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U.S. grading system: Why discrete grades?
Background
In the U.S., many colleges adopt an A–F grading scheme, topped with pluses and minuses.
Professors vary in the way they assign A to F grades, but my sense is most rely on discrete “bins”. For example, some professors use relative grading and (roughly) give an A to the top third or the class, a B to the second third, etc. Others will give an A to students who get between, say, 100% and 95%, and A− to students between 94% and 90%, a B+ to students between 86% and 89%, etc.
Using discrete bins necessarily implies some knife-edge cases where a student is right at the border with the next bin, and it would have taken very little for that student to jump into that next bin and improve their letter grade by one “level”.
That would be all fine (I guess) if letters where only honorary titles, and what mattered was the actual underlying percentage grade. However, in most places (i.e., all the places I know), it is the letter grade – and never the percentage grade itself – that is attached to the student’s academic record.
This could be an issue per se if a student wanted to show proficiency in a particular topic and got, for example, an A− that was in fact very close to an A. That student’s academic record will forever show very good but not perfect for that course, whereas it should really indicate almost perfect. This creates understandable frustrations from students who nearly made it.
Things get even worst when averaging through different courses and computing one’s GPA, since most colleges then use a scheme like the following one:

A: 4.00
A−: 3.67
B+: 3.33
B: 3.00
B−: 2.67
C+: 2.33
…

Again, this means that the half of a percent a student needed to jump from an A− to A will have a significant effect on that student's GPA, where really, the effect of getting one more half of a percent should be negligible, regardless of the baseline percentage one is starting from.
In a world where GPAs are taken so seriously, this means that half of a percent can make a significant difference in a student’s life and career. Again, this can create understandable frustrations for students who nearly made it.
My question
I know that there are “palliatives” to deal with the discrete grading scale and avoid some of these knife-edge cases, such as rounding up decimals. In all fairness, I don’t think those are real solutions (rounding up decimals just moves the problem from one threshold to another), but that's not what I am interested in here.
What I would like to know is:

Are there any arguments in favor of using a discrete grading scheme like the one above?
Or is just a product of history and the difficulty to coordinate practices across the vast number of U.S. colleges?

In other words, is anyone claiming that the discrete scale has virtues of its own other than the fact that it is used in so many places – creating comparability –, and that it would be hard to coordinate a change at all those places at once?

Well, I would dispute that "GPAs are taken so seriously," but I digress. I have always thought of it as "Is a 92 really more meaningfully better than a 91 that the transcript should reflect that"? Basically, it reflects the fact that GPAs are not very sensitive by not overestimating their precision. And as you point out, edge cases are an unfortunate byproduct of this.

Also, this system isn't unique to the US (Canada does it too) ... you could just ask about discrete scales, instead of asking about only the US

That student's academic record will forever show "very good but not perfect" for that course, whereas it should really indicate "almost perfect". I don't understand your logic here, since A doesn't itself mean "perfect".

The though of A- meaning "almost perfect" is peculiar. If I said someone got 91.273% in a class, wouldn't that be even more emphatically "very good but not perfect"?

A discrete scale is necessary to distinguish "pass" and "fail" at least

How many significant figures do you want to keep? Unless it is infinite, there are still a discrete number of bins, many of which are not particularly useful.

@Vladhagen - years ago I had a ~30% average in a physics class. That was a solid A. Another reason grades and not raw numbers are bad...

@JonCuster I take entirely the reverse lesson from your experience.  The examiner obviously set an unexpectedly hard examination so everyone got unexpectedly low marks - however the grade could be normalized so that it can be compared with other students doing other courses.

British Universities award undergraduate degrees at four classes:  First, Upper Second (aka 2.1 or two-one), Lower Second (aka 2.2 or two-two), Third.  My father was told that he had the highest 2.1 in the university (possibly in his subject); he would much rather have had the lowest first!  (I believe they also record actual marks these days.)

@MartinBonner - it was entirely expected actually, and that was my average for the whole course. The professor did not expect a student to completely solve any problem, although I occasionally would. The point was to see just how far one would get. All grades are normalizable, making a limited number of discrete grades even more desirable, barring some national law on how to normalize them.

A numeric grade for such things as an essay, research paper,  sculpture, etc. is just plain nonsense.  At the very least, you need to limit numeric scores to those topics which can be objectively graded, and even then there's a lot of slop.

Here's a relevant assignment from a class I did on assessment in my teaching program. Not very detailed but hopefully something useful there. N.B. This course did not bring out my best work. :p

I am in favor of using the US discrete grade system. Some thoughts I will address are as follows:
As the OP mentions, in the US, the ABC grade system is relatively standardized and well understood by a large variety of institutions. It makes comparisons among students from a variety of schools more compatible (although, yes, not perfectly comparable).
Beyond this, I feel that the ABC system delivers the appropriate amount of granularity. After all, you have to truncate grade percentages somewhere. In some sense every system is discrete.
One method that I have used for my students in math classes in the US is a clustering system guided by the grade cutoffs. The percentages are guarantees. After that, I cluster students into grade groups, with students who barely missed the cutoff still usually getting adjusted up. For example, let's say that we have the following percentages:

93.23%, 93.17%, 92.88%, 92.81%, 92.08%

I would give the first four students A's and the final student an A- under normal circumstances. (It is usually more nuanced than that). I feel that the grades I gave my students usually very accurately described their proficiency relative to the stated outcomes of the course.  This was also vastly true when I was a student. In fact there were times where I would prefer to take my A grade than my raw percentage. An 'A' sounds much better than "I got 83% raw, but I was the second highest grade in the course."
In my opinion, the ABC system actually is a stronger system than a raw percentage system. Is a 95% in Dr. Haskin's Calculus I class better than a 97% in Dr. Bodrel's Calculus I course? Both would result in an A grade. Or how would a 97% in Calculus I compare to a 97% in Floral Design? By using the ABC system, we effectively run a sort of "low-pass" filter on the grades. In my opinion this actually allows for a fairer comparison between students.
Let me also add that having a raw percentage system would be awful from the perspective of an instructor. Students already anguish about their grades. Now picture if they had to anguish about not just getting an A, but getting 100%. You would end up having students with 98% in the course worrying about getting 99%. It just becomes excessively fiddly. As a former student myself, I would actually hate a raw system. I was grateful for being able to get an A with 94% in a class without having to worry about pushing it up to a 95%.
I will close by saying that school and grades are not always fair. Such is life. No matter what system you use, there will be drawbacks from one perspective or another. There is no system that is perfect.

Addendum: Several comments have mentioned thoughts on being graded relative to others. Note first that my proposed method never moves a student down a grade, only up. Several comments seem to overlook that.

@BartoszKP: "You are grading not 'their proficiency relative to the stated outcomes,' but 'their proficiency relative to the stated outcomes and relative to other students.' Did other students doing well make this student suddenly know less?"

How could raising a grade indicate a student "knew less"? It seems that raising a grade would actually indicate a student knew more.
I guess I could grade students solely on their raw scores, 100ths of a percent be damned. Then students would be graded with less relativity to their peers. But wasn't such a "zero-tolerance of rounding up" system one of the named drawbacks of the ABC system? It seems like we are trying to play both ends of the flute here. I can see that it would be patently unfair if I rounded students down a grade. I must say though, I have never had a student complain about being graded "relative" to their peers when I rounded their grade slightly up.
Secondly, to continue the thoughts on being graded relative to one's peers, we need to keep in mind that it is next to impossible to provide students from current semesters the identical exam experience as students from previous semesters encountered. By adjusting scores within semester, this can help control for slight variations in exam difficulty from semester to semester. Note that I do not always have complete control over exams, since they often must be written on teams with other professors. All told, which system seems more "fair," a system that does not control at all for variability in exam writing styles or a system that attempts to account for that?

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I really appreciate anything that has "As a former student myself..." in it :)

This creates understandable frustrations from students who "nearly made it".

It’s worth keeping in mind that life outcomes are also discrete, and this also causes students (and everyone else) similar frustrations: you either get the fellowship/top grad school admission/job/promotion/whatever, or you don’t. So students would still experience the same frustrations even with continuous grades, and even under the completely unrealistic assumption that their grades are a perfectly accurate tool for measuring their level of knowledge, which obviously they aren’t.
I’m not a huge fan of the US grading system myself, but honestly I don’t think it matters very much whether grading is done on a continuous or discrete scale. Grades are a statistical tool and should be interpreted as such - when averaged over many scores they have some (limited) meaning, but any one individual grade doesn’t necessary mean very much.

