text:
investigating an allegation that I may have potentially breached Code of Conduct
this year I had an assignment due. I had some personal issues going on with my mental health, which my school is aware of. During this time I received a message from someone in my university group chat detailing that they could provide me with assistance with my assignments.
Although I did pay them once I received the work they provided, I quickly realised how baseless, uninformative, and basic the work was. It was worse than what I could have drafted myself. I was never going to submit it anyway: I was only going to use it to inspire me and give me the context and structure that I needed. But the work was so useless that I demanded a refund.
The person, started to intimidate and harass me when I requested my money back via PayPal. They demanded I cancel the refund and started to blackmail me. It got to the point where they found my name and university and my tutors name. Even though I didn't submit any work I felt compelled to cancel the refund just so they would leave me alone. But unfortunately due to the nature of these people they started demanding more money. In other terms, "hush money" to keep them from exposing me. I refused and blocked them.
Did I really breach the code of conduct even if I didn't submit any work? Even when I requested a refund and the fact that this person reached out to me via a university group on Facebook. I take full responsibility for my mistake. What is the likelihood that I will face punishment?

Are you sure that email came from your university? It sounds like exactly what someone trying to pressure you would send.

"I was only going to use it to inspire me and give me the context and structure that I was needing." If I would be the acccuser, I would summarize this as : "You paid for a document, you used the received document at the initial, difficult "blank page" stages of drafting your document. If the delivered document would have been of better quality you would have used for more stages of drafting your document. If it was perfect, you would have submitted directly the delivered document. Thanks for your involuntary honesty". I think that, in your case, the best defense is to say nothing...

By quickly googling the words "university code of conduct prohibiting looking external help assignment" you get many results from US-based universities prohibiting "Any use or attempted use of external assistance in the completion of an academic assignment and/or during an examination" (see USC CoC 11.13 A  https://policy.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SCampus-Part-B.pdf ). But not all of them. Again, check carefully your CoC.

"I take full responsibility for my mistake" Then you don't need to know the likelihood that you'll face punishment. Turn yourself in, admit everything, and accept whatever punishment is given. That's what taking responsibility means.

The following are not valid defenses for plagiarism or fraud:

You were going through a rough time with your mental health
You were the victim of a crime
You were "desperate"
The work you received was low quality
You only ever intended to plagiarize the "quality and structure"

On the other hand, the following is an extremely valid defense: you came to your senses, did not submit the plagiarized assignment, and voluntarily took a zero on the assignment in question rather than compromise your integrity. So, you never actually crossed the line of submitting plagiarized or fraudulent work.*
This should be simple to prove: ask your instructor for a note confirming that you did not submit the assignment in question, received a zero on it, and later applied for extenuating circumstances.

You should ensure that you read the procedure and code of conduct before attending the meeting.

This is very good advice, you should read the exact wording of the statutes you are accused of violating. For example, if the statute says "submitting plagiarized work," then you can point out that you never actually submitted anything and so did not violate the statute.
You may find that by paying scammers to complete your work, you are technically in breach of some regulation (e.g., bringing the university into disrepute). However, any penalty from such infractions should be small compared to the potential penalties if you are convicted of fraud.

So what is the likelihood that I will face punishment?

We cannot predict the future. But, I suspect you are mostly "off the hook" if you tell the story clearly and present proof that you never actually crossed the line.

(*) As noted in the comments, it does seem likely you would have plagiarized if the person you hired had done a better job; this is troubling. However, a fair judicial process will be concerned only with what you did, not with what you might have done under other circumstances.

While none of the reasons listed are valid defenses for plagerism, they may well be taken into account when deciding the punishment, particularly if it is a first offense.

You may find that by paying scammers to complete your work, you are technically in breach of some regulation (e.g., bringing the university into disrepute)
The university clearly stated that OP may be in breach of point 2 (breach of agreed conditions at enrolment), not point 3 (disreputing the Uni).
"any penalty from such infractions should be small compared to the potential penalties if you are convicted of fraud." please stress that it is your hypothesis.
"a fair judicial process will be concerned only [...]" False or too short. See the difference between manslaughter vs killing ...

