text:
What kind of colors are good to use on a whiteboard for a colorblind student?
Basically, what are the 'ideal' colors to reduce the impact on colorblind students? Is there a good set of colors that help many (or all) colorblind students differenciate ?

Perhaps relevant: https://jfly.uni-koeln.de/color/

This is so specific that you might best ask the student itself: there are lots of different types of colourblindness, so I guess it's not possible to make a general statement here.

Colour-blindness comes in many forms, at least one of which precludes any differentiation by colour at all (seeing ‘in black and white’ only) — so there's no possible set of colours that will help all students.  For accessibility, any information presented by colour should also be presented in some other way as well.  (E.g. clearly differentiating by brightness too, or by dotted and dashed lines, or by adding symbols, or something else.  — That can help students with standard colour vision too, of course.)

@mdewey if I draw 2 functions on the coordinate plane, you want to know for sure if they are |x| and -|x| or x and -x.

@mdewey Surely it's straightforward to recognize that's it's much easier to use three different colors to draw something than to try to hand-draw three types of dashed lines or something.

How are your figures so complex that black on white won't do? In ancient times (1970s) white (chalk) on black or green got us by. This is a serious question before I could provide an answer, not a joke.

@Buffy Colored chalk had been around since forever...

You might look into tools to emulate colour blindness on a PC, and apply those to photos of your typical whiteboard work.  ColorOracle is a cross-platform (Java) desktop visualisation tool, and G'MIC (usually used as a plugin to GIMP) can produce images to save.  And that's just free software (otherwise reduce to greyscale by desaturating in any image editor of your choice).

@Buffy there's a difference between "impossible to portray in B&W" and "possible to do in B&W, but would look clearer in colour"

That's such an important Question, every educational jurisdiction should have clear and specific guidelines not just for 'a colorblind student' but for every recognised kind of colour-blindness.
Are you saying your local education authority has no such guidelines?

In my red-green colorblind experience, the most important advice I can give is to use multiple means of distinguishing visual data. Do not rely on only color.

If you want to use dots of different colors to distinguish between sets (e.g., scatter plots, vertices of graphs), then make the dots different shapes as well: circles, triangles, squares, diamonds, crosses, etc.
If you're drawing lines of different colors, draw them in different styles: solid, dashed, dotted, dash-dotted, wavy, etc.
If you need to fill in areas with different colors, vary the brightness of the color: dark red and bright green, for example. Or, use different styles of shading: solid, vertically striped, horizontally striped, etc.

The point is to make sure that there are multiple approaches for readers to comprehend the visual data. Even if a student is not colorblind, they may have some other condition that makes the drawing styles difficult to distinguish. The students will be able to use the different colors to interpret the data.

This seems to address slides and papers, not writing on a whiteboard.

@TerryLoring I think what I wrote addresses both.

However a lot of these are easier to implement on a computer (drawing several distinct dashed or dotted lines consistently, for example).  So perhaps part of the answer is to have more complicated figures prepared in advance for projection or handouts (print the latter B&W to test).  That works for lectures, less well for tutorials.  When working through a problem on the board, IME it's likely you'll draw a curve on a graph (for example) discuss it a bit, then add another curve for comparison, so there's separation in time in a live discussion.

@TerryLoring the whiteboard in this office has both a sketch graph using solid red and dotted black lines (the black pen is also better, so the red would map to grey without colour information), and a sketched diagram in black using different hatchings.  The latter was very common in industry where a decent draughtsman could pick up any old biro and clearly sketch a fairly complex design.

Color-blindness is complicated, and comes in many forms, so it is nigh certain that there is no "magic bullet" set of colors that is going to be universally distinguishable for all students.  Indeed, there are people who don't really perceive color at all, so if you are using color in important ways, you will necessarily be excluding those students.
Instead of trying to find the right set of colors, I would suggest not using color at all as the only way of conveying meaning.  Design your lectures and plan your board work so that it works in high-contrast black-and-white.  Don't rely on different colors to convey meaning (you can use color, but don't rely on it).  Mark H has already given good advice on how to do that—I don't have much to add on that front.
However, I do think that there is a buzzword with might be helpful:  Universal Design for Learning (UDL).  In particular, you are thinking about the parts of instruction which relate to the UDL guidelines on Representation / Perception.  As with all buzzwords, there is good and bad, and there is a lot of aggrandizement on the part of CAST (the organization pushing for UDL), but I have, nevertheless, found many useful ideas in the resources provided on the linked page.  If nothing else, the UDL framework provides a useful tool for helping to evaluate the quality of instruction.

A quick anecdote:  during my masters program, I worked as a TA.  My very first teaching position was a multivariable calculus class (yes, my masters institution had graduate students teach full classes, ostensibly under the supervision of a typically laissez-faire course coordinator).  Not too far into the semester, I gave a lecture which I thought was really, really good.  I had practiced drawing figures in three dimensions on the blackboard, and had used all the colors of chalk available to me to convey the material.  I felt great when I finished the class.
And then a student walked up to me and said "Xander, I'm red-green colorblind.  I don't know what you were talking about."
We went back to my office, and I worked through the material with the student a second time, without colors, but golly, that sucked.  It felt terrible to learn that my awesome lecture was useless for at least one student.
After that lecture, the student and I talked about how to make the class more accessible, and I adjusted.  We worked together to come up with useful strategies.
I guess the point of this anecdote is the following:  you should also consider talking to your students and asking them what they need in order to be successful in your class.


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Do universities hire graduates from lesser universities?
Recently, someone analyzed computer science professors at top universities and found that over half of the professors at the top 51 universities graduated from a top 10 university. Others have also brought this up. From my personal observations, most schools do hire graduates from better-ranked schools.

Is this because of the competitive job market? We have so many good applicants, we have to narrow it down some how!
Or is it simply that these schools produce the most PhDs?
Has this always been the case?
How rare are exceptions to this? I know of a few people who graduated from a top 75 school and got hired at a top 50 school. But what about bigger gaps? The top 10 schools seem to just swap graduates, do they ever hire from a 50+ ranked school?

Update 2018: I have accepted a tenure-track position at a top 75 department at an R1 university immediately after graduating from an unranked department at an R2 university. It does happen!
This may or may not generalize to other fields and countries.

It is related to the quality of papers published, but better ranked universities do provide a better environment for high quality publication.

"I think this question can generalize to any field and country." - can it be generalized like that? e.g. do university rankings (at least those considering whole universities across all subjects rather than particular specialities of single departments) receive an equally high attention everywhere as in the U.S.?

@O.R.Mapper: the trend need not be due to any attention being paid to university rankings by employers. At any given rank, there are loads more students graduating than there are teaching positions opening up. So assuming that (a) top students tend to go to top unis and (b) top ex-students want teaching positions, one would expect them to apply to a wider range of unis and again beat the same people who they beat a few years ago for positions to study :-) The big question is whether the observed effect (>50%) is similar elsewhere, or if CS in the USA is somehow special.

@SteveJessop: In that case, do the assumptions apply? Where university rankings are not paid much attention to, factors such as proximity to where one lives, amenities in the city of the university or simply the availability of a particular subject of studies (it seems that almost every university tries to offer one or two unique things that are available hardly anywhere else) can easily be primary factors in choosing a university. So (a) is not necessarily true, which in turn means that (b) cannot be taken for granted, either.

True, but another way to look at this is, "why is that someone good enough and motivated enough to get a post as a professor at a top-51 university has a 50% chance of having studied at a top-10 university?". Answer might just be "because >50% of them were good enough and they wanted to". Of course we expect that there's also an influence from the brand value of your degree in a job interview. But yes my mechanism would not apply if there's essentially no correlation between being a strong academic, and choosing a top university to study.

My professor got his PhD in Chemistry from Florida and went straight from there to Harvard. Maybe this is an outlier, but it is still evidence to the contrary.

@JonathanLandrum The question states that half of the professors graduated from the top ten, so your mentioning is just expected that the other half did not, the issue is on the high relative amount.

All other qualifications being equal (publication throughput, grants/fellowships), it's not what you know but who you know that will determine this.

Quick reminder: One of the secrets of top universities is that they select and admit the students who would get a good education at any decent school even if they had to beat it out of their department. The best schools will focus MUCH more on the individual, what they've learned, and what they've done with it rather than on where they studied. But since the best people are more likely to have gotten into the best schools, those schools are going to be overrepresented in the results of that selection. Nothing arcane here, just variables with some correlation between them.

Congratulations!!