For the overwhelming majority of classes, grading is at least partially subjective. In the case of essay-based classes, this is immediately obvious. Likewise for art classes. Even for math and hard sciences, though, there's an element where graders need to make their best judgements. When a student solves an equation incorrectly, but their only mistake was dropping a sign deep in the weeds of an entire page of algebra, do you take off 1% or 2% of partial credit? If a lab report didn't have the expected accuracy in its data but was within a single significant digit, how badly do you ding the student?
As a result, the exact, four-digit-long raw percentage grade you get in a class gives an impression of being an extremely precise measurement, but in reality, it isn't. Depending on how the graders happened to be feeling  and thinking when they looked at your projects and tests, your grade could plausibly have gone up or down a whole percentage point or two with you submitting exactly the same work yourself. Assuming your raw grade is perfectly accurate is very similar to reading that the Earth is 25 thousand miles in circumference and assuming that number is accurate to the inch.
Because of this, I would argue that the discrete letter-based grading system is actually a more reliable measure of your performance, one that does not overplay its accuracy. The distance between partial letter grades is about the same magnitude as the margin of error I would give to raw percentage grades. So after your raw grade is converted to a letter grade, you can be confident that the grade you received is very highly likely the grade you deserve, even accounting for the subjectivity, fuzziness, and slight randomness of assigning percentage grades.

Consider the perspective of a transcript-reader. They're interested in scanning a school transcript with records of maybe 30 or 40 classes (for a bachelor's degree), with maybe half of those in the major, as quickly and efficiently as possible. The fact that there are a small number of different marks is a help in parsing the record.

The A-F scheme is just a single glyph per class, instead of the
two-glyphs (or three) for a 0 - 100 system.
The granularity of letter grades is entirely useful to the reader; it is doubtful that the reader cares about the difference between 85% and 86%, and so that ones-place digit is often just wasted space and eye-strain.
The A-F system seems compatible with "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" rule, which says psychologically people can juggle and assess around 5-9 discrete things in short-term memory at once.

Furthermore, many non-STEM classes have, by their nature, qualitative grading on assignments, performances, etc. Consider, e.g., the policies listed for Grading at Yale. The first possible protocol listed is "Letter grades for all assignments"; the second protocol listed is "Numerical grades on all assignments", and it asserts that this is the standard only for STEM courses. So in the first (possibly more common) case, presenting a number at the end of the course with two-digit precision would be vacuous.

I think your point 1 is wrong. People don't read glyphs: they recognize larger structures than that, and a two-digit number is just such a structure. That's why all-caps is so hard to read: because you can't recognize the patterns within the words any more, you're forced back to reading letter-by-letter like a five-year-old.

@DavidRicherby Of course, in my experience, reading 2 digit scores is difficult on-par with reading all caps, which probably sits between point 1 and point 2.  Consider 99, 98, 99, 97, 98, 97, 99, 99, 89, 99, 98, 97. as compared with A A A A A A A B A A.  I do find the latter makes it much easier to spot a meaningful outlier.

@DavidRicherby: I disagree. Parsing a number like "97" is not like recognizing the word "strawberry". Numerical and linguistic mental structures overlap but are not identical. E.g., There is research that mentally comparing two-digit numbers is slower than comparing one-digit numbers (as must be the case computationally).

Very good point that not all work is given a numerical scale.  That was very common in my studio art classes, and I find it personally easier when I'm grading essays to just give things an A - exceptional, B - good, C - acceptable, and then focus my comments not so much on justifying a 92.5 vs 94.25 as on providing useful feedback.

@CortAmmon that's because modern-style digits essentially are "all caps" for numbers. In a font that has old-style digits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures), it would be a bit easier.

There are a number of issues here. One, however, is that the table you give doesn't seem accurate to me - or at least, I'm pretty sure it isn't used by most US colleges.
Second is that your assertion that a student can "miss" a higher grade by an insignificant amount, while true in theory, is less true in practice. I never let that happen, for example, always giving students the benefit if a point total for the course was insignificantly different from that of another student who got the higher grade.
Third, it is a tradition that A means "finest kind", B means "good but not finest kind", C means "acceptable", and D means "needs improvement". Yes those are bins but I don't think I can make a statement that a person with 3.22 is in any way better than a person with 3.20. The means by which I assign grades are not that fine grained. The grade is an aggregate, not an absolutely precise measure. So I can't even distinguish that finely between students.
Fourth, if we compare different courses, even by the same professor, but in particular by different professors in possibly different fields, does a 3.22 mean the same thing. Is a 3.22 in a basic philosophy course exactly the same as a 3.22 in an advanced math course. It would be foolish, IMO, to assert that they were the same.
All of the above indicates that indeed, the grades are just bins. And the bins are accurate enough that, for example, an employer or graduate school admissions system can make valid judgements about the prospects of a student. There are exceptions, of course, but in the main, simple bins represent reality better than giving a precise measure to something that isn't.
Don't confuse accuracy with precision.

Also note a psychological effect of "bin grading". If a student realizes that with just a bit more effort they can raise their grade from B+ to A-, they may just be wiling to put in the effort. That won't occur with grades that are purely numerical.

Just as an FYI the missing a higher grade does happen. I had a physics class with 3 midterms, 1 final. 95%, 100%, 95%, 100%. Missed a recitation and didn't have a doctor's excuse, got a 0 on that. My final grade was a 92.49%. Department refused to round to an A despite being 1/100 of a percentage point away from the cutoff and getting a straight A on every exam, and a perfect final. It was a large state school and this sort of thing was by no means uncommon. It can be extremely frustrating, but I still agree I'd prefer it over a raw system.

@brenzo That almost sounds like an issue of administrative bullheadedness, not an intrinsic issue of a well managed ABC grade system. Not sure why departments dig in their heels like that. I guess it's sort of an issue of "budge an inch, slide a mile."

@brenzo, actually, the department was the wrong place to seek redress. It should have been handled by the faculty member originally. He was the one being unreasonable. The department almost never changes a grade of a professor, and, probably, should not.

Yes this was about 5 years ago. I did indeed email the professor directly and he replied it was department policy to never change a grade and even CC'd the department head on the reply. I'm completely confident he could have, but it's ancient history at this point. ;) It was a good life lesson to learn - sometimes you simply have to accept things as they are and move on.

@brenzo: But normal rounding of 92.49% is down, to 92%. You want some kind of pre-rounding in your favor prior to the actual rounding?

@DanielR.Collins Correct in the rounding. And rounding of 92.50 is up, to 93. Which falls into the A bucket instead of A-. Anyone who received a 92.50 would receive an A. My argument was that receiving an A on every exam, having a perfect final, being 1/100 percentage point from said A, and only being lowered to an A- for a single attendance instance did not demonstrate that I had a lack of knowledge of course material but was instead bureaucratic nonsense and being bullheaded. It should instead constitute extenuating circumstances. I worded my request more kindly, of course.

So, yes, they were "technically" correct but there is more than one way to be correct some of which entail more common sense than others. https://xkcd.com/1475/

@brenzo: You weren't 1/100 percentage point from an A. You were 51/100 percentage point away from an A. Somewhere there's a student who did everything you did, and had perfect attendance, and feels they should have a higher grade than you did.

You say "I never let that happen" because you shift students close to the boundary upwards. But that is just equivalent to moving the boundary down. There is still a hard cutoff, and some students will be just below that cutoff.

half of a percent can make a significant difference in a student's life and career.

Here is where you are wrong. The difference between an A- and a B+, or an A+ or an A, etc will never make a difference in your life.
This is because:

That variation will regress towards the mean in any students career
GPA has arguably the lowest ratio of actual_importance / given_importance of anything you have ever encountered in your life. It is nearly entirely irrelevant once you no longer have to apply to colleges.

So why do discrete letter grades exist? Because they are easy to understand and compare, but most importantly because it doesn't matter. Grades do not define who you are. They are an inaccurate and minor indicator of what you could become, and useful for binning students into their colleges, no more no less.

“[GPA] is nearly entirely irrelevant once you no longer have to apply to colleges.” Sure, and the skill of your heart surgeon is nearly entirely irrelevant once you’re no longer in the operating theatre. But it’s pretty damned important while you are in that phase of your life, and that phase of your life has a pretty damned important effect on the rest of your life...

I think GPA can be very important if someone wants to work in an academic (or academic-adjacent) setting. Coincidentally, that's almost everyone here.

But it’s pretty damned important while you are in that phase of your life — No, it really really isn't.

Point one is valid, and I agree with the final paragraph. But can we address the first sentence? What if you are relying on a course's grade to meet some statutory requirement, to receive some stipend, or apply for some funding? For example, consider being in your final term in an undergraduate or master program and being binned one rank too low to graduate. This happened to a friend of mine. I'd say that accounted for a significant economic change in her life.

gpa doesnt define you, you define your gpa. It is a side effect of who you are, not the definition of who you are.