I think this scenario is kind of like what "attempted murder" is to "murder" - the OP fairly clearly had the intent to plagiarize and took overt steps to do so, but did not achieve their intended goal only because the work they bought was too poor to submit. The OP didn't commit plagiarism because they never actually presented another's work as their own, but I'd argue it's still academic misconduct to make the attempt. You'd get kicked out of a proctored test the moment you got caught looking at another's paper, it doesn't matter if you ultimately decide your own answer was better anyway.

@NuclearHoagie I don't think that's a good analogy. An example of attempted murder is that you shoot but miss. If you plan on shooting but change your mind before pulling the trigger, it's not attempted murder.

I think that stressing that the OP "came to their senses" is very good advice. To that end, the OP should strictly avoid any mention that the bad quality of the commissioned work made it easier  to  come to their senses ;-). Like "it was even worse than the ChatGPT version I also considered!"

@Barmar: failed manslaughter then? with respect to the answer we are commenting, what you did is "almost killed someone", the circumstances makes it attempted voluntary manslaughter, attempted murder, attempted involuntary manslaughter ?! So a fair judicial is exactly evaluating the circumstances  (and by exclusion the other circumstances, too)

@EarlGrey I don't think it's anything like that. It's like you planned to murder, bought a gun, but then changed your mind.

@Barmar we are discussing a breach of CoC, which I am almost sure it includes a prohibition in trying to get external help for your assignment. In your analogy, it would be like "it is prohibited to plan a murder".

@Barmar But it is still very much a crime to hire an incompetent hitman who fails to kill the target, or to hire a hitman and later call off the hit. Arguing that you called off a hit because you realized you'd get caught or that it wouldn't accomplish your goals doesn't strike me as a good defense. Maybe "attempted murder" isn't the right charge, perhaps "conspiracy to commit murder" would be the better fit. Planning it and taking steps to do it are still problematic even if you don't successfully accomplish it.

@NuclearHoagie There's a big difference between hiring someone to do something (since you expect them to carry it out) and planning on doing something yourself but not going through with it.

@NuclearHoagie I opened this law.SE question: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/98713/what-crime-have-you-committed-if-you-hire-a-hitman-but-cancel-the-contract

The hitman analogy is wrong because as soon as you hire them it is a crime even if later you cancel it. With plagiarism it's only a crime if you actually submit the paper. What's in your draft is no business of the university. However there may be other COC rules that apply...

"Quality" is not a plagiarizable attribute.  In many cases (depending on the discipline and application) neither is structure.

i might include in the answer the idea to actually ask the university directly if the email is real.  If not that is a big help, and if so that could be a time to ask how to show their defense.

@Barmar And while "purchasing a weapon with intent to commit a crime" may be in and of itself a crime, the punishment for that crime will be much less than the punishment for actually committing, or even attempting, the murder. Likewise, even if there is a disciplinary cause for "procuring homework services," the action should fairly be less than the action for "knowingly submitting plagiarized work."

In German law there is a distinction between (unsuccessful) attempt to commit a crime and abortive crime (one which you desist from before going through it). OP's case is somewhere in a gray area between these two. This answer is excellent, do you provide legal service? ;-)

First: are you sure that the email is not a scam itself? the service providers you contacted have no interest in getting you expelled from the Uni: they lose their golden egg laying chicken (i.e.: you). They have all the interest in scaring you, though.
Assuming the email is true: although your defense has some strong points, you are better to search what is prohibited by your University's Code of Conduct.
Let's assume that the code of coduct prohibits explicitly "looking for external help to prepare the submission of homeworks": you are then guilty.
What you are (most likely) facing are scammers that sent screenshots and printouts of your emails and messages. How can someone believe that these printouts and screenshots sent from some random people claiming to be from Kenya are authentic and valid and not doctored is extremely beyond my comprehension, but apparently it is the case of the ethical commitee in your University.
Yes, they are true (you admit having had an exchange with them) ... but this is all matter for a lawyer to defend you, on the legal basis.
I will be blunt: on the ethical basis, you already did something that you know it may be wrong. What if the work delivered whas of good quality instead of the crap you received? Would you have used them?
On the legal basis, though, it is all but set. But you are in hot waters. Read the procedure and code of conduct, get some form of legal counsel as soon as possible, stop asking questions in the internet and ask in person the question "How can I defend myself?" to the University and all the possible student groups/association/etc/etc .