People are occasionally hired by far more prestigious universities than the ones they studied at.  For example, there's a tenured professor in the Princeton math department (unambiguously among the top 5 departments in the U.S.) who received his Ph.D. in 1999 from Kansas State (which wouldn't necessarily make the top 75).  Where your degree is from is a negligible factor in hiring decisions compared with how outstanding your research is.
On the other hand, research excellence is highly correlated with which doctoral program you attend.  The top programs tend to get the students with the most talent, determination, and preparation, and they usually provide the most support for these students to succeed.  Of course this is just a statistical assertion, not an absolute law.  However, in mathematics in the U.S., the number of students graduating each year from rank 50-75 universities whose job applications are as impressive in research as those of the average top-5 graduate is tiny.  If you're hiring based on research promise, then even the most unbiased search should lead to hiring mainly people from higher-end schools.  Of course there's presumably some prejudice as well, but I don't think it's a substantial factor at research universities.  (I have no first-hand experience with hiring at teaching-oriented schools.  In particular, I don't know how overrepresented graduates of prestigious universities are or which factors are responsible for it.)

See my similar answer to a closely related question.

Spot on. When looking for top talent, look to the places with the reputation for producing it. Also, look for the strength of the resume of the applicant. Amazingly enough,  strength of resume often correlates with the quality of the program from which the candidate graduated. Nonetheless, one must always look for the "diamond in the rough."

Can you quantify your claim to "highly correlated" with a journal publication with that yields a specific correlation coefficient and its corresponding p-value?  Also is the relationship causal?

@paul, at a certain point, the usual journal-publication-count stats are not of great interest...

@paulgarrett: That's not what I'm referring to.  I'm interested in the correlation between research excellence and pedigree.  Everyone speaks of it as if it were obvious, but what are the actual statistics on it?   The statistician within me is dying to know! :)

I don't know of a principled study, and it would be difficult to carry one out. The issue is how to measure research excellence. Objective measures like counting publications or citations are mediocre at best. Expert opinion is the only half-decent measure we have, but it can't address the possibility of bias. There's certainly data about people's beliefs: for example, the placement data cited in the original question shows that hiring committee judgments correlate with pedigree. That's pretty compelling if you trust their judgment, but it leaves open the possibility that this is just bias.

The top ranked doctoral programs get the cream of each year's incoming graduate application pool because they can offer access to the top professors, top research libraries, and have tons of money to spend on tuition waivers, stipends, summer research money, etc.  They can effectively outbid other programs and choose the people who seem to have the most promise (or are advantaged in having Famous People write for them, etc. etc.).
Graduate students at top ranked programs don't have to spend as much time doing non-research activities such as teaching and waitressing to pay the bills as they're getting most of their living expenses covered. They instead can focus on their research and publications, resulting in a flush CV by the time they graduate.
This leads grant agencies and hiring departments to assume that the graduating students at the top ranked programs are indeed the best of the best. They certainly have the imprimatur of the Best Programs® and Famous People® are writing them letters of support.
This is almost certainly a flawed assumption, but when faced with 200 grant or job applications, it's a shortcut many search committees make. Ideally they should just look at the candidate's qualifications without considering the school or the Famous People® who wrote for them.
But even if we redacted program names in applications, the very fact that having gone to a top-ranked place gives people a huge material difference/advantage in resources available while they are in the program, and this is evident in their CVs which are long with lots of publications and talks in the Right Places®.
In a totally fair world, we'd do what google does and throw away (or at the very least redact) CVs and letters and instead interview people one by one. But try to convince a provost and a search committee to go along with that. It would take too long and cost too much.
Interestingly, as fewer and fewer people get jobs straight out of graduate school and everyone now has to have a post-doc or visiting position, this has served as a slightly equalizing factor as hiring schools can look at performance there as a better indication of inherent ability.
Note 1:  People can and do move from lower ranked to higher ranked schools, but usually they don't do it in their first job. Rather, from a low-ranked they get hired at a mid-ranked school, then through publishing and publishing and publishing, they get hired away into a top-ranked (perhaps going through one or two job hops along the way).
Note 2: Top ranked universities (as well as everyone else) have overproduced so many PhDs in pretty much every field that there is market saturation. Even graduates at top-ranked programs are having trouble finding jobs -- even as adjuncts and NTT faculty. In a true market economy, the suppliers would be forced to lower production in the face of oversupply, but academia is not a market economy and having doctoral students is seen as a source of prestige for both faculty and institutions alike. Unless we can increase demand (by forcing schools to hire TT faculty instead of contingents, or other means) or reduce supply, we're all screwed but the folks graduating from mid- and lower-tier schools are screwed the most.

I rather strongly disagree with the suggestion that one-on-one grillings are a great way to identify excellent researchers.

Can you suggest another way that is free from the bias of going to a top tier school.     2) have you never given a job talk?

Yes: put all the candidates' names into a hat, pick one, and offer her a job.  That a hiring method is free of the "bias of going to a top tier school" does not imply that it is a good one.  2) You can see from Noah Snyder's profile that he has a tenure track job at the University of Indiana.  Your equation of job talks with one-on-one grillings is from my experience a non sequitur.  For that matter, I find the idea of throwing away candidates' CVs rather silly: trying to learn about someone's research accomplishments primarily by "grilling" is superficial at best.

My point was that finding a mechanism free from bias and that looked only at aptitude and ignored graduating school is impossible. That being said, your CV and letters and other things in your portfolio get you the the job talk, how you do at the job talk gets you the job. Job talks to me are a fair evaluative mechanism where KSU candidates are relatively equal to MIT.

"My point was that finding a mechanism free from bias and that looked only at aptitude and ignored graduating school is impossible." I agree with that, but I did not see it in the passage "In a totally fair world, we'd do what google does and throw away CVs and letters and instead grill people one on one. But try to convince a provost to do that."

In a totally fair world, we'd toss out the CVs and letters and let everyone give a job talk. But provosts only let us invite 3-4 candidates to do so.

"[h]ow you do at the job talk gets you the job."  That's an oversimplification. It takes an especially good or (more likely) especially poor talk to change people's minds.  "Job talks to me are a fair evaluative mechanism where KSU candidates are relatively equal to MIT." I don't see what is inherently more fair in evaluating someone's work in an hour long talk than spending hours or days evaluating their written work.  I also find the idea that people who are from KSU will come off as well as people from MIT slightly naive.  MIT people will probably do better under "grilling", for instance.

Any viable faculty candidate in my department has letters from Famous People® most of whom are not at the applicant's institution.  A stellar computer science researcher at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople will likely have a recommendation letter from Prof. Turinga Wardwinner at MIT or Berkeley.  Conversely, a candidate from MIT who only has letters from Famous People® at MIT almost certainly will not be invited for an interview, even if the letters are glowing.

@Pete - Of course it's a simplification. Every job search is different and every university has its quirk.  My point is the OP wanted a system where there was no  prejudice based on the alma mater of a candidate. As my response (and others) have shown, the quality and amount of research you get done while in a doctoral program is positively correlated with the rank of the graduating institution for factors other than aptitude of the candidate.

Someone with a crap CV and no publications could have been at an institution where they had no resources, no mentoring, and had to work 60 hours to put food on the table. Theoretically, they could be brilliant if only given the chance. Unfortunately, search committees don't have the ability to easily find these diamonds in the rough since they only have the CV/letters to rely on. The current solution is that these folks (people who got buried at a low-tier school) get a position at a low-mid-tier where they can do enough research to get noticed and work their way up.

And I hope we're all talking about the same thing here: the hiring of junior colleagues who might have very few research publications under their belt (especially as lead author) and aren't yet well-known. I.e., not the rising superstars.

"My point is the OP wanted a system where there was no prejudice based on the alma mater of a candidate."  Where did he say that?  My point was that your answer makes a very strong claim about fairness, but I think that the scenario you suggest (which is implausible for reasons of pure arithmetic, so I'm not sure why you're blaming "provosts") could be less fair than the current system.  If you're simply trying to reach an absurd conclusion given your assumptions (which were not stated by the OP and haven't been made explicit by you), could you please clue us into that?

This is one of the most absurd suggestions I have ever heard.  Just like it does for google, it would result in you hiring a long stream of aggressive, overly-confident white men.  The goal in hiring tenure-track faculty is not to figure out who the "smartest" person is (however poorly-defined that might be), but to find the person who will produce the best research over the next 20+ years.  And the best predictor of future results is past results.    The source of the PhD is irrelevant (and mostly ignored) -- it's the papers and letters of recommendation that really count.

@AndyPutman Job talk dinners tend to do a good job of detecting these folks. At least in the social sciences, we expect candidates to both have solid  research as well as being able to present the research in a way that is accessible to different audiences. I don't know how many CV stuffers we've tanked at my school because they couldn't give a good job talk or were socially inept at the job talk dinners.

@RoboKaren : We use job talks and dinners to weed out e.g. psychopaths and other people who would be an utter disaster if we hire them.  But once they reach a basic level of competence and reasonableness, we want to hire the strongest researchers we can.  If someone is close enough to my research area that I can follow the technical aspects of their talk, then I almost certainly already know about their work and have read their papers; otherwise, I have to reply on the letters and my colleagues to evaluate their research and just use the talk to gauge how reasonable a colleague they would be.