I actually think the letter-grade system is very good.  First, it makes the grades comparative in the sense that - in principle at least - the top student of a class can get an A+ even if the numerical grade is not >95.  Second, while students may get unlucky in some courses and just miss threshold, they will get luck in other courses and just be above threshold: it tends to average out over the time of the degree.
Most important in my mind is that the binning system captures the reality that numerical marks are overly granular: there is no material difference in competence level between a student with 89% and one with 90%.  The marking scheme is not that accurate and the difference in marks could be due to some trivial factor, such as fatigue on the part of the marker, or bias such as having marked a number of very good copies prior to marking a slightly less good copy, etc.
Students are IMO overly fascinated by numerical grades, and this binning - in particular the ability to assign A+ irrespective of the actual numerical grade - is a good overall way to assess students within a peer group.

Just to briefly reiterate other answers:
The information content (in an information-theory sense) of "precise numerical grades" is much lower than it might appear, even apart from complete lack of information about the purported meaning of numbers at a given level.
Apparently many people believe that "letter grades" are "absolute", and resolve (!?) the ambiguities and context-dependence of numerical grades. Of course, this is not true in the first place, and, in the second, there is grade inflation, and so on.
But/and there are virtues to discretizing, as also observed, because it can reduce fixation on grades ... to some degree. Sure, edge cases are still an issue, but without discretization everything is an edge case.

All grades are discrete. I've never had a teacher use an irrational number for a grade. I also have never had a professor use more than ~5000 or so discrete "points" in a grade. Said another way all possible grades in a course can be uniquely described by the numbers 0-5000.
The problem is 3392 of 5000 captures absolutely nothing about a student's knowledge, skill or level of effort (why we care about effort when grading is a misery to me, but that's not important here).
Grades represent two or arguably one thing. First they represent how a student has done (in the graders opinion) against other students. Secondly (and far less importantly) grades represent if a student can accomplish the material in the future(the link between academic and "real life" performance is tenuous at best).
So given the goals and problems of grading all we can really do is separate students into categories and let the chips fall where they may. Humans are really bad at dealing with more than 10 or so categories/bins. So we created a system with ~10 bins and assign students to those bins.

Short verion:

Most of the answers here discuss the ABCDF grading scheme in the context of some numerical or percentage grading scheme. One strength of the ABCDF scheme is that it enables grading schemes decoupled from numerical score and instead focus on mastery of specific key content. Because the ABCDF schene is based on a commonly understood philosophy of student achievement, it allows comparison of student grade outcomes in courses that use a numerical or percentage grade basis to those that may use mastery, specifications, outcomes, or other non-numerical basis.

Consider a course with five learning objectives, each covered by an exam. If an instructor set a C as a 70% exam average, a student could achieve this 70% by a number of ways on a spectrum in between the following extremes:

Earning an average of 87.5% on four exams and earning a 0% on the last one (say by earning 100%, 100%, 100%, 50%, and 0%) ,and
Earning 70% on all five exams.

The former extreme could be trouble if the student earned a zero on the exam for a learning objective that is critical for success in the subsequent course. In fact, a student could easily earn a B despite failing an exam. This student would feel confident in their preparation for the next course, but might be no better prepared than a C or D student.
For example consider a General Chemistry I course that covers the following key topics: atomic structure, molecular structure, solutions, stiochiometry, and therochemistry. All five of these topics are foundational for many other chemistry courses. What if a chemistry department determines the strongest predictor of a student's grade in General Chemistry II is not their course grade in General Chemistry I, but their grades on the stoichiometry and thermochemistry exams. Their grades on the other three exams are not strong predictors. That is, a student who earns a C in Gen Chem I but does well on the stoichiometry and thermochemistry exams is more likely to earn an A in Gen Chem II than a B student who bombed the thermochemistry exam.
The ABCDF scheme allows a General Chemistry I instructor to set a grading scheme to require passing the exams on stoichiometry and themrochemistry in order to earn a grade of C or higher and qualify for General Chemistry II:

Grade of A - Pass the exams for all five learning objectives (scoring 80% or higher is a pass), and pass the advanced project.
Grade of B - Pass the exams for all five learning objectives (scoring 80% or higher is a pass) without completing the advance project; OR meet the criteria for the Grade of C AND pass the advanced project.
Grade of C - Pass exams for three or four learning goals (scoring 80% or higher is a pass): stoichiometry, thermochemistry, and any other goal.
Grade of D - Pass exams for at least three learning goals (scoring 80% or higher is a pass), but fail to meet the criteria for the Grade of C; In other words, you failed the exam for stoichiometry, thermochemistry, or both.
Grade of F - Pass exams for fewer than three learning goals (scoring 80% or higher is a pass).

If the instructor allows students to earn the chance to retake an exam they almost passed, say by crossing some threshold on turning in homework or by completing a certain number of optional review quizzes, we virtually eliminate the "knife edge" issue. In my case there will never be a student who has 92.7% and gets an A- while a student with 93.1% gets an A. Students pass the exams or they don't. Students pass the advanced project or they don't. This specifications-style of grading emulates life to a certain degree. On the job, an employee completes a project by the deadline, or they don't.
However, even if I use a grading scheme like this, I am still basing my grading philosophy on the common understanding that the grade of A is reserved for the highest achieving students, the grade of B is reserved for students who have mastered most of the courses, the grade of C is reserved for students who have learned enough in my course to be successful in the next course, the grade of D is reserved for students who have learned something in my course but not enough to be successful in the next course, and the grade of F is reserved for students for whom I cannot be certain they learned anything in my course. This philosophy makes my A comparable to another instructor's A despite the radically different means of determining that A.
In a system where I was required to note a student's grade using a numeric grade of some kind, be it percent or percentile, I could never run a grading scheme like this one. And I like this scheme better because it forces my students to focus on learning and mastering key material instead of playing a mathematical game with a point-based system.

The 0–100 grading system is problematic in several regards.
To begin with, let’s assume the true knowledge level of a student can be meaningfully represented by a number in [0, 1], and that the grades are professors’ best efforts to estimate that figure. One professor’s function will end up being convex upward while another one’s would be downward, one will convert 0.5 to 40% while the other would grade the same student at 60%.
Not that it even makes sense for professors to try to define such a function in their minds. If the problem was solved correctly but with an inefficient method that suggests the student failed to master a more appropriate approach, is that worth 100%? 90%? 80%? 84.2%? What weights to apply to each of thousands of possible factors? Not to mention the grading will likely drift as the professor goes through students’s papers because it’s so vague.
Additionally there are some perverse incentives, such as the professor feeling free to deduct a point here and 5 points there for things that annoy that professor personally, where most would have refrained from turning an A into a B on petty grounds.
A discrete system can be formalized much easier. Like math olympiads: you solved it correctly? You get a 7, no variance.
Professionals in most fields take pride in their ability to estimate parameters of complex things, but study after study (I think Kahneman quoted some in his famous Thinking, Fast and Slow) shows that many such professionals are consistently outperformed by simplest methodologies akin to the APGAR score.

I think it depends partly on the nature of the class.  As a (former) teacher of electronics, I could argue that ABCDF is too granular:

Can student identify a clipped signal or not?
Can student measure the voltage on a test point or not?

But an art class would be very subjective.

And somebody could infer the answer to those questions from, e.g., a score of 80 vs 79?

They meet the objective or they don’t.  Two options.  Some things may be fuzzy; some things aren’t.

OK but you've given two objectives. So there are at least four possible grades: does neither, can identify but not measure, can measure but not identify, can do both. That doesn't seem to map directly onto any kind of grading. Long story short, I'm not really sure how this answer relates to the question.

If you can’t do both, you aren’t ready for the job.

So you're advocating pass/fail grading in this scenario? I think you could edit this answer to make it much clearer.

I'm also confused by this answer. In electronics, is identifying a clipped signal the only goal of an entire course?

Of course not.  The point is that there are specific skills that a technician must have.  The employer (Navy) doesn't need a 75% technician.  Or to put it another way, there's a reason why you can even find pass/fail courses in universities.

@Wgroleau Who said anything about the Navy? If I am understanding you correctly, you're proposing a class with two objectives: identifying a clipped signal and measuring voltage. A student should get an A iff they can do both and an F if they can't do both? Is that correct?

The question was whether ABCDF is not granular enough.  My answer is that sometimes it is too granular.


text:
If the interviewer says "We have other interviews to conduct and then back to you in few days", is it a bad sign to not get the job?
I had an academic interview. During the interview, some panel members showed  positive body language. In the end, they asked me for a reference. After that, the main interviewer said that they had some more applicants to interview and would get back to me after a few days. I wonder if that means that they are not interested in me? Is that a bad sign?

In general when somebody says "hello" they just mean "hello"... Same thing here.

This is what I say to every candidate we interview (except for the last one in a hiring round). It's neither a good nor a bad sign, it means exactly what it says on the cover.