Please do not use the "mental health" defense. Every single student with some grievance, failed exam, missed quiz, etc. leads with that these days. If you have genuine diagnosed issues which could have led to out of character behavior, excessive stress, etc., or anything else that's related, you need to provide a note from a health professional.

As others have noted, check your university/college policies on what constitutes a breach of conduct. For some, soliciting or engaging in obtaining material for the purpose of cheating, or helping others cheat could be considered a violation whether you did it or not. At my University you would have breached it. In fact, I have had to report students doing the same thing as you, because others from the group chat sent the complaints my way (it would have been a breach of conduct on my end not to report).

Consult the syllabus for the class which was impacted. What is their policy on academic dishonesty? Fail the course? Fail the assignment? etc...

Since you did not go through with it, you are unlikely to face full discipline (for us that ranges from a permanent mark on your transcript, to suspension, to expulsion). It could be as simple as failing that specific assignment and taking a hit on your grade, or having to retake the course (see #3 for what the policy is)... or you may just get off with a warning and the requirement to attend an academic integrity workshop.

Finally. Don't ever do this again. No matter how stressed or burdened you may feel. Talk to faculty, seek extensions and help when you can, if you have legitimate mental health concerns, go to student health services or other medical health professionals. Cheating is not worth it on so many levels.
Ask yourself, was the potential to "get away" with a higher assignment grade worth all the stress you are going through now? Or worse, if you had actually used the fraudulent work?

I take full responsibility for my mistake that's for sure but I knew full well not to ever submit someone elses work which I didn't do.

I think in this one sentence you contradict yourself in a way that makes you look pretty bad. "Taking full responsibility" would mean acknowledging that you did in fact have the intent to commit plagiarism at the time you commissioned the "assistance". But when you say "I knew full well not to ever submit someone elses work" you seem to be deflecting criticism of your actions by constructing a straw man definition of plagiarism in which only "submitting someone else's [verbatim] work" counts as plagiarism. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Commissioning another person to write the assignment for you and then using it, even only for "inspiration" and for "context and structure" (which any academic who wasn't born yesterday can interpret as "for submission after a couple of rounds of mild paraphrasing"), would still count as plagiarism, and would still be a form of submitting someone else's work.
To be clear, your description in the post of what happened does appear to be a good start and a step in the direction of taking responsibility. But I wouldn't call it "taking full responsibility". Partial responsibility, maybe.

So what is the likelyhood that I will face punishment?

I don't know. More importantly, the likelihood that you will face punishment, and the severity of the punishment if one is imposed, depends on how maturely and honestly you handle the situation. "Taking full responsibility" is indeed the key -- from your story it sounds like you messed up a bit, and possibly broke the code of conduct, but as @cag51's answer says, the fact that you ultimately did not submit a plagiarized assignment is certainly a strong point in your favor and a valid defense, though not necessarily an impenetrable one. A willingness to take responsibility and honestly acknowledge your mistake would be another thing that university disciplinary offices generally consider to be a very positive factor, and would help maximize the chance of walking away with a mild punishment or no punishment at all.
It could also help if you have someone within the university system who can offer you advice as you navigate the disciplinary process and help advocate for you. In some universities you can ask to be referred to such a person. I have also seen misconduct cases where students hire lawyers, who are in some cases allowed to participate in misconduct hearings. Whether you should do that is difficult to say (particularly because some lawyers make bad arguments that can make you look even worse than you would look without a lawyer), but it's something to consider. Good luck!