(and frankly I am glad that in math one is allowed to be socially inept and unpolished as long as you are basically a reasonable person)

I think there might be a disciplinary difference here.  Perhaps faculty in math don't have to be inspiring and dynamic to bring in students. In my discipline in the social sciences, this is unfortunately a necessary skill as we aren't a required subject for graduation.

I should also add (without the snark tags) that I am speaking of the ideal and not the real. In reality, my dept. relies much too much on letters from Famous People®, is swayed by CVs overflowing with research publications, and it does take a pretty bad job talk and social ineptness at the after-dinner to tank you. That being said, when I look back at the candidates we got vs. the candidates we dropped, I have to say that I'm not sure we got The Best®. We might have gotten the ones with the best CVs and who will be (or are) Famous People®, but perhaps not the best colleagues and teachers.

I think I took this post as an opportunity to vent some of this frustration at the selection process. Someone should post a question "How can a department select the best candidate to hire?" -- but of course it'd get shot down for being opinion based. Nonetheless, I think the system in place at most schools is optimized for a certain type of candidate but we could do better if we broadened our horizons more.

I would be interested in hearing what programs or institutions you consider as having a policy closest to your ideal. How well have they done?

Here's a numerical perspective on this.  Let's take the position that students graduating from highly-ranked schools have competitive advantage against other students (i.e. they are "better", and will generally be hired when their applications are compared with students of less prestigious schools).  Now, consider how many positions are available at each level:

Undergraduate: Typically, a college will have hundreds if not thousands of students in each year, of varying majors.  In my major (math), let's say 5% of the class has it.  At my school there were 1000 students graduating, so let's say 50 math majors (actually, it was more like 80).
Graduate: Typically, a graduate school department will have tens of students per year.  A small number of tens; at my undergraduate institution (Chicago), the corresponding graduate school has about 100 total students, for about 20 per year.  So, with similar figures at other schools, only 0.4 of math majors can go to graduate school.  Fortunately, not everyone wants to.
Post-doctoral: Most math departments only have a handful of postdoc positions; let's say 10 (which is actually on the high end).  So only 0.5 of graduating students can get postdocs.  Of course, there are teaching jobs available at schools that don't produce PhDs, but those are "lesser universities".
Tenure-track: In any year, any department might have three of these.  Or one, or none.  That means that 0.3 of postdocs will go on to a more permanent position.

At each stage the number of people accepted to the next level is a small fraction of the total number of applicants, and so the schools can pick and choose whom they take; of course, they will take the "best" applicants, which (according to my conventions) will generally come from the highly-ranked universities.  The alumni of just the top 10 universities are sufficient to fill all positions at all universities that are at all desirable (to researchers, that is).

Not to mention only 15-80% of the tenure-track get tenured, depending on the institution. The cultural and social capital you build (or are given) as a doctoral student continues to help you when you come up for tenure.

Val Burris addressed this issue for sociology back in 2004 in the American Sociological Review and the article has now became quite a well-known piece of scholarly work within the discipline.
http://asr.sagepub.com/content/69/2/239.short
He basically argues that while departmental prestige is quite loosely correlated with the scholarly productivity of its graduates, being high-prestige school graduate gives one the necessary social and network capital to be placed within the institutionalised system of prestige sustained through the accumulated and "closed" interlinkages between top departments. Although the bulk of his analysis examines sociology placement records, he also provides some comparative data on the hiring of history and political science faculty, and finds that the relationship is quite robust while those latter disciplines tend to reinforce status hierarchies more so than sociology.

It'd be neat to have a ranking of disciplines by meritoracy vs. top-tier aristocracy. The problem of drawing up the metric is trying to decide what makes a problem meritocratic vs. aristocratic. Diversity of graduating institutions in the faculty is problematic as some disciplines have more (top) doctoral programs in certain fields than others.

Look at:

Pierre Deville et al., Career on the Move: Geography, Stratification, and Scientific Impact, Scientific Reports 4, Article number: 4770 (2014)

From its abstract:

We find that career movements are not only temporally and spatially localized, but also characterized by a high degree of stratification in institutional ranking. When cross-group movement occurs, we find that while going from elite to lower-rank institutions on average associates with modest decrease in scientific performance, transitioning into elite institutions does not result in subsequent performance gain.

Inside, there are plots quantifying transition from institutions of different rank.

Universities typically hire the best people they can. And sometimes they can be found as graduates of lesser universities.
One of my favorite professors, who went from Yale to Ohio State, indicated how this could happen. His opinion was that a top 10 percent student at Ohio State was just as good as a top 10 percent student at Yale. So a top 10 percent student from Ohio State who applied to a high level university could be very competitive with a top 10 percent student from Yale, provided that research, letters of recommendation, and other aspects of the application were competitive.
Where the professor saw value in a Yale degree was that an average Yale graduate would be accepted in many places that an average Ohio State graduate would not be.

Can you clarify whether your prof meant undergraduates or doctoral students when he meant the top 10%?

@RoboKaren: Both. He was working with both sets of students.

Having taught at a private R1 for the past 8 years, I have to say that the quality of the top undergrad and grad students at the large state schools is equal to many of the students here. A good part of is the extreme long tail of state university undergrad populations (a large n even at 2-3 sigma greater than mean) and that many people chose grad schools based on non-reputation criteria (such as proximity to family) even though that affects their careers later. That's why the bias in the hiring process frustrates me. Yes, some break through, but not enough.

@RoboKaren: Princeton once did a study on three groups of applicants: 1) Admitted by Princeton and went to Princeton, or some other Ivy League college. 2) Admitted by Princeton and went to State U. 3) Rejected by Princeton. Years later, they found that the third group underperformed the first, but much to their surprise, the second group was not behind the first. Put another way, Bill Gates is not noted for graduating from Harvard (he never did). What is notable is that he "got in."

Having been accepted to Princeton undergrad many decades ago, but ultimately deciding to go to a very different, lower ranked school, your comment makes me very happy. =)   I went to college before US News & World Reports ranking was pervasive. It was a better time, much less anxiety on everyone's part.

I strongly agree, with one addition: a high ranking degree, postdoc, etc covers  many sins, not just being average. Unfocused in your research? Unexplained gap in your CV? Unconventional mix of degrees?  No letter form your primary adviser? As those evaluating you fill in the blanks, they will be kinder in what they imagine you are if you have a nice brand attached to your name.

Another statistic: according to Wikipedia the 62 institutions of the Association of American Universities (AAU) issue 52% of doctoral degrees in the U.S. So, in the U.S. system, even if we discount any effect of institutional ranking, these schools should still account for half of the hiring of doctoral recipients.  Of course, there is also an effect of university quality, so the AAU schools should account for more than half of hires. On the other hand, of course there are exceptional faculty who did not attend top-ranked schools. But the statistics suggest we shouldn't be surprised to find many faculty from a relatively small number of schools.

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Non Anglo and older grad school applicant
I am 49 years old, Psychologist with MA in Psych, PhD in Public Health and postdoc at University of Toronto. However,all my academic background here stated is from Brazil and I have been facing some stumbling blocks to enter Academia in Canada. Therefore, I decided to apply for a Masters in Counselling. Would my age and an already extensive academic past with a long research history [non North American] hurt my application? lastly, would I face institutionalized racism due to my non-anglo surname and academic history? My GPA's are: BA= 8.1 ; MA= 9,1 ; PhD= B.
Thank you!

For a counseling master's? Almost certainly not.

Did you address the institutionalized racism issue or the old age one? Thank you for helping!

Anecdotally, age is not an issue for professional master's-level degrees. For counseling in particular, "diversity" should be a plus. Institutionalized racism is a problem everywhere.

I would start with one course as a non-matriculated student or auditor.  This would give you a feel for acceptance level, etc.  Also, it would help you get a foot in the door.

@aparente001 this is exactly what a professor at USeattle told me last year. But I chose to try the Masters itself. You handed me esome nice food for thought, though.

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text:
Would peer-reviewed articles of single author give insights into the author's collaborative skills?
I was searching a specific person (scientist) online to seek for potential collaboration. I retrieved his/her peer-reviewed publication list and found out that more than 70% (I just did the calculation) of the articles have him/her as the sole author.  Would that be a sign of an uncollaborative scientist?
EDIT
The field is life sciences and/or biological sciences where collaboration is key to achieve high-quality publications. It is imperative to assign tasks to different laboratories (students, postdocs) to obtain timely results otherwise, research might take years if it is done by only one scientist.