Even if we like the person and we (the interviewers) individually plan to offer the position, we still say something like this. Getting an offer for the job on the spot is incredibly rare (only happened to me once). Often the interviewers cannot make the final decision and need to run it by their supervisor.

@Erwan sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Lemons ripen faster than cherries. If they had decided to reject you independent of how good or bad the other applicants were, there would be no reason to delay telling you.

@RonJohn You took the words out of Freuds mouth...

@alephzero: I've always thought it was (maybe misguided?) professionality and respect that prevents people from telling directly after an interview that they are rejected. Do people really often reject directly adter the interview?

@user111388 worst I've had happen was finding the rejection letter on my doormat when I got home from the interview. The letter had been postmarked 3 days BEFORE the interview and mentioned that the interview (that hadn't happened yet when the letter was written and sent) was the reason not to proceed...

I don't understand the close reasons. Here arw good answers demonstrating that this means nothing.

It's not a bad sign at all. If they have more interviews arranged, they wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't interview them. They don't just hire the first person suitable for the job. They hire the best person for the job! This may still be you - or it may be the next person to be interviewed.
Be patient, and they should let you know one way or the other!

In fact, giving all candidates on the short list "equal" consideration may be a legal requirement. (Depending on the jurisdicition)

As an interviewer, we have been instructed that we must never say in the interview whether we're going to take them or not.
Suppose we do want them. The interview process also includes the manager, the technical interviewer(s) and the HR representative all comparing notes afterwards, and possibly then passing the best candidate's details to the next level of management for sign-off. We can't do that with the interviewee present, and we can't very well make them wait around. And if the interviewee has gone through an agency, technically the request to hire has to go through them.
And suppose we don't want them. If we say straight out in the interview that we're not going further, we're leaving ourselves open to the candidate getting unpleasant with us. We don't want our staff getting abused or possibly attacked during an interview. So rejections happen at arms' length, by phone or post.

For the case that you want them, it surely wouldn't hurt anyone if you said "We want you, but the hiring process takes the OK from some other parties that we have no control over". I've heard from people getting calls directly after the interviews to be told exactly this.

@lighthousekeeper Directly after the interview, sure. I've done that myself, regardless of whether someone else is lined up for another interview, if it looks like we've got a good one. But like I said, we can't tell them that in the interview.

In the comments above, alephzero mentions that if somebody is very bad, they may be rejected immediately (I also doubt it).

@user111388 Maybe for him. Not for us though, as I said.

It is what they mean...it not bad or good.

While it's true on average that they're probably saying exactly what they mean, it's all about
Context
Depending on how well you came across, how well you interviewed them, their manner when they say it, it could be a good sign. Or bad.
The unspoken part might be:

(We really want to hire you now but) we have other interviews to conduct and then (we can talk about when you can start).

Of course, if they're not nudging you and winking obviously, then it might instead be:

(We don't think you're that great but) we have other interviews to conduct and then (we'll know if there's someone better suited to this job).

But I have to complain you buried the lede... When an interviewer says they'll call in "a few days", ask them to be specific. Your reasoning might be that you have other offers to consider, other interviews to attend (possibly out of town?), and so on. Be polite and positive, naturally. But it looks like in this case, their vagueness is the all the context you need. Keep trying!

The only true answer.

The reason for marking it off-topic is incorrect. "only someone familiar can answer this question and it cannot be generalised to apply to others." I just generalized it. Whoop-de-doo.

The main interviewer said that they had some more applicants to interview and would get back to me after a few days.
Is that a bad sign?

It is not a bad sign. Quite the opposite! It is a good sign. It is an indicator that their hiring process is well-designed.
Think about it: Would you really want to start working at an institution where your future colleagues were hired on the spot, without the institution looking at the other candidates?
Concerning your chances at this institution, it is not an indicator at all. But even if it was – you shouldn't concern yourself with that. All that matters for you is the final hired/not hired response.

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text:
Is it normal to CC my professor when they introduced me to someone?
Research student in Japan here.
Recently, my professor (Japanese but studied in the U.S. for  long) introduced me to his friend who was a guest lecturer. I got the guest’s contact information and communicated with him through e-mail. When I reported that at the next weekly meeting, my professor gently advised me that it is generally considered “rude” if I didn't CC my professor when I contacted someone he introduced me to.
But that confused me, because back in another university in the U.S,  when I CC’d my professor to contact another researcher, my American professor told me nicely,
“Let me give you a general advice. Professors don’t want the inbox clogged up. You generally always want to save your professor’s time. Simply report to me in our weekly meeting when there is a meaningful progress”
In both scenarios, I met the guest lecturer in person, and I was given their contact info directly from them, not through my professors.
While I will follow my current professor’s direction (to be safe), I was genuinely confused by what is the norm or standard in these situations.
Can anyone tell me what is the norm?
I assume it is safe to CC professors from now on?

I don't think it can be reduced to etiquette. It is reasonable that the professor want (actually s/he must) to know the email content if the latter engage you as member of the group. Else the response might varies depending on culture, personality, level of trusts and so on.

Sometimes, you just can't win.

I appreciate how polite you're trying to be

Most faculty are curious and would like to know what their students are doing, therefore you should CC them. If you CC them, they don't have to ask you if you sent the email.  If you CC them, they have the opportunity to clarify what you have written.
Some faculty consider deleting an email to be an unpleasant chore.  If your supervisor is one of those people, do not CC them.
Otherwise it is a matter of individual preference.  Few people consider it rude to CC or rude to not CC.

The nicknames of OP and you together coincidentally made a nice Big Bang Theory reference.

To cc or not to cc; that is the question.

Obviously you don't get a hundred emails a day. Especially complete threads discussing every detail back and forth including two "thank you" emails are very annoying. You cannot focus on the relevant emails but are distracted by irrelevant noise.

@usr1234567 delete the noise. Humans are excellent at filtering out signal. Use that ability.

echoing others, I'd do it on a case-by-case basis.  That said, I send out an email roughly once a week and try to mention what I've been doing & everyone I've spoken to - it cuts the noise down and concentrates the information they're getting.  I'd make an exception and CC the person if they might want to have some input, or have specifically asked to be CC'ed.

Thank you for clarifying. I'll take on them by case-by-case. Also I'm surprised by the number of warm, funny, and helpful responses here ;)

"Anyonymous" Sure, Sheldon.

As a professor, I suspect it's fair to say that there is no "norm" about this (in my culture at least). Both your professors' remarks are reasonable ways to think about being cc:ed on an email.
When in doubt, I recommend doing the cc:ing, after comparing the potential downsides: needing to delete one email (several seconds of thought), vs. being unsure about how one's student is doing (a more lasting mental state).

Thanks for the first hand opinion! I was really curious about this.

I think there is no norm. I can understand both positions, as
a) I don't like to be included as recipient of many emails, as I don't like to follow every detail but want to get an overview. So I'd like to be informed in weekly meetings.
b) When I forward the contact of a friend or an old contact, which I value, I don't want that a student messes up with inadequate questions or at worst rude requests.
People tend more towards a) or b), also depending on the topic. You need to find out what to do depending on the topic and the professors you interact with.
As you know now that it is a deliberate topic, ask next time whether the professors wants to be included. From that you can derive if you need to include your professor for less controversial topics.

How about ask? After the introduction you could just ask your professor if he would like you to CC him, in case of reaching out to the contact.

I'll mention another option that no one else has yet: the BCC (blind carbon copy) option. Putting someone as a CC recipient on an email is a good way to indicate that they're being included more for informational purposes, rather than expected to actively participate in the conversation. Putting someone as a BCC removes them one step further from the conversation - the other recipients can't see them, and they will not receive further emails from people hitting Reply All to the email chain.
If you are copying your professor mainly to inform them that you're making contact, and don't want to weigh them down with a potentially lengthy exchange of introductory emails, BCC is a good option - it will keep everyone in the loop about the lines of communication that have been opened, but will prevent cluttering the inbox of the BCC recipients. In general, I don't think there's a single right answer for how closely an advisor might like to be involved in your day-to-day communications, so it's probably best to learn individual preferences of whether the person would prefer to be a recipient, a CC, a BCC, or not included at all.

My advice is to send two emails. One to the contact establishing the connection. The other letting the contact provider know that you appreciated the assistance and that you have followed up. This avoids the question of CC’ing and communicates to all parties. Additionally, since each email is addressed to the specific recipient they will not feel they are just observing a conversation (such as the US professor situation).
My personal preference would be to be CC’d. Though the biggest issue in this scenario is being removed from the ongoing conversation that may arise in the email chain.
In the US, my experience is that this is quite a significant issue for business organization and communication. The true issue at hand is email mailbox organization and a lack of tools in email UI.