[OP was edited to remove the de-anonymizing info, but still...]
Your question appears to be:

So what is the likelyhood that I will face punishment?

I'd say, very close to 100%. What you might be able to affect, is the severity of the punishment.
Firstly, this appears to be a real email, from a real university, identifiable from the email text in your question.
Unfortunately, that easy identification means that the text of your question (which is effectively a confession) has likely already been seen by or sent to your university's disciplinary dept: so you should probably assume that they will know everything you have written here, and that they already have your written confession.
I still agree with other answers, in that I recommend reaching out to the email's author through another channel (or at least, through email only after validating their email address is correct), just to ask if it is legitimate, before proceeding further.
I wouldn't recommend pretending ignorance, like "could you clarify whether you have listed the correct assignment, as the one listed is one I did not contribute to, and have even applied for extenuating circumstances". In theory this could defuse the investigation immediately, however, if they already have the text of this question in hand, this approach may come across as "trying it on".
I would probably ask the sender for additional information on the investigation process, asking for information on timelines, etc, so that you know how much time you have to work on providing evidence. There seems to be very little on timelines in their regulations.
Once you've confirmed that it's legitimate, and established what your timeline for action is, you might wish to seek legal counsel before engaging with them or sending them anything, or admitting any guilt: consider asking the Citizen's Advice Bureau about this. If you do take on counsel, make sure to let them know that you posted this confession publicly, and that it might be in the hands of the University.
In the absence of legal counsel, though, I'd definitely follow the instructions in that email to the letter.
From the email, it seems that you should probably read all sections of their regulations, as many apply to you.
Read them carefully, and completely, and do what the emails and regulations say.
I'd draw your attention to the parts which say it is your responsibility to raise any health issues as extenuating circumstances, so while leading with that as you did here may come across poorly, it does seem valuable and possibly important that you do so.
Also read about the evidence you should be providing to them as soon as possible.
Are you screwed? You probably know better than we do, as they provided you a required training module on the topic, early on. So, you'll have been trained to know the answer to your own question, and we people on the internet have (for the most part) not been trained by your university in their policies.
But whether or not you're screwed is largely out of your hands at this point. All you can do is try your best to navigate the process. You've given here some compelling arguments for leniency (health, and the fact that you opted not to use it and instead to take a zero mark), so make sure that all these good bits gets introduced in the information you provide them. Downplay the bad bits, but don't lie.
Note that this public confession was for some time the top "Hot" post on SE's front page, and also of course the top post on Academia SE. It is VERY unlikely to have sailed under their radar.

I think the request to admins to delete the question may be out of line. I mean, does this site actually have a rule against providing enough information for the poster or the situation they're asking about to be identified? I doubt it, given that many of use our real names to post here. (also, here deletion is generally done by moderators or high-reputation users, not admins)

It's more a suggestion they do something charitable to the poor guy. He's in bad enough trouble at this point, surely?

Well, no, I'm not sure of that. But it doesn't even matter. On SE sites, questions are valuable to lots of people other than the asker, e.g. those experiencing similar situations, now or in the future. We generally place that value to others above negative consequences of leaving the question up, unless it's extremely serious - but this doesn't qualify. "Serious" would mean that, say, someone's life is endangered by the question remaining visible.

@DavidZ Relevant: https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4762/68109

Shrug You do you. My suggestion stands.

@GoodDeeds Ah, thanks for the link, that's sort of like what I had in mind in my first comment. Though my guess is this question doesn't qualify as an allegation against a named organization or individual in the sense of that post - if nothing else, no person or organization is named in the question, except for the asker's use of a name for their account. Anyway, as a practical matter, we can tell from the edit history that at least one moderator has seen this question; they could have deleted it if they thought that was appropriate, and they didn't.

"this question doesn't qualify as an allegation against a named organization or individual in the sense of that post - if nothing else, no person or organization is named in the question" ... It infuriates me that in this day and age, people still don't understand PII. Why do people think names are some kind of particularly powerful dark magic? We're not summoning daemons, here. Both the organization and the person involved were uniquely identifiable from the post before it was edited.