As established in discussions of other similar questions, all depends on the field. See: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/10977/is-it-better-to-have-a-single-author-paper-or-a-joint-authored-paper https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/45506/should-i-try-to-avoid-being-the-single-author-of-my-patent-paper https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16910/are-single-author-publications-given-more-weight-in-math-hiring

If "some" show he publishes alone, that implies "some" show he collaborates.  Why are you focusing on the one thing and not the other?
As for why a person publishes solo:
Maybe they're shy, suffer from impostor syndrome, etc., and this makes it inordinately difficult for them to suggest the idea to others even if they really want to.  Maybe they try to collaborate, but then the collaborators contribute nothing for months by which time they've completely solved the problem and so publish solo.  Maybe this is a highly specialized topic, and there are only a handful (or less) of potential collaborators; it'd be quite easy for them to all be busy with other matters (such as some other ongoing collaboration, committee work, etc.).  Maybe they didn't need anyone else for that topic: how to proceed with the problem came quickly and clearly to them, and there was never any need to bring in another perspective.  Et cetera, et cetera.
The short of the matter is: the correct thing for you to do here is to ask. As long as your topic seems reasonably within their skill set there's really  nothing to lose. (Asking a PDE's guy to work on a group theory paper probably isn't smart if you don't have a very specifically good reason)  Long as that's the case, worst case scenario is you lose a couple of minutes typing up an e-mail.  And even then the person probably is happy to know someone finds his work and skills interesting, and may seek you out for potential future collaborations.


text:
Is it too late to contact prospective PI's at grad schools I applied to?
I applied to several grad schools and have heard back from two - rejected (somewhat expected) and waitlisted. I had other things going on and (stupidly) did not contact prospective PI's at the other two schools (well I contacted one and received a form response and thought maybe I should just wait to hear back from schools before talking to more prospective PI's).
Is it too late to contact prospective PI's? Most admissions committees have already started going though applicants and setting up interviews so at this point I'm not even sure what I'd say. If I had emailed when I should have (before applying), I would have said I was thinking about applying to that university and was interested in their work then asked what projects a new graduate student might work on.

I think contacting Profs is only helpful if you are genuinely interested in their works and have good questions to ask. If you are contacting Professor because you think they can help your application get accepted, it might not help at all. Profs are smart, they can easily recognize that.

Thank you for responding. Could you please give examples of "good questions to ask"?    ....
P.S. I think contacting Profs because I'm interested in their work and contacting Profs because that contact could help my application aren't mutually exclusive. I applied to these universities specifically because I was interested in the research occurring at them and because I was interested in the work of specific professors whose research I mentioned in my applications.


text:
Unresponsive coauthor
I have a paper accepted at a conference, written together with a colleague (X) and my supervisor. X and I are both postdoc and first authors: writing was done together, but experiments were split between me and X.
The reviews for the paper were very positive, but reviewers still asked for some things: adding some references, giving more details about the experiments, commenting more on some results, and running few extra experiments. In the rebuttal we promised to do most of the things they asked.
The paper was accepted months ago, and I have included the reviewers' requests except additional experiments that have to be done by X.
X has done nothing in months. I have asked them countless times to do the experiments we promised, but they either did not reply or say (in a very polite and apologetic way) "You are right, I am very sorry! I had [sickness / deadline / errand / ...] and could not do it yet. I will do it by the end of the week." This went on for the last 2 months.
Talking to some other colleagues, I have come to know that X is involved in 10+ projects/papers, and is often unresponsive. However, since they are a good researcher nobody has ever complained.
The camera-ready deadline is getting closer and I do not know what to do.
The supervisor (last author) does not care because the paper is already accepted, and does not mind not delivering what promised to the reviewers. ''The paper has been accepted, do not waste any more time on that.''
I would feel really bad about not doing the experiments we promised. How do I confront X?

Does this answer your question? Non-responsive co-author

@Sursula-they- The question is quite similar (co-author is unresponsive in both cases), but the context is different and I think it matters. The author of the question you linked could simply resubmit the paper ignoring the work to be done by the co-author: it was not asked by reviewers and they never promised anyone to do it. In my case, the work to be done by the co-author is something we promised in the rebuttal. I think it is more pressing.
(Thanks btw! Somehow this question did not appear in the related ones when I submitted mine)

If you trust your advisor's knowledge of the field, then listen to his/her advice. He might be right that this part won't matter and won't have any impact. In other words, look at the facts.
I know that this sounds very unpleasant and even slightly immoral (even to me); welcome to academia.
Edit: It won't hurt to speak with X once more and tell them that the final deadline is approaching. Don't add anything else or try to wrap it in a nice wrap. Just that the final deadline is approaching.

Thanks for your reply. I have already asked X once more, and he told me "I am stressed for deadline X, sorry. Will do it asap."
In the end, the advisor is kinda right because no one will probably complain that we did not add what we promised (but this may be a topic for another question). As you said, very unpleasant and slightly immortal, but that's how publishing papers works. Yet, I am not happy with X behavior, and would like to convey my feelings in a polite manner: basically that he could have just told me "I don't have time to do it, sorry" rather than keep pushing for 2 months.

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


text:
Status meaning: report on revised version promised by referee
Status of my submitted paper has changed to:

28 November: Sent to referee 1
28 November: Sent to referee 2
28 November: Sent to referee 3
29 November: Report expected from referee 2
29 November: Report on revised version promised by referee 2

What's the meaning of last status? Considering that  I haven't submitted a revised version yet!

When did you submit the paper? Is it to a publisher that appears on Beall's list of predatory publishers?

October 16. It's IFP Energies nouvelles.

Flippant: It means Referee 2 has promised a report on the revised version.
I'd normally say that this probably means that Referee 2's review is overdue, they have been contacted by the editorial office, and they've said it's coming. However, given the short time frame, unless you have submitted to a journal with an extraordinarily fast turnaround, this isn't likely the case.
With your added information, and that only one referee has appeared in the status, that likely means they have accepted the review. The updated status may mean that the referee has given the journal a head's up that the report is coming, but that it's delayed in some way that they know in advance (hence the "promised") and the editor selected the wrong status. It may also mean that something went wrong in the initial dispatch of your manuscript and they had to fix something (hence "revised) - I have, for example, had a supplemental file go missing in a packet sent to me.
But all of this is idle speculation - no one here can really know what it means.
My advice? It's been one day since your paper was sent for review. Stop checking on its status.

Well, I haven't submitted a revised version yet!

@Ghartal That is useful context that you may wish to include in your opening post. I will edit my answer shortly to reflect that.

Oh there is one more point to mention in opening post! Please wait for my edit!

@Ghartal Yeah...no offense but you seriously missed some important context with your first version.

No problem! So the referee says he/she doesn't even look at it! Paper is not that bad really!

@Ghartal You really can't know that.


text:
Is it common to refer to someone as "Prof. Dr. [LastName]"?
I have generally only heard people refer to professors as either "Dr. Smith" or "Prof. Smith". However, I received an email that referred to the keynote speakers at a conference as "Prof. Dr. Smith". Is this common? (It is for a conference in taking place in the EU and I am from the US if that helps).

It was (at least at one time) common in Germany.  Herr Professor Doktor Klein.  No, it is not common in the US and never was ... except maybe among German Jewish immigrants arriving here during the Nazi times.

@GEdgar Thank you! I really appreciate your comment. It was just seemed different than what I was used to and just was wondering if it was just a matter of custom or if this was just an atypical, but not unexpected formulation.

Indeed very common in Germany. If somebody earned multiple doctorates, you would list each one, so you may sometimes actually find Prof. Dr. Dr. or even Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. Also important: that only applies to actual Dr. - in Germany, it is illegal for somebody with a Ph. D. to substitute the title Dr.

@KevinKeane, isn't a Ph.D. a form of doctorate? Perhaps this is a regional difference, too.

@MikeHill Ordinarily, a Ph.D. is indeed equivalent to a Dr., but not in front of the law. In Germany, it is a crime to use the title Dr. when you don't have it - and there was a case a few years ago when somebody with a Ph.D. was convicted for using the Dr. The regulations are explicit about it. https://rp.baden-wuerttemberg.de/Themen/Bildung/Ausbildung/Documents/Tierarzt_Merkblatt_ausl_Grade.pdf page 6 : you cannot use a domestic title even if your foreign one is materially equivalent. You aren't even allowed to use the German translation; you must use the original foreign-language title.

One correction: you are allowed to add the German translation of the title if you add it in parenthesis to your foreign-language one.

I know that Star likes to be referred to as "Mr. Dr. Professor Patrick", but I don't know any other examples.

@KevinKeane it is a crime to use the title Dr. when you don't have it. Well, let's say it's a misdemeanor, or an offence. (It's a Vergehen, not a Verbrechen.)

@KevinKeane From what I understand, in Germany you can call yourself "Doktor" if you have a title attained in the EU.

@KevinKeane In your document, page 11: Danach können Inhaber des Doktorgrades „Doctor of Philosophy“, Abkürzung: „Ph.D.“ von Universitäten der sog. Carnegie-Liste anstelle der in den USA üblichen Abkürzung die Abkürzung: „Dr.“ ohne fachlichen Zusatz und ohne Herkunftsbe-zeichnung führen.