I think you must act on the situation. If you meet your professor from university CC with him, but if it's another professor don't do this!

Thanks for sharing your answer. But it is rather short, often good answer give rationals. Further, it does not add anything new compared to the existing answers.

I think it depends on the situation. You may ask first if it is okay to send an email, so it is not necessary to include in CC your professor.

As @Anonymous Physicist wrote, most faculty personnel are curious and would like to know about what the student is doing. But in addition to this, I think there is an extra element. I'm extending my answer to a broader question "when do I have to cc?" rather than answering to this case only.
The list of many activities can be categoriesed in several ways, but for the scope of this answer I will use a subjective metric: important and not so important. On important matters such as purchases or potential collaboration with a visiting professor, always cc your supervisor because many issues may arise that you were not aware of. For instance, if a purchase is made there may be errors in the purchase such as incorrect amount, quantity or other errors.

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text:
Writing letter of recommendation for someone I have never met
I'm a first year PhD student. A student applying for an undergraduate institution in the US has asked me to write him a letter of recommendation. I wonder if a first year graduate student can write recommendation letters to high school graduates applying to US colleges.
This is not my main question though. That student has a connection to my family. I discussed physics with him once and I wasn't able to form any idea about his physics ability. What's worse, he wants me to recommend his friend who is also applying to US colleges, although I have never met or spoken with his friend at all. He wrote himself a recommendation (which I have to send as if it's I who had written it) that he had worked with me in the physics laboratory and that he was my strongest student. I wish to know how to proceed. I have two options:

refuse to write that letter

write that I have never met him.

I wonder how common is this.

Its not the main question so I'll just comment here, but it is very unsual for a first year grad student to be asked to write a letter of recommendation, particularly since he is asking you to say he is your best student, when presumably you have no students. If I were the admissions tutor here, I'd probably throw such a letter in the bin.

You have no basis on which to write a fair and honest letter so you should tell your "friend" that you are unable to help. I doubt that this is very common, actually.

"I wonder if a first year graduate student can write recommendation letters?" Can, but should choose not to in most situations.

Option 2 has the potential to make you and the student look bad. It's not clear why you're so conflicted over taking Option 1. Is it because it's a family friend?

@Jay I had been asked to write a recommendation for a 3rd person who never asked me directly. In these cases, Option 2a, writing that I cannot say anything relevant about that person, is the only option. Why is that bad? Of course, one should not agree to write and then write something like that.

Option 3: Decline to write. - "I'm sorry, I cannot do that, Dave." (note the difference in tone between "refuse" and "decline")

To address "how common is this", what country is this?  LoR practices vary from country to country, and certainly students writing their own letters is reasonably common in some regions, and I suspect using family/social connections to get letters also is.  I don't know about outright dishonesty though.

In some countries this is the standard practice. There, the point of a letter of recommendation is just to say "this important person is vouching for me", and the actual content is irrelevant. This student might just not know that the standards are different elsewhere.

In the worst case, writing such letter(s) could sabotage future applications from other students, if somebody in the US university flags the applicant's school (or even country) as "not understanding the concept of academic standards". If one piece of information is apparently fabricated, then everything else might also be fabricated. If future applications go straight into the trash, the applicants will never be able to prove they were rejected unfairly.

@CSguy2020 Option 2a is bad for you and the person you're writing the letter for. A letter that says "I don't know X" is at best useless (X has used up one reco slot on a letter that says nothing), but will probably make the admissions official think "X is dishonest, because they solicited a fake recommendation." It also reflects poorly on you, because you agreed to do something so against the norms. It makes it seem like you don't know how recommendations work. Why can't you explain this, and refuse?

You shouldn't write a letter of recommendation for someone you have spoken to once, and you certainly shouldn't write a letter of recommendation for a friend of some you have spoken to once.
You should never lie in a letter of recommendation, but it is generally also bad form to write negative things in a letter of recommendation. If you can't in good faith write good things about a candidate, you should refuse to send the letter.
EDIT:
I'll add an answer to your first (not main) question from the comments:
It is very unusual for a first year grad student to be asked to write a letter of recommendation, particularly since he is asking you to say he is your best student, when presumably you have no students. If I were the admissions tutor here, I'd probably disregard such a letter. Unless it was obviously dodgy (claiming things which were clearly untrue), in which case, it would count (heavily) against the candidate.

Maybe strengthen this a bit, similar to what you have in your comment to the question.

Since OP says there's a family connection, perhaps "decline politely" rather than "refuse." You could write, "I'm sorry, but as I have no basis to evaluate your work, I am unable to help." (Hat tip to Buffy for most of those words.)

I agree with this answer, but just to clarify a potential misconception among young readers: there are circumstances in which it makes sense to write a recommendation for someone you've never directly spoken with, if you've evaluated there work in some way.  (E.g., a student in a large lecture class.)

I wonder if a first year graduate student can write recommendation letters to high school graduates applying to US colleges.

I can’t say much about the extent to which such a letter would be helpful to someone’s application, but a letter from a graduate student, assuming it is truthful and written in good faith, is absolutely acceptable. I can imagine situations where it would be pretty helpful actually, others (like your particular situation where you know very little about the applicant’s actual abilities) where it wouldn’t be.

he wants me to recommend his friend who is also applying to US colleges, although I have never met or spoken with his friend at all. He wrote himself a recommendation (which I have to send as if it's me who had written it) that he had worked with me in the physics laboratory and that he was my strongest student. I wish to know how to proceed.

First and most importantly: Do not under any circumstances send a letter of recommendation containing untruthful statements. If you send it you would be committing serious academic misconduct. It is unethical and if the lie were found out you could get in serious trouble.
Second, this request reflects quite poorly on your family member/connection. I suggest explaining to him in no uncertain terms that his request is unacceptable and unethical, and that he should not be abetting his “friend” in cheating his way into college. Don’t “decline politely” as some people are suggesting in the comments. I assume if someone were to ask you to rob a bank as a favor you wouldn’t be “declining politely”. This young man is at a point in his life where a tough bit of reality can be immensely helpful in helping him mature and learn how the world works. If you care about him, you’d do well to tell him the truth about the nature of his request even if it’s unpleasant.
As for writing a letter where you say you don’t know the friend of your family connection, presumably that would itself be a dishonest act since you would be telling the friend that you’d be sending the fraudulent letter that he wrote, but actually sending a different letter. You would be leading him into trouble, and while arguably he deserves it, it’s more ethical and decent to try to prevent him from getting into trouble in the first place by steering him towards a better path.
Edit addressing some of the comments: when I said not to decline politely, my issue is not so much with the “politely” but rather with the neutrality implied by “decline”. So for example, OP should not say

Please tell your friend that I don’t feel I can help with his request. Sorry! And best regards to Aunt Betsy.

This doesn’t send any helpful message about how serious and unacceptable it is to take part in a conspiracy to send fraudulent letters of recommendation. Instead, what I meant was that the reply should be clear and direct about this issue (whether it’s polite or not is beside the point, OP can use whatever mode of address feels natural to them when talking to this person). For example, something along these lines would be much more helpful:

Hi [name],
I can’t help your friend by sending the letter he wrote, and you should know that what he is asking is completely unacceptable and is a form of cheating. I would never lie in a letter of recommendation, your friend shouldn’t ask anyone to do such a thing and you shouldn’t help him if that’s what he insists on doing. It can get him into serious trouble, like being expelled from college or not getting in in the first place.
Anyway, I understand you’re just getting started with the whole college application thing, so maybe you didn’t know. That’s okay I guess, but I wanted you to understand how serious this is. College isn’t high school, and cheating is taken extremely seriously there. If you need more advice about how to handle any of the application business, I’d be happy to discuss it, so feel free to reach out.
Give my regards to Aunt Betsy!

"I assume if someone were to ask you to rob a bank as a favor you wouldn’t be “declining politely”."  I heard many bank robbers will give up if you decline politely to give them money.  I am not sure if that is true, though.  Anyway, just because someone is doing something bad is no reason to be rude.  I would assume this high school student is acting out of ignorance - not all high schools have competent college admissions advising.

@AnonymousPhysicist reminds me of this movie. Yes, in movies bank robbers are very charming and gentlemanly, in real life I kind of doubt that this is typical.

I also don't see a problem with "graduate student", since many of the student's high school teachers likely have only an undergraduate degree. However, such a letter would raise red flags unless the letter clearly showed why it is more informative and reliable than one of the usual letters from a high school teacher the letter is presumably replacing. But given the comments in the OP's second paragraph, the OP doesn't come anywhere close to satisfying this.

I mostly agree with the response, except for "[not] declining politely". There is almost never a cost to be polite, at least at first interaction. The message still can be the same. A polite response is more likely to be listened to rather than raise defensiveness.