Since the OP has been edited, I've edited my answer to also be vaguer. At this point, I don't think the OP's a deletion candidate any more.


text:
The more I improve the quality of my course, the worse the student evaluation becomes. Should I provide low quality lectures?
For almost 6 years, I have given courses on different CS topics at my university. This year, I decided to make my lectures and tutorials for a specific master course as perfect as possible, so I and my team (tutors) put an enormous effort (compared to previous years) to provide:

clear and informative slides,
explanation on a digital board + the slides (the only course providing recorded slides and board),
diverse examples,
the best possible video and audio quality,
exciting and interesting weekly tasks,
we even covered the fundamentals of linear algebra and math in general as a bonus because I noticed that my former students had a problem understanding some topics because of this.
we also made the course hybrid: online, on-campus and recorded (the only course provided with this format at our university).

As I have taught the same course for 4 years, I would say that this year's version is at least twice as good than the first version. I not only base this on what I mentioned earlier but also,

I have mastered the topic very well now,
I prepared the weekly tasks from real-life examples (this makes them of course much more difficult but better to learn),
My courses have become very well organized and transparent (compared to previous years),
etc.

However, year after year, the student evaluation becomes worse based on strange reasons (e.g. the topic is difficult, we had to search by ourselves to understand*, etc).
EDIT: One of the common reasons given is that they could understand some topics better when they watched YouTube videos. For the university level (masters degree), I believe I have to explain on a higher level and not like 3Blue1Brown videos.
Consequently, the evaluation of this year is very bad compared to the first one from 4 years ago (which was relatively good).
I am wondering now whether I should go back to the old style, which I personally find bad and not very conducive to learning, but the students seem to like. Or should I continue improving my course regardless of the students' comments? Note that as a junior lecturer, the evaluation would help me to get promoted.
*By providing diverse examples and tasks, of course, they need to search by themselves and that was as intended. I think this is a legitimate learning technique as we cannot cover 100 percent of the topics in the course.

Could you explain the sentence "One of their common reasons, is that they could understand some topics better when they watched youtube videos."? Does it mean that they failed at your course because they couldn't find youtube videos on that topic, or does it mean that they found your teaching material to be even worse than a youtube video?

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

it could be helpful to understand some undiscussed metrics: are there are additional students in the course? and are these reviews from a subset of students who would normally leave the course who instead choose to continue with bad marks? it's my anecdotal experience from friends who are in and around college and some lamenting grads that in the last decade, many students are rushing to become computer scientists, without appreciation that it's quite largely applied math and without the requisite interest because they perceive it as an easy and highly paid career path

What was the class performance like?

This questions seems to suffer from the fact that quality is never defined. Without defining what quality is to you, it is impossible to give help on how to improve it. E.g, are student evaluations a part of quality for you? Or what objective measures define quality for you?

Are the students doing better on the exams now?  Or not?

One observation, based on my own habit of completely redoing classes, is new syllabuses suffer severely from lack of tuning. In practice, a "worse" syllabus which I've taught a few times before is as good or better than a new "better" one.
I'd say to put a moratorium on "improving" the class. You've taught it this way once, you've seen what didn't quite work and so on. Use that to make tweaks to smooth it out.
One thing that jumps out -- real-world examples. All students say they want them, but as you wrote, they always involve way too much domain specific knowledge. The actual thing you're trying to teach gets lost in the mess. Cut them and go back to the old "teaching" examples. It's not a complete loss -- when students complain you'll be able to say "yeah, we tried that -- didn't work".
Then just work on general smoothing. If lots of students loved a certain 3rd-party video, go ahead and add a link to it. Think back over test Q's you were sure more people should have known, but didn't. If students were weak on a topic they needed later in the course, expand it a bit and cut one of your darlings. I love teaching recursion, and did it at the end of 1st semester intro to programming, but it's tough to give a good assignment on, students needed more work with arrays, so it was cut.
A longer-term project is to look at previous, or even concurrent, courses in the major. Some things in the old syllabus may have taken advantage of those topics (maybe they all wrote small bash scripts, but have never seen HTML), or meshed better (and even if you wrote the old syllabus, it may have meshed coincidentally).
One of the hardest things for me is to look over my shiny new baby syllabus (and the rest) and realize I had some good ideas, but also a lot of wishful thinking. And thinking it wouldn't need lots of tweaking was pure hubris. I feel like teaching ComSci at least has a metaphor for this -- writing a new program is fun. But you don't have a product until after the drudgery of debugging, adding nice interfaces, and so on.