In Austria it will also make you look like a super villain

you've got to love amalgamation!

German academia traditionally expects that one will use all relevant titles, so Prof. Dr. is pretty common there. Likewise other places with an academic system related to Germany in some way. As you note, in the US this would be very uncommon and the two titles you mention often used interchangeably there, even when it isn't clear that both apply.
And, if I remember correctly, it is always Prof. Dr. and never Dr. Prof. since the professorship was earned after the doctorate and is a "higher level" honorific. But "Herr Prof. Dr." doesn't fit that rule, I guess.

This is also the usual form in the Netherlands. I guess this is covered by the 'academic system related to Germany' in so far as it's next door.

FWIW, I just randomly typed some honorifics into google and found an obituary for Prof. em. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dr. h.c. Dr. h.c. Dr. h.c. Dieter Schneider. Which tells us that Prof. Schneider was a former professor who earned one doctorate the usual way and was awarded an additional four honorary doctorates. (However, note that an obituary is of course an extremely formal situation. You would not have addressed him that way, you would have addressed him as Prof. Dr. or maybe Prof. em. Dr. if you wanted to emphasize that he is retired.)

And just to add to the last comment, the commonly used formal way to list multiple honorary degrees in Germany would be Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Schneider.

@JörgWMittag I take it that h. c. stands for honoris causa?

@RobertFurber: Correct.

'But "Herr Prof. Dr." doesn't fit that rule, I guess.' - well, depends: In German, Herr/Frau always precedes the entire name (including any honorifics); it does not get substituted as soon as there are any honorifics like in English.

The sorting of titles is complicated in Germany. Titles granted due to obtained academic degrees are in ascending (difficulty) order, e.g. "Herr Mag. Dr. X" (where Mag. is the traditional MSc equivalent). But "Prof." is not an academic title you earn by getting a degree, it is the name of the position you hold. That's why it comes first.

I'd like to add that this is common in formal situations. I'd expect to hear "Prof. Dr. X" in the introduction of the speaker before the award lecture at a conference, but an introduction in the coffee break by a 3rd person to be maybe "Prof. X" if not Herr/Frau X. If Prof. Dr. X introduces themselves in the coffee break, that would often be a handshake with e.g. "X, angenehm" (= "X, nice [to meet you]").

You remember incorrectly, the "height" of the honorific has nothing to do with ordering, but higher ones of the same type replace lower ones (so Prof replaces Herr, Dr replaces Mag, etc.). For an extreme (English) example a sitting MP and ambassador who has been knighted, ordained and granted some degrees, a chair, a fellowship and a peerage could be His Excellency The Right Honourable and Reverend Professor Doctor Sir John Lord Smith KBE FREng PhD LLM Baron Smith of Townsville.

@OrangeDog. Otherwise known as John.

@cbeleites Or, as is also not uncommon within some circles, Frau Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Schmitt introduces herself as "Hi, I'm Ute, what's up?".

@OrangeDog, though I have seen strings like "Prof. Dr. Dipl.-Ing." (in Austria, not sure about the order though), where it at least seems the Dr. didn't replace the Master's-equivalent. (Well, unless it implies they had a Dipl.-Ing. in one subject and a doctorate in another, but I don't know.)

@ilkkachu not having heard of it before but Dipl.-lng is literally "Engineering Degree". Are you sure it's actually a title and not a post-nominal (like PhD, MEng)? More fun arises when the field of study and the subject of the degree are different - most PhD are not awarded in the field of Philosophy for example. So in post-nominals a PhD overrides an MPhil but not an MEng, even if the PhD was for Engineering and the MPhil for something completely different.

@Cubic And let’s not forget that, until depressingly recently, “Frau Dr.” was by default generally understood to refer to the wife of a doctor, not a woman with her own doctoral degree.

@OrangeDog, yeah, it's pretty much the same as M.Sc.(Tech), but I swear I've seen it in the same litany. Google finds some examples, too. I'm not sure how common it is, I've mostly filed this under regional differences which I don't need to actually understand...

@ilkkachu: was that Dr. Dipl.-Ing. or Dr.-Ing. (that's the doctoral degree engineering faculties give)? Also, in written contexts such as business cards or email signatures it is fairly common to give a more precise profession than just a Dr. in front of the first name. E.g. the small print on my business card tells you that I'm Dipl.-Chem. and Dr. rer. nat. (the latter could have been obtained in a number of fields ranging roughly from physics to psychology; and a Dipl.-Ing. would often indicate whether they are, say, electrical or civil engineer)

@OrangeDog There are professional degrees that have a legal impact on whether you're allowed to practice in a profession - e.g. Dipl. Ing. or Dipl. Iur. or maybe Dipl. Arch. sometimes, it depends on the country. They're somewhat equivalent to master's degrees in the Bologna process but because of the legal permission issue they're still relevant even after obtaining a doctorate, unlike other fields where the doctorate should "override" the earlier degree.

Dipl.-Ing. is simply the german name for an MSc in a technical field. In Austria, titles are generally considered very important (for many people, at least), so all titles are listed more often than in Germany or elsewhere.

Background.
In Italy, Dottore (short version dr. or dott.) refers to those who hold either a bachelor's degree, or a graduate degree, or a Ph.D., or those who are physicians.
Reply.
Those who both serve as physicians and teach at medical school are commonly regarded as Prof. Dott. or Prof. Dr.

Yes, it is common to use both, and the reason is that these are two completely different categories. Doctorates are academic degrees that come in different flavors including "Dr. h.c." and "Dr. habil.". They indicate the academic level, just like Bachelor or Master degrees. For academic degrees, you typically use all degrees on the highest level, so you don't mention a Master degree when someone also holds a PhD, but you mention all doctorates. "Professor" on the other hand is (in almost all cases) an official title which you mention just like you would always refer to a judge as "Judge XXX", whether or not he/she's holds a PhD. That also explains the order: Titles come first, and you lose them when you lose the job. Degrees become part of the name (so to say, until recently, it was possible to have them on your ID card.)

@GeorgeM Also common in Belgium. Most of my professors signed everything, even their class handouts, with Prof. Dr. Ir. because they were all professors after doing a doctorate after receiving their engineering titles.

@GeorgeM and also common in Indonesia. And all the professors usually have the full titles in their names, something like Prof. Dr. Ir Name PhD.

In Germany, the Dr. (only) would legally become part of the name. Leaving it out of official identity documents was not an option (as of a couple of decades ago).

@DonFusili Where have you seen this in Belgium? In my experience it is done in Dutch-speaking Belgian universities but never in French-speaking ones.

@ArnaudD. That's a fair point, I only have student experience at Flemish universities. My only contact with Walloon professors was as a representative of a company, where the interactions for both regions are pretty lax about titles.

@GeorgeM it's common wherever Professor is not essentially a synonym for Teacher.

@OrangeDog Nope. "Prof Dr" is never used in the UK, where, in most universities, "professor" is only used for the most senior academics.

@DonFusili . I can confirm this is also used in Walloonia (but not every time)

@David never used, really?

@OrangeDog "Never" in the sense that I've been in UK academia for 24 years and this is the first time I've ever heard of it.

@GeorgeM sorry, I tried to comment an answer specifically talking about Germany, but couldn't as a newbie. Hence my stand-alone answer. I simply forgot to mention it's specific for Germany, most likely valid in Austria, too.

@OrangeDog worth noting that one of those is a medical doctor (for which case I can well believe it is commonly used, since unlike a PhD you cannot infer it from "professor"), one a German academic working in the UK but using a German-style title, and the other appears to be discussing someone primarily based outside the UK.

All the other answers focus on the formal importance of titles and etiquette in German speaking countries. While refering to a person by his/her titles is normal, has not to be taken too far.
Still the level of formality isn't always the same. While the name and titles on a board can be meter long, normally an entitled person is approached by students as Herr/Frau followed by the most prestigious title and that suffices.
Professor will work well in your case. And this depends on situations, too. You might be for a beer after session and call American professors by name, it could be seen bizarre to switch to professor even, not to mention Mr or Sir professor :)
The language will often,if not always, be English, and somehow the level of formality goes along with.
I have worked in Austria and visited Germany. I never heard of herr Prof. Dr. or viceversa if not in pompous presentation as in special academic events. For sure students do not approach someone using two titles.
So there is nothing to worry about.
Edit: driven by other answers and comments I have focused on german speaking academia.  I see the Q is more general. In a way the answer is still valid as Professor serves well the purpose of directly speaking to whom has that title (for foreigners, europeans or not, in Europe). Again printed material, official listing, ecc. might well detail all the titles. So Prof.  Dr. might be encountered, but it will be always in the same fashion as the OP has already experienced, namely a third person or a third inanimate thing as a board introducing you an entitled person.