@CaptainEmacs the point I was trying to make wasn’t about politeness versus the lack of it. I edited to clarify.

I think there may be some cultural considerations where the person asking for the recommendation is coming from a culture where this kind of pro-forma recommendation is common (maybe along with other things that would be seen as academic misconduct in the US). The OP still shouldn't do it, but might have to adjust the explanation accordingly.

@user3067860 lying is not “pro forma”.

@DanRomik I'm trying to not make a value judgement about someone else's culture.

@user3067860 that’s an impressive level of moral relativism. If someone from an unknown culture asked you about murder, would you refer to murder as “pro forma” to avoid offending cultures where murder is regarded as no big deal? It seems to me that in trying to avoid a value judgment about some completely hypothetical culture (that may not exist) you in fact end up expressing a value judgment about the very real and non-hypothetical act of lying to receive a benefit that one doesn’t deserve as being acceptable. That’s not helpful to OP or anyone else here, regardless of their culture.

@user3067860 (and others): I read and evaluated admission packets a couple of times when I taught here in the 1990s (this task was rotated among groups of teachers from year to year), and while this was a high school, the format and admission (for last 2 years of HS) was much like that of a college. One of the packets in my stack had a letter on official state government letterhead that was written by the governor (or at least signed by the governor). I wasn't sure how to treat it and asked the others, and together we decided to essentially ignore it. (continued)

@DanRomik If I tell someone they look nice on their wedding day when actually they are ugly, is that also equivalent to murder? I don't think it's "OK", but I'm also trying very hard here to avoid saying that anyone specific is a morally bad person.

They asked me how strong the candidate was, because if he (and it was a "he") was reasonably strong, then it wouldn't be something we really needed to worry about. Unfortunately, he was marginal, although not so poor that he was unlikely to get in. As it turned out, he did get accepted, but primarily because at that time (and maybe now, I don't know) there was a strong male/female unbalance in applications, with the female applications being much more numerous and stronger than the male applications (an issue we had many school-wide recruiting discussions about).

@DanRomik I got your point about making a clear statement, your clarification is good. On the matter of culturally comparing giving a questionable reference with murder - there is a good reason why the time of Dracon the lawgiver are over; and why not every felony and crime are punished by the death penalty. Such comparisons just invite polemics, even if it's just meant to clarify. We should not forget that some countries consider some of Western rules unacceptable. It is better to say that in the target country (US) such a practice is unacceptable, rather than to claim universality.

Just to be clear, the governor's letter wasn't over-the-top praise, and there was nothing that indicated the candidate's achievements and potential were being inflated. Rather, it was more an appearance of conflict of interest, because the school was funded directly from a separate/individual state funding source that was directly under the governor's purview.

@CaptainEmacs thanks, sensible comment as always. It’s certainly the case that in the US the practice is unacceptable, and it’s possible that in other cultures it isn’t (I’m not claiming otherwise). Nonetheless, I don’t think the statement “lying is not pro forma” requires an added qualifier. That was my main point in the above comment.

Don’t “decline politely” as some people are suggesting in the comments. Exactly. Both the request to sign a fake LoR and to recommend an unknown friend are completely out of line.

Don't lie under any circumstances

Never mind academic misconduct, under certain legislations this is straightforward fraud and might get you a huge fine or put you in jail.

If something goes wrong and either of these people get into academic or other kind of trouble your name will be dragged into it.

You will spend the rest of your life worrying about this, in case something goes wrong.

Academia within subjects is a small world. People know people and they know who knows who - especially in research fields. You can easily get caught out if someone asks questions.

It is not unknown for institutions to follow up on a letter of recommendation to find out more about a candidate. If you get a telephone call asking for further details, what will you do.

Once you give in to this sort of thing, you will be seen as an 'easy-touch' and you will start to get requests from other people.

Find a way to refuse
Let us know if the culture you are from makes it difficult or impossible to refuse. This will help with formulating an answer.

Please explain the downvote.

The other answers have covered this specific situation, where you should clearly say no.
That said, I do want to push back a bit on the idea that graduate students shouldn't write recommendation letters for people applying for undergraduate programs.  I have a lot of experience at summer math programs, and it is quite common for students to get a letter from one of their graduate student instructors at the summer program, and our students have excellent placement at top US undergraduate institutions using these letters.  This may be in part because the program itself has a strong reputation at top universities, but I think it's also the case that graduate students at top universities often have more experience with top math students than a typical high school teacher does and can make a more credible and accurate identification of the difference between being in the top 10, top 100, or top 1000 math students in the country in their year.
(My case is even more unusual, because I was homeschooled before that was very common, but I got a letter from my counselor at the Ross summer program who was at the time I applied a 2nd year math graduate student at Harvard.  I got into every university I applied to.)

Other answers already confirm your concerns that writing a LoR for someone with whom you have discussed physics once has problems.
The key point being that you need to be honest in what you write, for both your sakes.
However, an alternative approach to your dilemma is to talk to him again, making clear to him that writing anything inaccurate is off the cards.
Let him know that you would be able to help him, but would like a video chat to explore what to write.
Effectively, you would provide a friendly interview/ mentor and discover strengths that can be touched upon in your LoR.
When writing your LoR, you can in turn be up front about this, stating your relationship but then calling out those things you have learned in your conversation.
You could potentially even do this for the friend, this approach allowing you to be both supportive and honest.


text:
What questions should one ask to the former/current students of a professor before deciding whether to do PhD under him/her?
Before deciding to do one's PhD under a certain professor, what questions should one ask of his/her former and current students?
Many students (including me) are not sure what exactly to ask. May be a community wiki here might be a general source for such students.
Please recommend phrasing of the question(s) also.
This is a related question, How to evaluate potential advisers on grounds other than their research/publications? but it is much broader. I'm looking for specific questions to be asked to the students. Also manner in which to ask :)
P.S. I have accepted an answer, but feel free to add more answers if you think they differ than the ones already given.

"How did your job search go?"

It is difficult to understate how important any substantive engagement with students of a potential advisor is. Great question.

Also worth mentioning that it's overall a good idea to talk to the potential advisor (PA, as @Suresh put it) and current staff before  contacting the former staff/students, to avoid any personal bias. Go meet them with fully transparent glasses, instead of tinted ones :)

I think the most important is:

Are you happy with your PhD in general?

It covers a lot of issues, but usually you don't want to do a PhD in a place where students are unhappy and frustrated. The good thing is that if students feel really bad, they rarely hide it.
The next things are related to:

General contacts on the line student-advisor (How much contact and support can you expect, both for research and administrative stuff?).
Funding (Is it a problem or a non-issue, e.g. for attending a conference?).
Research (What the actual research looks like? What is the toughest part, biggest emphasis on, the most time-consuming part, etc?)
How much time does it typically take to finish PhD? Does it happen often that someone drops out?

Other questions will depend of things you consider important. You may expect a lot of autonomy, or a lot of guidance. You may expect a very ambitious programme, or a PhD-life balance. You may like to teach, or you may like to keep it at minimum. You may be eager to travel a lot, or prefer to stay mostly in one place. You may be more into a particular branch of science or methodology, or into another...

+1 for "Are you happy?" So many focus on the research topic, the logistics, the funding, the amount of teaching, and other nuts-and-bolts that we often forget to ask questions about the personality and mentoring capacity of PhD advisers.

+1 for "if students feel really bad, they rarely hide it". :)

Maybe the PhD-life balance bit could be emphasized a bit more, but +1 nevertheless. :)

Disclaimer: I am not a student. I am the "potential advisor" (PA)
For current students:

does PA have time to meet with you when you need help? Or does PA want too many meetings?
how much guidance are you given? Too much? Too little?
is the relationship "work only"? Do you talk about non technical academic issues?

For former students, the comment by Anonymous is dead-on.

From my own experience, I think that a 'yes' answer to the first part of your third question may carry little valuable information.  It seemed that for my supervisor, to what extent the relationship was 'work only' depended on the student rather than on him, and I imagine this might be common.

This is true. A lot of this can be subsumed under: is the relationship sensitive to what the participants need. Or, is the advisor sensitive to what the student needs ?

A couple of variations on Anonymous's fabulous comment:

"What do you want to do when you finish?"
"How is your advisor/department helping you prepare for your eventual job search?" — Be wary of confused blank stares, even from the younger students.
"Where did your advisor's former students go after they finished their PhDs?  Where do they work now?" — Be wary of "I don't know."  Compare with the answers to the first question and with your own career goals (even if they're not well-formed).

I wouldn't advise putting too much weight on the answer to the last question.  At the time I started my PhD, only one of my supervisor's 8 or so previous students had stayed in academia (which was my goal).  Now I and my 'academic brothers' on either side are also in academia.  It's going to depend a lot on the students, not just the supervisor.  Still, I would agree that 'I don't know' is a bad answer.  If an advisor is really interested in their students, they will probably talk about the previous ones occasionally (mine did).