Regarding the problems with real-world examples, there is a very good example from the world of CS: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is widely regarded as one of the best CS courses / books ever written, and it manages to teach (most of) computer science to absolute beginners, but it suffers heavily from being designed for absolute beginners at MIT. Many of its examples draw heavily on domain concepts from mathematics, electrical engineering, and physics, and make the examples hard to understand for anyone not familiar with those … which has nothing to do with the …

… actual concept the example is trying to teach, only with the examples chosen to teach it. Assuming this knowledge makes sense for a course taught at MIT, since all students should have courses in those disciplines as well, but it places artificial hurdles around what would otherwise be probably the best book on programming, ever. See the second paragraph on page 9 of section 4.1 of Structure and Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum for a much better analysis than I can do justice.

@JörgWMittag I completely forgot about meshing with the "context" of other classes. A certain 10th-week topic may align with what they covered in a concurrent class in week 9; or an intro class may have covered some surprising topics. An old oddball javascript example I cut may have actually been good since they previously wrote some JS while learning HTML.

"I prepared the weekly tasks from real-life examples (this makes them of course much more difficult but better to learn)," ... I honestly wonder if the bulk of the negative student feedback has come from the choice to make weekly tasks much more difficult.

@Owen Expanding on your metaphor: You need to do UX on the course. Look at it not from your perspective, but the user perspective. If evaluations are low, some needs may not be met.

@AdamBurke Indeed: " I think this is a legitimate learning technique as we cannot cover 100 of the topic in the course." If your exams/assignments require knowledge that is not taught in the course you need to make that abundantly clear beforehand -- or -- cut some of your material, so you can cover what you advertise in the course.

Are you sure that you are measuring the quality of your course and not something else?

The last two years are special (corona), maybe that affected evaluations
6 years is a time in which the curriculum in the schools can change
6 years is a time in which the perception and expectation of students change, maybe there are good lectures on youtube or theattention span has changed
6 years is a time in which the composition of your audience may change - maybe CS became more popular

So before drawing conclusions, talk to your colleagues to get a reference value for how critical students may perceive something. Check if the curriculum in school of your audience has changed (if homogeneous enough).
After you actually verified that you can actually read something from this, break it down.

Also, students are more visual learning-oriented than ever. Preferring a video guide over a written one en masse would be an absolute shocker back when I studies yet here we are... Maybe students as a whole DO prefer those 3Blue1Brown videos to a more complex university-level course and that poses a systemic problem...

Does your university have a center where you can go to have your syllabus evaluated? For example, at the universities I have taught at, there are Centers for Teaching and Learning (or some variation upon that title), where you can have your syllabus and materials evaluated by administrative staff focused on pedagogy. There might not be anything "wrong" with your course, so I suggest having an external reviewer look at your materials might help.
On a personal note, for an online course I teach, I've ended up adding a lot of different materials to accommodate a variety of learners and learning styles over the years. However, by adding more videos, lecture notes, and activities in addition to the standard lecture and slides, some students have felt overwhelmed by the sheer variety of course content. So while I thought I was making my course more accessible to some, it was becoming less accessible to others by bringing in too many types of content.

-1. (a) Faculty putting faith in administration for syllabus review is a bad idea. (b) Learning styles are a myth. https://youtu.be/rhgwIhB58PA

@DanielR.Collins, I'm on board with your second comment, but not your first.  At my institution, at least, the pedagogy-oriented folks at the university's teaching & learning centre are pretty good ...