+1. OP mentions an email introducing the keynote speaker - in my experience that's one of the special events where one would mention ALL titles.

@Sabine. Indeed I've formulated my answer as if the OP is going to meet a German professor in person. If it is matter of addressing in letter and email, I would write dear Professor, still. While for organizational things would be safe to list all. Though I doubt that someone sitting in Italy or America would be responsible for, say, printing the badges for a conference in Berlin. Otherwise if a I print a flyer yes, all titles needed especially if the happening is in Germany. Hope our comments complement the answer.

In academic settings, a professor, also known as a full professor, is the highest rank a Professor can acquire. A Ph.D. is generally a minimum prerequisite for obtaining the title of Professor within a university. So, writing Prof.Dr. is just redundancy. Just like saying (Person.Mr. or Person.Ms.)
German Academy may that be the exception that uses it.
Other ranks are assistant professor or associate professor, but below the rank of professor.
Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that people who were assistant professors for three months 20 years ago write as professors, hiding behind the ignorance of some readers. They are just playing a fallacy.
References:
According to the Cambridge dictionary, a Professor is defined as "a teacher of the highest rank in a department of a British university, or a teacher of high rank in an American university or college."
Similarly, Merriam-Webster describes a Professor as "a faculty member of the highest academic rank at an institution of higher education" or "a teacher at a university, college, or sometimes secondary school" who possesses specialized knowledge or skill in a particular field.

I have personally never seen Prof. Dr. X. At least from my experience Prof. is reserved for those who are teaching a course, but do not have a Ph.D. degree (graduate students teaching intro level undergrad courses) or faculty members who only have a MA/MS degree. Dr. in contrast is used for people who have a Ph.D. degree.

Matter here is about persons who are professor. While in many countries a teacher can be called professor, the actual case is quite different.  While a person might be called professor in german high school I have no idea. Surely at german universities a teacher is not called professor.  Is not exactly but quite opposite to what your answer suggests.

Even better for the sense  of my comment. @Roland

In the US, grad students spend half their time trying to get first-year undergraduates to stop calling them "professor." The title professor is not generally used for grad students or anybody who is not, in fact, a professor.

Where are you from? In the U.S., nobody from my school calls me "Doctor". It's always "Professor" (unless it's just my first name).

I also wonder where your experience comes from. In my experience (US), Dr. would supercede Professor only for medical doctors (MD, DO, etc.). Anyone else (PhD, ScD, JD, etc.) hired as a "Professor" (whether full, assistant, or associate) is just Prof.

authors: ישו אוהב אותך


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How to deal with instructor forcing me to do an uninteresting optional exercise?
If I am in class and I don't feel like doing a boring, uninteresting, optional exercise which won't benefit me in any way, how should I deal with an insecure instructor attempting to force me to do it?
If I pull out my laptop or phone and start watching some harmless, audioless videos, that cannot possibly bother anyone. I feel the instructor should spend time helping and overseeing those students actually doing the exercise, and not waste their time on the smart student that doesn't necessarily need to do some cute little exercise in order to understand a simple concept.
Should I leave the class? Do I have a right to stay? For example, at some point during this (for me) useless exercise, the instructor might happen to say something of value that I might have an interest in hearing, so do I not have a right to stay in case that did happen? If so, how should I respond when my instructor tells me that she is bothered by my innocent act and wants me to leave class, an idea which she sadly got from some internet people?

Just curious, how did you find out that the instructor posted the question here, and how did you know with certainity it was your instructor specifically?

@Ovi This is a question which mirrors the other one, written from the point of view a student who is hypotetically in that position. Though clearly written with a provocative intent, I don't think it deserves so many downvotes.

@MassimoOrtolano your reading is understandable, but incorrect - there was a slew of deleted comments which indicate that the question was not hypothetical and provocative, but aggrieved and tendentious (IMO)

This is an excellent question and there is excellent advice in the answers - especially a great way to move forward if in the position of the OP in the answer of Patricia Shanahan.

The instructor is literally in charge of what is happening the classroom. She can set the rules because the lecture is for her to teach.
You, on the other hand, as a student have your free will not to attend the classes, leave the classroom in the middle of the lecture, provided that you accept the results.
One thing a student (in your case, I think bachelor's) is surely not qualified, is to decide what should/shouldn't a professor do or if the assignments are interesting/necessary/motivating/good/bad etc. If you find the class uninteresting, do not attend. But attending the lecture and complaining about assignments, and the way professor behaves during the lecture hours is pure sauciness. If she says no laptops, then it means no laptops. End of discussion.

From the tone of the question and your comments, it looks a bit like you are waiting for someone to tell you you are entitled to your behavior and your instructor is wrong. This someone will not be me.
If your situation is covered by the rules at your university (e.g. if instructors are not allowed to ask students to actually work or step out), as it seems implied in some of your comments to previous answers, then your question is pointless. Let me thus assume otherwise.
You should realize that an instructor has a responsibility toward the group of students to ensure a good learning environment. Even if you do not actively disturb the class, being openly doing anything else than working on the course (or related) material is influencing the environment in the classroom. You may feel that this influence is mild or even non-existent, but it is not your call: the instructor is in charge, not you. You thus should, on that principle alone, respect the rules set by your instructor.
Let me add something: I (and probably all academics reading this) have seen a lot of overconfident students that did good at first, did not work, and ultimately failed; or that thought they were brilliant, and might have turned brilliant with some effort, but instead did not confront to the exercises and failed by a long shot. Even in the best case, where you are indeed smart enough not to need any effort to pass your classes, being in class not studying is still wasting your own talent (which is all the more stupid that your talent is great). If the covered material is so simple to you, why don't you ask for more challenging assignments? I know very few instructors who would not put an extra hour designing tough exercises for a student asking for more and acing all tests.

Remember the instructor has no reliable way of knowing whether you are not doing the exercise because it is too easy or because it is too hard. Claiming to not need to do an exercise because it is too easy is a common defensive mechanism of people who want to feel smart without actually having the ability. If you don't do the exercise the instructor has no way of distinguishing your genuine smartness from that effect.
The simple solution is to spend a minute or so doing the over-simple exercise, and leave the completed work prominently on your desk. That way, the instructor can know not to worry about you.
Once you have done the exercise, it would be better to either stay engaged in the class, possibly doing harder exercises from the text book, or to do other school work. A video showing on a laptop can distract those who have the laptop screen in their field of view, even with no audio.


text:
Lecturer in a course I'm TA'ing refuses to give feedback on student assignments
I am a teaching assistant in an undergraduate bioinformatics course. A few weeks ago the students in the course handed in the final assignment (which is worth 80% of the final grade), which we (me and the other members of the course staff) are currently in the process of grading.
The lecturer in charge of the course wants to give the students only their final grades for this assignment without any feedback on why points were taken off.
Her justification for this is that she do not want students to pass the feedback to the next class that will take this course and thus avoid copying of answers.
While she did not say so explicitly, my impression from some things she did say is that by avoiding a more detailed feedback she hopes to discourage student from appealing their grades. My university's regulations state that a student can appeal any grade, but in the appeal form the student must specify exactly which question/part of the assignment they appeal and why do they think that points were taken off unfairly, so no feedback - no appeal and thus no extra work for the course staff.
I am rather uncomfortable with this attitude for several reasons:

From a didactic point of view I think that merely giving a student their final grade without any indication what was his/her errors is wrong is it does not allow them to improve.

Not giving feedback will not prevent students from passing their work to the next class. It will just mean that the errors of student from this class will propagate to the next class.

On the other hand, I am uncomfortable from insisting on this issue from several reasons:

This is my first year as a TA, whereas the lecturer has been giving this course for many years, so it is possible that her judgement is better then mine, even though it seems wrong to me.

It is unlikely that I will teach this course again (I intend to graduate and move to another university later this year). Thus, even if I do manage to persuade the lecturer to give a more detailed feedback, I will not be around to face the consequences she is afraid of whereas she will, so insisting on this may be a bit unfair to her.

The other TAs in the course do not seem to share my opinion (they did not voice any strong opinion of this matter).

I do not want to start a confrontation with the lecturer, as I might need a reference from her in the future.

There is still a window of a few weeks until we are supposed to give the grades, so theoretically I can reopen this discussion.
Basically, I have two questions:

Given all of the above, should I attempt to persuade the lecturer to allow more detailed feedback?
If I should, how can I persuade her?

EDIT
Some additional information that seem relevant is light of the comments and answers:

As per the lecturer's instruction we keep a detailed record of the grading of the assignment (this also includes that lecturer, with respect to the parts of the assignment that she grades herself). So detailed feedback is available. Thus we can rule out the possibility of laziness or unwillingness to waste time on detailed grading.

