's final year projects, we will be in tier 1. About IEEE I still do not have information about it.
In any case, I would like if there are another alternatives to those two digital libraries, excluding Arxiv because a lot of their articles have not been peer reviewed.
Any suggestion?
PD. Update information:
We would like to access to articles about all the fields of Computer Science, the access would be for around 20 students maximum each month (that is the number of students enrolled in their last bachelor project). We need only the articles to be reviewed for their research as supporting literature.

I feel like you should explain what "features" the alternative should have. To be clear, you will not find another DL that gives you access to the same articles for less money. You can subscribe to other, maybe cheaper, DLs, but the articles you will find are not the same as in ACM DL / IEEEXplorer. Those have a monopoly on ACM / IEEE material respectively.

20 students assume 4 full-text downloads each at minimum is just under a 1000 downloads/year. I assume you're at a non-US institution, so tier 3 at least. There is a link about a discount based on a country's economy ranking at the World Bank. Also check whether your institution is a local consortium member.

If you are needing frequent access to particular articles published by ACM and IEEE, then ACM DL and IEEE Xplore are really the only ways to go.
However, if you are needing to be able to find and reference general background information across a broad range of computer science subjects, then there are informal access methods which also work quite well.
First, Google Scholar is very good at finding non-paywalled copies of PDFs.  This is especially the case for computer science, where many conferences have very liberal policies about self-archiving and where many people strongly believe that material should be made accessible online.  Some organizations, such as AAAI and AAMAS just always put everything online for free as a matter of policy. Even IEEE and ACM are fairly liberal about this and rarely interfere with authors who do not follow the letter of their law.
Second, the ResearchGate site has an option for privately requesting copies of publications from authors, and most computer science authors are quite willing to share (again, there is a strong "information wants to be free" culture in much of the community).
The efficacy of these approaches varies from subcommunity to subcommunity, but it sounds like the type of general access you're looking for may well be sufficiently served by them.

The comments contain very good information.  I think the only real alternative is to settle for access to the subset of those articles that happens to be freely available, either from authors' websites or the arXiv.  Note that authors can indicate on the arXiv version where a paper has been published, so you can avoid using papers that aren't peer reviewed if you wish.


text:
What are the differences between a cover letter and an application letter?
I would like to apply for a PhD position, and I have found the following requirement in their web page:
An application letter that includes at least:

contact information of the applicant
the topics of interest in ranked order
names and contact information of two senior academics available for reference per e-mail,
information whether the application can be used in filling other vacancies at the Department and,
from which source the applicant received the information regarding the current call.

I was thinking to put all these items in a list and fill them like some type of survey, but I am dubious if I should do that. I mean I have found templates for cover letters, but not for application letters. Is there any format for this?


text:
GRE score sending how long
This question is similar to this one but is different enough I felt I should ask it separately.
I am wondering how long it will take a given institution to receive my General GRE scores from ETS.  Note: I am not asking how long it will take after I take a test for the scores to be sent.  These are scores from a test I took almost two years ago; I am asking how long it will take for scores already available to be sent and available.
If it matters, I am putting my score submission request into ETS on Jan. 2.  I don't know if some times of the year are busier for them than others and thus processing and sending times may vary.

You should contact ETS to ask about that https://www.ets.org/gre/contact#general_inquiries
Generally I'd say that processing and sending times should be somewhat the same. But I think that mail delivery would depend on how far the institute is from ETS.

@MohamedKhamis Can you please turn this into an answer so that I can vote it up?

You should contact ETS to ask about that https://www.ets.org/gre/contact#general_inquiries
Generally I'd say that processing and sending times should be somewhat the same. But I think that mail delivery would depend on how far the institute is from ETS.


text:
Examples/anatomy of good tenure track recommendation letters
I'm wondering if anyone has a link to some (obviously anonymized) tenure-track recommendation letters.  I'm in the processing of putting together some applications and I've been curious to know what a good letter looks like versus a bad letter.  There have been a few relevant questions asked here, such as this one, but it seems like for the most part I'm just seeing categorical philosophy about letters.  I would be interested in reading a "great" letter and a "mediocre" letter, just to get a feel for what the difference looks like.

I think this is an excellent question, and (as of this writing) the sole answer below is very helpful. The problem is this question is much like asking senior researchers for a copy of their successful grant application: sure, a few will let you see it, but a not-so-insignificant number of them want to keep the best practices to themselves. :-)

While I do have sample TT recommendation letters, I'm not at liberty to share them, even anonymized (sorry!).  However, I've just re-read a few, and there are a couple commonalities I'll share below.
First, all made a strong case for the applicant having already impacted their field (for the record, all applicants completed a post-doc; none were straight out of graduate school).  This is noteworthy, because recommendation letters for tenure seek to establish that person's real, significant contribution to the field.  It is perhaps not surprising that the letter for a TT position has a similar flavour.
Second, all made a case that the work was likely to be funded. One of these had never previously received funding, the others were supported by post-doctoral fellowship or as some kind of co-PI on larger grant.
Third, all but one seemed to make an effort to highlight the 'departmental fit' in terms of research interest, both directly and complimentary.
I'm not sure how to answer your question about a 'great' letter vs a 'mediocre' one, but I did get the sense that the most compelling letters, in my opinion, had an air of 'obviousness'. What I mean by this is that the authors wrote as if 'obviously you must know this work' or 'undoubtedly you're familiar with...'.  I can't be sure if that was actually true or whether it was a marketing ploy, but it seems to have worked.
Hope that helps, and good luck!