Also, it's better to work with other students who are curious enough to ask.

That, too.  Although students of the same supervisor needn't necessarily work together at all, of course!

Do/Did you (the current/former PhD) enjoy working in this supervisor's research group?  Do research group members work with each other collaboratively and help each other? And ask the PhD student to elaborate.
This question tries to get at what the research group dynamic is. This is fairly important in my opinion - the last thing you want to concern yourself with is politics in the research group. I have seen PhD friends frustrated by this.
Ideally you should ask this question in a less formal setting (some grad school visits will have time for social events). And sometimes you meet grad students who are comfortable sharing their experience openly. If you are not comfortable asking this question, as it can be an awkward question for the supervisor's current PhD, you can simply observe the interaction between group members, and between group members and the supervisor.
Is the supervisor generally available? Does it take a long time to arrange a meeting to meet with the supervisor (used to be the case with my supervisor because he was so busy)? Does the supervisor respond immediately and effectively (another friend's supervisor tend to leave questions to last minute)?
Are group members expected to work 24/7 or 9-to-5? Some supervisors expect you to reply to emails immediately, and some work strictly business hours.
Does the supervisor take a hands-on or hands-off approach? Are students expected to be really independent with lots of freedom, or are they guided/directed along the way with less freedom?
Does the supervisor support his/her students to consider career paths outside of academia? Some supervisors only want their students to go into academia, and it will be harder to discuss options with such supervisors.

For Q2-Q5, the right answer will depend on your own preference - what you want is a supervisor whom you will work well with.
And, I know you ask specifically about questions, but make sure you watch their body language and see if the lab members seems comfortable with the supervisor or not. This says a lot about the supervision style.

How to phrase #1? If one directly asks Do research group members enjoy working with each other, or not? will not he be met by surprised eyes?

I edited #1 to provide some additional information. Let me know if this helps. Like I said in the edited answer, you might get a lot of how people in the group work with each other by observing them in the lab or watching their interactions. So sometimes it is not necessary to ask the question.

@user13107: Maybe, but so what?  It's an important question!

Is your advisor planning on going on sabbatical any time soon?
My horrible advisor did this during my second year (he spent the year in Ireland instead of the US) and it did not help my efforts at all.

Given that professors usually go on sabbatical once every 7 seven years, and the average ph.d is at least 5 years long, the odds are high that a student's time in a Ph.D program will intersect with an advisor's sabbatical. But it's good to know these things ahead of time.

@Suresh, I always tought that someone that took much more then 3 years to get a PHd was consider to be slow - maybe the UK expects students to work harder then else where.

The UK is structured differently from the US (where I am). There (and in much of Europe) the Ph.D has a hard time limit IIUC. In the US, it's more open ended, and five years (in computer science) would be considered close to the average (with variations within subdisciplines). In the natural sciences and humanities, 5 would be considered very short.

#1 question (for former students):  How long did it take for you to graduate?

I disagree that this is the #1 question.  An advisor who graduates PhD students in 2.5 years isn't worth much if those students end up driving taxis afterward.

Every professor is unique, every student is a bit different. The most important thing in a grad student/prof relationship is that you can work effectively together. If the professor can work well with his current students, then he can probably work well with new students. So what you want to find out is: does the professor give the students the environment they need to flourish? Do the current students work together extensively, or do they compete with each other? (For example, do students collaborate on papers or does everything funnel through the prof)? Are the current students excited about their research projects? (You can figure this out by asking them to describe what they do).

Link to the urch.com forum discussing exactly these kinds of issues: Questions to ask current graduate students
The problems people have differ greatly by field, e.g. the funding issue depends on whether students are supported by grants of their advisors (sciences and engineering) or by the university. Also whether the courses in the field are popular among undergrads (many teaching assistant positions available) or unpopular (the opposite). The questions you should ask should address the common problems in your field.
Edit: forgot the shameless self-promotion: I wrote about the suggested questions for admitted graduate students once in my blog.

I'm a supervisor not student these days.  I had things go rather wrong as a student, quit my project and moved to a new team and restarted everything.  I knew about my proposed supervisor's field reputation (excellent - I still think this even after things went wrong) - I knew nothing about what they were like as a supervisor (they sucked).
This also should be more a conversation over coffee - you don't want them to feel like they are being grilled or are under evaluation from you.  Remember, if you accept an offer they could be your colleagues so you are selling yourself to them too.  Keep things positive on your end.
How would you describe their supervision style? Different styles suit different students, know about yourself as best you can.  I know of advisors that have contracts and forms that students fill in after each meeting summarising their understanding of the key points and next steps that advisor then responds to and they both sign -> student speaking of this loved it, I would have run screaming.
How would you describe the group dynamics?
You usually aren't just working with the supervisor but the group.  Even if your project does not involve the group - these are your colleagues.  How do they tend to function?  Is it everyone on their own? Collaborative?  Collegiate but not collaborative?
Did you have much / a lot of freedom to direct your own project?
What sort of involvement have you had in funding proposals (grants / commercial etc.)
This can be good and bad - too much involvement and you are taken away from your core business.  But some involvement can really help develop skills useful for industry and academia, and can help land that next position.
Does your supervisor include you in opportunities. Will their "big name" actually get you anything?  Remember "big names" are often super busy, so there needs to be a trade off (big names do help just by reputation, but it isn't everything).
How involved are you in the larger group / School / Institute / University?. Just useful to know how they tend to work, and again knowing what sort of person you like to be.  If you just want to focus on your project and nothing else, being expected to engage widely will feel like a drain.  For others it is great career development opportunities (and helps them stay sane while studying).
What are your career goals - how well have they been supported through your studies?  Have they changed through your project
Helpful to understand their perspective.  Also good to know if the supervisor is super helpful if you want to become a copy of them, and not helpful if you have different goals.
What's a typical work week look like for students (hours, office vs lab vs field, wfh vs in office, group meetings, paid work etc.)
This is important information about work style and allows you to evaluate whether you will have a nice work environment (based on what you value) and good work-life balance (based on what you value).  If your supervisor says I expect people to work 9-5M-F (or set your own hours), but the typical is 8-8M-Su then that's really important information. Even if your supervisor is happy with you doing a "standard" day, will you feel comfortable keeping that balance when everyone else isn't?  How much "other" stuff are students typically doing and how will that affect your plans?
With paid work (teaching, tutoring, research assistant stuff that is not on your thesis) - how well does the number of hours you are contracted to do match to what you are expected / end up doing?
If you pick up 10 hours teaching a week will you typically spend 8 hours on it? or 20?  Important to be able to make an informed decision about what you want and can afford.  You might earn double what you'd get at Maccas so might be fine that 10 on paper = 20 in practice cause you still earn as much and are happy with the work, or you might resent what really is wage theft and an illegal, dishonest and exploitative practice.
What's the administration of your studies like eg reports, presentations, hurdles etc.. No external oversight is a problem - you do need some outside your supervisor review that your project is at an appropriate standard, is practical and realistic with resources (including time), and you aren't being hung out to dry.  You need some way to raise issues and have people whose job it is to deal with them if they happen (and they are not uncommon - even with good supervisors).  But, too much administration and it becomes a burden.  Understanding what is required is just nice additional information.  It probably won't be the same for you - universities love to change up their admin frequently in my experience.
Question about the project and funding others have proposed are also really important, I've focussed on the "other" stuff that often gets missed.

A lot of important criteria have been mentioned here. There is, however, one integral criterion which, in my opinion, covers everything: the careers of this professor's former disciples. Using internet, you can easily gleen this info.
My long-term friend is a professor at a university, which is regarded very good but not fancy (not in the Ivy League, or alike). However, young people are trying hard to join his group -- and some choose it over Ivy League offers. Aside from him being a brilliant scholar and a devoted teacher, an important reason for his popularity is that (a) all his postdocs become professors; (b) all his grads get postdoctoral fellowships (not just regular postdoctoral jobs, but fellowships) -- and eventually they also get permanent academic positions (usually, faculty at good schools). The people in the community know this, and regard it as a great luck to work with him.

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text:
How to approach American English vs. British English spelling in a paper?
I am currently writing a paper, for which my title and core problem is spelled differently in American and British English.
I don't worry about my professor preferring one way of writing over the other, as I'm not residing in an English-speaking country, but:
After all, my paper is being written in English, even it won't be published. Thus I wonder:
Is there a "standard procedure" for such cases, at least in US Ivy League universities or in certain citation styles? (I am currently using APA, 6th (our prof. didn't prescribe any specific citation style) as it suits my personal preference of how a reference should be cited and displayed.)
I will definitely mention both words in the "keywords" area, but other than that I will go with one spelling, namely the American English one. The word is "harmonization", if that should be important.
Sorry for my lack of initial research, I found this SE question though.