Assessment and feedback during the course
Many of the classes in the course included practice sessions during which the students were supposed to complete on assignment. These assignment were not handed in or graded, but were meant solely for the students' learning. During these sessions the students were able to consult the course staff if they did not understand or were unsure about a certain question.
In addition there were two midterm assignments, each worth 10% percent of the final grade (I would mention that at my institution it is quite normal that the final exam/assignment makes 80% or even more of the final grade, but is not normal not to give feedback on it).
For the first of these midterms we did not give students individual feedback, only the final grade. We did mention in class some frequent errors and issues in the assignments. Formally students were allowed to approach us for more detailed feedback but as far as I know few if any did that.
For the second midterm assignment we give detailed feedback.
The in the grading policy between difference between the two midterm assignments is that the first assignment was submitted only electronically via the course website and in the second assignment the student were also required to hand in a hard copy of the assignment. The lecturer refused to allow feedback on the electronic submission because this would be easier to pass to the next class. Initially she wanted to require hard copy submission of the first assignment too (presumably to allow detailed feedback). When I asked prior to the issuing of the assignment to the students why an electronic submission is not enough she changes it an electronic submission only. I did not realise at the time that this would deprive students from feedback. She only informed us about that after the assignments were handed in and we were about to start grading.

Have you checked your university's regulations to see if they set any standards for reporting grades by question/part?

Would you be allowed to go over the student's work with them individually in office hours?

@Patricia Shanahan: I don't know if the the regulations say something on this explicitly, but even if they do I would not feel comfortable with confronting the lecturer on this ground alone.

@Nate Eldredge: Maybe if a student will specifically ask for a clarification on the grade, but not many students will do that. Also such students will likely approach the lecturer and not me, and I don't think she will be receptive to the idea.

Have you talked to your advisor or someone else in the department you trust about this? They can likely help you navigate local politics.

I know a few professors who don't write down detailed feedback in their initial assessments of final projects;  instead, they just assign a letter grade, and keep a private rough record of their impression of the assignment. This is for two reasons:  (1) The most time-consuming part of grading assignments is actually providing the detailed feedback;  reading over an assignment and getting a sense of its quality is pretty quick.   And the end of the semester can be quite busy. (2) Many students never read feedback comments on assignments during the term, let alone after the end of the term. ...

...  If a student does request their final assignment be returned after they receive their final grade, the professor will then go back to their "private rough record" and fill in the detailed feedback after the fact.  This whole technique seems a little odd to me, but some of my colleagues swear by it in order to maintain their sanity at the end of the semester.

@Richard Erickson: I don't think local politics are much of a concern in this. It is not that I fear that lecturer will retaliate if I would confront her on this issue. Getting a reference from her would be nice but not critical so this is the least of my concerns. I am just wondering whether it would correct to act on this and how. Given the feedback I got so far from other responders, I will probably drop the issue.

Re: Some comments to answers below: I'm not that surprised by this policy on the final. At my institution, all final exams are stored in a "vault" by the registrar after 72 hours and then generally not available to instructor or students. In some cases I record stuff so as to give feedback, but I'm really working against the flow of the institution for that. The thing that does smell stinky to me here is that only 20% grade/feedback came prior to this point.

@Daniel R. Collins: Thank you for your valuable input. it is customary in my university that the final exam/assignment make up most of the grade (up to 90% in some courses). However, such assignments are generally returned to the students, and usually with substantial feedback. In fact I can't recall a single instance where feedback on a final was avoided in such a way. Nonetheless I think under the circumstances I will take your advice.

As a programmer, I can't help but think of the compilers/parsers/etc. that give really, really bad error messages and make my life miserable trying to find the real problem... You can waste literally hours on a single error sometimes.

Can you let students come in and walk them through their answers in person?

Speaking as a former university instructor who had to grade things, have you considered this person is just lazy and doesn't want to take the time to do proper grading?  That was always the most tedious part of my job, but it's also one of the most important for student growth to have good feedback, so I did it.

No.  I understand your good intentions and appreciate your courage to follow your conscience.  As you analysed there does seem to be a deliberate grey-area justification.  Since you have done the best for the students, dont worry about the rest (grading part).  I think accumulation of such instances in life will make you realize the difference in 'practice vs preach' in academics, along with creative ways of justification.  Hopefully future gets better :)

@Kevin: I doubt many students will opt for that. Also we distributed the grading so that each question is graded by a different members of the course staff. Thus, this is not a possibility I could offer students as I won't be able to answer about questions I didn't grade.

@ childofsoong: I don't think this is the case. Some of the grading is done by the lecturer herself, some by the TAs. If it was laziness on hep part so could have just assign all of the grading to the TAs. I don't know what she does about the parts that she grade but she directed us (the TAs) to keep a meticulous record of the grading and why points were taken off, so at least for some questions detailed feedback is available. So I do believe that the reasons are what I stated in the question.

A grade without comments is just about as useful for the student's purpose (learning new things) as giving no grade to begin with. The purpose of studying is to learn things, not pass exams.

Question: Does the lecturer give any feedback on other work prior to this in the course?

@ Daniel R. Collins: I edited the question to include details about the prior feedback in the course and some other information that seem relevant in light of the comments and answers, see question.

@user1614062: I think that edit was helpful, thank you.

No, you should not confront the lecturer again ("reopen") over this issue. That would not be an efficient use of your time.
You've talked to the course instructor. She has explained to you her justification. Presumably she's observed both cases of giving and not giving feedback for the final in the past (you have not). You do not have the power to compel her. You don't have other allies on the grading staff. You are ending your engagement there in the immediate future. You will not deal with this issue again. Move on.
Keep this in your list of "things I think I could improve on when I become a lecturer" for the future. Hopefully this will be a memorable case to experiment with later on your own. And you'll get to observe another institution's practices for comparison in the meantime. You may well be right, but you triply don't have the time to redirect this in your current position.

+1. This is unfortunately not the time and place for the OP to pick a fight. "Keep your powder dry", as they say.

+1 for "Keep this in your list of "things I think I could improve on when I become a lecturer""

+1 for an answer that says something correct but unpleasant to admit. It is difficult to stand by and do nothing in the face of injustice (and I do agree with OP's analysis of why the lecturer's behavior is wrong), but given the power dynamics at play here and OP's personal situation, I think accepting the lecturer's decision is the most sensible course of action.

Could also talk to the dean and get the lecturer disciplined, no? as far as I understand, she's deliberately skirting the appeals process. Thats worth firing for, imo.

@Magisch The OP thinks that might be why the lecturer isn't giving back feedback. It sounds like the OP doesn't have any proof for that claim and isn't even fully convinced that truly is the case themselves.

Yes...but. Feedback is the essence of the learning process, in any context. Some one is refusing to do her job.

Can't it be escalated? E.g. handed off to whoever the lecturer's superior is. The OP may not have the power to change things, but someone else might, and handing over the responsibility to act feels like it would be better than essentially sucking it up.

-1, this is why injustices impregnate and pervive in the western educational system. "just move on".

This is exactly the right thing to do. Politics have ended too many grad student careers.

@CptEric the answer has no downvotes, so it looks as though like you didn't put your vote where your mouth is. When you have to downvote, downvote, don't talk.

"it's not public, but it's there" ~SO message when i try to do so. @DanRomik . get down your high horse.

This answer is a problem with academia. The point of a course is 1) teach students, 2) certify knowledge and 80 percent of a course without feedback is not conducive to healthy courses.

If there are any issues, they are between the instructor and the students.  One would assume that if a student approached the instructor with questions about the grade, then she would be responsive to that request.  If she is not, the student has the responsibility to pursue recourse.
The best you can do is to grade as quickly as possible, so that students will have the ability to ask questions soon.

Some people think you have a moral duty to do a job well if you are doing a job.  Especially if the well being of others depends on you doing your job well.

There was one professor at a college I attended who, knowing that grading is the least pleasant part of a professor's job, wrote a "quiz" program that automatically graded student assignments without him intervening. Students kept complaining about it in course reviews, and he kept tweaking it, sometimes in ways students found very strange. (At one time, his students could get zero credit for a good chunk of a working solution; at another time his students could get partial credit for what turned out to be very minimal.)
That "quiz" program was the reason he didn't get tenure, and that was the only time in academia that I have seen sheer delight on the part of a student who just heard that a professor was not extended tenure.
Others are, unfortunately, probably right in assessing the politics and saying that the problem is not one you could straighten out or should try. I'd love to give you some pixie dust that would give the necessary clout, but I can't.
Meanwhile, you have provided perhaps a lesson for the rest of us that a large portion of a professor's obligation to students is to answer the question, "How could I have done better?" Your own situation may be immovable, but you've given everyone else here a valuable "Heads up!"

+1 for the pixie dust part:). Also it is good to know that such a lesson is needed. As a student I always received feedback for my work so I thought this is elementary, which is probably part of the reason that I find the situation difficult.

You would not expect detailed feedback for a final exam so why for a final assessment?
This does not seem abnormal to me. Feedback is given through the course to help students improve, and then they are assessed on what they have learned during the final assessment. Were this assessment a final exam there would be no expectation of detailed feedback, so why expect it for a different form of assessment?
Feedback is not "free"; it hugely increases the amount of time that marking a piece of work takes. For a final assessment the chances that the feedback will simply be ignored by any student is substantially higher since there is no further assessment of that material, and the value of that feedback is also lower. It is not unreasonable to hold assessments without feedback to students.

Gee!  I provide detailed feedback for all my exams!  (Exams during the semester are returned with feedback. Final exams are not returned, but I mark them as though they would be, and invite students to come by to look over their final exams.

I think that's very generous of you @BobBrown.

-1. Not giving detailed feedback is very different from not giving any feedback, which is what OP is describing, including not giving a breakdown of how points were assigned for different questions. The former is somewhat reasonable, whereas the latter sounds like unethical behavior on the part of the lecturer (especially given their apparent motivation of making grade appeals impossible). And yes, offering feedback is not "free", it is part of our jobs for which we are paid a salary.

+1 To counter some downvotes; like Jack, I'm not that surprised by this policy on the final. See my comment to the main question above.

You don't expect feedback on 80% of your grade?

Giving feedback exposes you to arguments, which are very time consuming and unpleasant, better not to write anything, just put down the marks. Then hand out a sheet with commonly made mistakes.


text:
(Indirectly) looking for a PhD before I have published a paper
I am currently in the final (second) year of my masters degree (in bioinformatics) and am beginning to look around for a PhD. Admittedly, my resume so far is not very impressive: I did pretty well in courses but I do not have any published papers nor any conferences to speak of.
A few days ago I had a conversation with a Cambridge professor who has visited my institution and has collaborations with many key researchers working on a topic I'm interested in pursuing (he himself does not work directly on this topic, to my understanding).
The professor said that if I send him my CV he may be able to forward it to his collaborators.
When I talked to my thesis advisers (I have two) about this, both of them told me that I would be far better off if I had a published paper, or at least a submitted one, before I apply for a PhD. Our intention is to try to publish the project I'm currently working on, but it is likely to be a few months until we will a manuscript that we can submit.
On the one hand, I agree with my advisers that a paper would improve my odds with respect to admission to a PhD program (in terms of finding advisers, scholarships, etc.) . On the other hand, I think that I am presented here with an opportunity that I might not have again as the Cambridge professor will probably soon forget me if I don't write him soon.
So, I basically have two questions:

Is it a good idea to try to submit my CV at this stage? Could this have any negative effects or do I have nothing to lose?
If I do write to the Cambridge professor, what exactly should I include? If I write directly to a potential advisor I would of course enclose a cover letter and letters of reference, or at least list referees in my CV, but in this case I don't know if this is appropriate and I'm not wild about the idea of pestering my advisers by requesting letters of reference for this after they already told me that they don't think it is a good idea.

Any comments will be appreciated.
Note: this question is somewhat related to:
Apply for PhD before finishing my Master's degree
Applying for a PhD before or after finishing master's
but I thought that having a contact makes my situation sufficiently different in order to ask a new question.

Can you treat this as a networking opportunity, rather than an application?

@ Patricia Shanahan: Interesting idea. Can you please be more specific as to how can I best use this as a networking opportunity? I'm pretty new to all of the networking business.

It sounds like the visiting professor was speaking in rather vague terms, just being a nice guy offering to help you make a connection with people in your target researc area.  This is nice, and under normal circumstances you would follow up by sending a short email and with a short CV attached, since that's what he suggested; however, there is in principle nothing to prevent you from writing directly to the people the visitor had in mind.
But I think your question is more about how to apply for a PhD program, so let's look at that.
I suppose PhD applications are different in Europe than in the U.S.  In the U.S., I would say:

Today is February 19.  If you have just started your last semester of your master's program, and have no plans for next fall, then you'll have to get cracking with your PhD applications.  Meaning, drop everything and get them out the door ASAP, hoping to either barely make the submission deadline, or hoping your application will be considered after the deadline.
If you can continue on in your current department for another semester or year, then write down the application deadlines for the programs you're interested in, work backwards from that, and sit down and talk with your advisors about your timeline.  You may be able to find some programs that allow a January start date, but watch out, teaching assistantships are typically given to August start students.

I am sorry I don't know about procedures, timelines and customs for PhD admissions in Europe.  All I can suggest is that you start by carefully reading the admissions information published on the target university's website.
You could take a look at Academia SE questions related to the PhD admissions process in Europe, and ask a question targeted at that specifically.
Additional notes: in general it is best not to go against one's advisor's wishes; your question did make me wonder if your advisors are trying to keep you in your current department.

The first paragraph relates to what I meant in a comment by treating it as a networking opportunity. The idea is to start establishing very casual contacts with researchers in your area.

@PatriciaShanahan - Yes, I agree with both of your comments; it's just that I'm worried that OP may have missed the boat for applications for next fall....

I agree with your point about the deadlines.

@Patricia Shanahan: I appreicate thius comment. If you will be kind enoguh to give me some more specific tips to how to create such connections it would be great. As I said I'm new to this.

@user1614062 There is no formula, and I'm no expert. Just be open to contacts.

@aparente001: Thanks for your answer and comments. I will probably be able to stay in my department for another year so I decided that at present doing a good job on my masters takes precedent over looking for a PhD. Maybe, as Patricia suggested I should look at this as an attempt at networking.

@aparente001: this may be beyond the scope of the question but I wanted to respond to your note: One of my advisors did want me to stay and pursue a PhD with him  I decided against this because he  his approach to research is not quiet compatible with mine. When I told him I prefer to look for a PhD elsewhere he told me that he can help me with that, but it won't be easy. Are there other things I should make me suspicious that he actually try to keep me under his wings, and if so, what would be an effective reaction to that?

I guess you could try to pin him down (e.g. "Why won't it be easy?  What are the hurdles I'll be facing?  How did you surmount these challenges when you were a student?" but mainly I hope you can get a more positive approach from your other advisor. It's fortunate that you have two, I guess! // If this question hasn't been asked before, I think it would be a good one -- How to go elsewhere for PhD after Masters, when Masters advisor resists (or something like that). // Glad to hear you can stay on where you are, and do a good job with PhD applications next fall. // Thumbs up to the networking.


text:
Research studies covering the reasons why faculty applicants accept or reject academic jobs?
Is there any research/study/survey that tried to quantify the reasons why faculty applicants accepted or rejected academic jobs that have been proposed to them? (e.g., location, salary, the current faculty, college ranking)
I am mostly interested in the United States and the field of computer science, but curious about other countries and fields as well.

Did you try any of these articles? I have only read a few abstracts, but some of the answers you want may be there.

Meta discussion about the closure of this question

See Matier, Michael W. "Recruiting Faculty: Complementary Tales from Two Campuses." Research in Higher Education 32.1 (1991): 31-44. DOI: 10.1007/BF00992831
As the abstract says:

This paper—a complement to “Retaining Faculty: A Tale of Two Campuses” (Matier, 1990)—examines the factors influencing individuals with firm offers to join the faculty at two research universities. Particular attention is paid to the relative weight and importance placed on the tangible, intangible, and non-work-related benefits in the decision-making process.

According to this paper:

Using the enticement to accept the Wyandot, Manada, and alternative best
opportunity values assigned by the participants for each factor, it was possible to determine those most important in the decision-making process.
...
Of the ten most important factors at each of the subject institutions, nine were common to both. Of these, eight were intangible benefits: reputation of institution, teaching assignments/opportunities, reputation of department, career advancement opportunities, reputation of associates, congeniality of associates, research opportunities, and rapport with departmental leaders.
The remaining common factor was the tangible benefit teaching/research load, ranked number three at Wyandot and number eight at Manada. The
uncommon factor ranked in the top ten at Wyandot was the tangible benefit
research funding (ranked number nine). At Manada, it was the tangible benefit library facilities (ranked number seven).

Another similar study: Teevan, James J., Susan Pepper, and Joseph R. Pellizzari. "Academic employment decisions and gender." Research in Higher Education 33.2 (1992): 141-160. DOI: 10.1007/BF00973576
Its findings include:

The most frequently mentioned reason for accepting a position, cited by 50 percent of academics, was the reputation of the department or the university, a factor similarly important to both males and females. The next most frequently mentioned reasons for accepting positions concerned the compatibility of the job with family needs (cited by 39% of all respondents), positive aspects of the job offer, and personal opportunities (each mentioned by 36% of all respondents).
Among those who declined or resigned from positions, a somewhat different pattern emerged. Dissatisfaction with aspects of the job offer, cited by 47 percent of these respondents, and the incompatibility of the position with family needs, cited by 42 percent, were the most frequently mentioned reasons. Insufficient research support, fewer personal opportunities, and a weaker university or department were mentioned by 26 to 30 percent of these respondents.