Advice I was given on this is to use American spelling when in doubt. Because if you use American spelling, Brits will say "They are using American spelling". If you use British spelling Americans will say "Who is this moron who can't spell 'center'?".

It might help to be more precise about your question. Is it "Should I use the American or British spelling for harmonization in the title of my paper that won't be published?"

@Neal I don't know who misspelled British, wasn't me. ;) Happy to see that this question found some interest / upvotes. DJClayworth: That makes sense. Fuhrmanator: I sure agree with you! But I am really interested in the general conflict (what happens next time otherwise?) and more so I think the SE community is. My specific case is really not that interesting, it is just a starting point IMHO.

I have to add: Unfortunately the OECD as well as the original publication(s) on which most of my research is based use the British spelling: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/16751/harmonisation.jpg Considering this, would this influence your stance?

Whatever style guide your use, citations should be cited exactly in the original spelling. Doing otherwise would defeat the whole purpose of citation: uniquely identifying an existing publication.

I could find no direct quote from APA to justify this (except that, well, they don't indicate that you have the liberty to edit the title of cited works!). However, multiple secondary sources make it clear, as for example:

Notes: Please "copy" the title of a book/an article/whatever (as far as the spelling of words such as "behavior"/"behavioral" are concerned) […] exactly as in the original.

Citation style guides tend to be more explicit for foreign language works, where most of them explicitly state (in some wording or another):

Give the original title, and, in brackets, the English translation

The question in bold is: “Is there a standard procedure for such cases […] in certain citation styles?”… but I agree it's not entirely clear what is asked.

F'x it is true, I actually didn't think about the implication of "citation" vs.(!) "citation style". But after my recent look into the Chicago and other style, those "big players" meanwhile offer a whole "styling guideline" for the rest of the academic paper, unless I misunderstand and e.g. the "Purdue OWL" content is entirely "made up" and not founded on APA guidelines (cf.: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/).

This doesn't answer the question.

That's why I frankly have a hard time clicking the checkmark on any answer. I haven't seen a single citation standard, publisher manual or university (chair) quoted (incl. source).

@grunwald2.0 you're asking someone to prove a negative :)  The title is the title, and when you're quoting someone, you're not supposed to edit what you quote, period. (Or you mark it as such, and there are rules.) I've edited my answer to add what little relevant information I could find.

F'x, thank you for your edit, this actually in turn answers another of my questions! :) Again, don't worry, I wouldn't dare to change the spelling of a cited title. But as papers should (ideally) mostly quote indirectly, I am thrown back to my own text, about which I have to decide, if no initial guideline should be given to me -  discussed controversially by anon below. I comment here only to carve out an answer as precise as possible, I myself already settled on AE.

I typically don't worry about this question as a writer.  For what it's worth, I'm based in the United States, so I default to American English.  I always spell check my papers, but in the more than 25 papers that I've submitted, I've never gotten any feedback about using American spelling rather than British spelling; this question is very relevant for me since many of my papers are on graph colo(u)ring.  It may be useful to note that in the journals that I submit to and read, I've seen both American and British spelling.  (I think many editors typically let the authors choose which they prefer.)
So my suggestion is this: choose either American or British spelling and stay consistent throughout your paper.  Don't lose any sleep over this.  It will not be the deciding factor in whether your paper is accepted.
However, for doing a literature review, I feel your pain...

Would you recommend adding keywords in the other language, or really stick to one or the other ?

I would recommend sticking with one spelling per keyword.  For human readers, there will be no confusion.  For me, listing both alternatives would be a bit of an eyesore.  Hopefully, if this becomes a significant issue, we'll see search engines that automatically check for spelling variants... (but I'm not holding my breath).

I would recommend using a single consistent spelling standard for the entire paper (except the bibliography, where you should always cite verbatim).  American titles and British keywords in the same paper would likely raise eyebrows.

Dear JeffE, interesting point of view! Why would they raise eyebrows? Keywords are certainly intended to help find and classify a document, or aren't they? Then again, this would be the ONLY exception from the rule (aside from my reference section) that I would make too.

I strongly agree with "Don't lose any sleep over this." The people who write search engines do know about the issue. I just typed a search with the English word "colour" in the US version of Google, and the results included hits for the American word "color".

If your question were about the -our/-or distinction, or the -re/-er distinction, it would be a real question, but with -ise/-ize there's no contest: go with the Z form, as it's accepted on both sides of the Atlantic.
The International Organization for Standardization favours British spellings, and uses the -ize form. (This is known as Oxford Spelling.)

Dear TRiG, thanks for sharing your extensive knowledge from the English SE and about Oxford Spelling (Wikipedia).

For references, F'x is correct: citations should be given in the spelling used in the original publication.
Beyond that, however, when writing the main text of your article for submission to a journal (or for any other work submitted to a professional publisher), you should follow the style guidelines they set out. Pretty much every journal should have a statement about which set of spellings they prefer (usually based on its country of origin).
For instance, the textbook I am using to teach a course this semester is written by Americans but published by Oxford, a UK publishing company. The word "center" is spelled "centre," and so on.

"Pretty much every journal should have a statement about which set of spellings they prefer" - this! But: "you should follow the style guidelines they set out" - that was basically my question: Do they? Are the specific examples, i.e. who can (if legal) point me to the section of a style-guide or an author guide of a major publisher, where this is specified? Because your example "they spelled it BE" is not an explicit rule set for authors, we just witness a matter of fact. Further, most papers won't end up in a (text)book, so I dare to say we're really just talking about the academia "niche".

As an example, Taylor and Francis journals specify either UK or US spellings as preferred in their author instructions. ACS and AIP journals regularly prefer US spellings (ACS's style guide is published as a book).

I think this is really a non-issue. Any decent search engine will return hits for your paper, even if one searches for harmonisation (the spelling more common in Britain) rather than harmonization (the spelling used in the USA, and also valid, though less common, in Britain) as long as a literal search isn't used.
Example search.

I'm amending my answer to address the part of your question about whether specific journals require certain spellings. A Google search limited to the .edu domains finds lots of author guidelines that address this issue to various degrees, but nothing shows me that there's a single way to go.

Thanks, good point, I noticed that meanwhile too. That was only part of my question though. And I think we will have to check on other search engines then just Google Scholar to verify that this is indeed the case.

England is in Britain, in case you hadn't noticed.

I should have said "American spelling" rather than "English spelling" in my first posting. Thanks for the sarcasm and the edit.

If the intent of the writer is clear and the content is clear, who cares?  As long as the message is clear, the writer has performed his duty.  I know this is a short putt, but, bottom line, communication rules.  If you can't be understood, why bother to try to be understood?

What about consistency throughout? e.g. 'optimisation', and 'optimization' -- If there are 5 occurrences of this word (3 of one, 2 of another one), then would not reader be unhappy about it.

The best thing is to pick and choose the sensible spellings from both dialects. I'm Canadian, but I refuse to write neighbour, a synthetic spelling which has a superfluous letter. On the other hand, the American spelling center (rather than centre) holds no advantage of brevity, and betrays only ignorance of the Latin root centrum in which tr aren't separated.
Regarding -sation endings versus -zation, these are a favored in a handful of languages like French, Dutch, German. However, not in others like Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Croatian, or Czech.
-sation is bad etymology. For instance the Online Etymology Dictionary gives us this for the word organization:
mid-15c., "act of organizing," from M.Fr. organisation and directly from M.L. organizationem (nom. organizatio), noun of action from pp. stem of organizare, from L. organum "instrument, organ" (see organ). Meaning "system, establishment" is from 1873. Organization man is from title of 1956 book by American sociologist William H. Whyte (1917-1999). Related: Organizational.
As you can see, the original Latin has a z. Since we don't gain any brevity, again, we should go with the spelling which respects etymology. In this case, it is the American one.
Forget borders: respect etymology and favor brevity, but do stop short of writing night and light as nite and lite.
I would hang a footnote on the occurrence of a word with a contentious spelling, explaining my position on spelling and that is that. Academics do not have to be tied to other people's conventions based on national borders.

English is not logical.  Following logical (as opposed to nationally consistent) spelling rules will only frustrate the reader.

Interesting part on "-sation is bad etymology.", yet my conclusion from this is to go with American English, as that was the question. I can't just create a new standard of English when publishing, I'm no linguist or language researcher.

We are not discussing journals here, but there are journals that require consistency of spelling, so this "best of both worlds" approach does not work much in practice. Actually, some journals also specify which of American and British spelling to use.

Unless your paper is on etymology, nobody wants to see it cluttered with footnotes about spelling.

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