@BenBolker yours is in my experience an usual situation.  Where I work the last people I want advice from for pedagogy are the people from the TLC… they talk a good bunch but have no practical solutions and a completely orthogonal understanding of teaching.

I guess I'm lucky then.

@DanielR.Collins I'm surprised the myth that there is no such thing as learning styles still persists :-)  The video you linked made a common mistake - attributing too much to a person's learning style and then dismantling that strawman.

@AlanDev That "myth" as you call it is pretty well-established state of the art in pedagogics. See also here https://medium.com/illumination/youre-not-a-visual-learner-learning-styles-don-t-exist-3219ec3203e2 but there is also plenty of scientific evidence (or lack of evidence for learning styles, more accurately).

@xLeitix True, but it would seem the actual concern is that for a given educator, group of students and material not all teaching methods are seen by students as equal - the most importantly, not equally approachable. Studies do not capture that aspect of real life; rather, they consider a more refined version. Different levels of engagement in a formal setting vs while watching lighthearted videos on Youtube is probably the reason people conflate it with the "learning style". In other words, a boring controlled study is not the same as binge watching videos, even if technically correct :)

To say that the VAK learning styles are a myth is probably true. To say that people don't learn things in different ways is just ludicrous. In math, there are geometers and algebraists, and a very small number of people who do both equally well (as opposed to the overwhelming number who do both equally poorly). Multiple explanations relying on different intrinsic modes of thought rewards learners and it's unfortunate that it bumps up against the equally important need to be succinct both to prevent overwhelment and cover all the required material.

Your Premise Is Broken.
If someone explained to you that he had refactored a program and now it ran slower, you would not call that an improvement. Yet you make an analogous claim in your question.
To the extent that student evaluations measure quality (which is a BIG, BIG caveat!!), your course is lower quality* than it was before. You had something that worked, and you "fixed" it until you no longer had something that worked. Your starting point has to recognize that.
You denigrate, "the old style, which I personally find bad and does not help to learn but the students seem to like it." I think you should strongly consider that you may not have a good perspective on what helps your students learn. That can be true without any failing on your part - several of my favorite professors from undergrad were objectively terrible at gauging the level of understanding.
Fundamentally though, if quality means good student evals, your effort was counterproductive. Sorry.

*Alright, look: "quality" is totally undefined. You could define quality to mean "maximizing the number of examples that use pineapples", and then you could legitimately have a higher quality course, but your metrics would not really lead you anywhere useful. I'm assuming that you're going with something like student satisfaction as your measure of quality, because otherwise mentioning the student evaluations is a non-sequitur.

A slower refactored program could still be a huge improvement in terms of readability and maintainability, which can be more important than performance in certain contexts. This analogy does support the idea that the actual issue is with the definition of "quality".

I think many answers here miss the most basic thing. The thing is to talk to students and ask them what their problems are when trying to perform on an evaluation test/ what they find difficult. The quality of the course as a course itself should by determined by what the student gets out of it, not of the material or Individual components.
You may have the best material in the world or the best presentation in the world, but if the students don't get it (over repeated testing), then that material has some fault in it preventing it from being useful.
You also have another thing to check, the actual question papers. See what the students are writing, what they can and don't answer , and, if you've talked about these things in class or not.
Also secondly, you don't have to just make it abstract because it's a higher level. People are people whether they are studying in UG or masters. If you can present the topic in a nice and easy to digest way, then even masters student would get more from your lecture than if you didn't.
Two key examples of this I found are Tristan Needham's book on Visual Differential Geometry, and Complex analysis. Sure, it doesn't really teach either of these topic in the conventional sense, but reading these books, the student can develop a real passion for these subject and that can propel them into studying and working through a dry rigorous text.

I am not a professor and haven't been in any formal teaching role, this came really from a student perspective but I hope it is of use

THIS! You have to talk to the students to know what they need. The goal is to teach them the content, not to create something beautiful that nobody can use. OK, I am slightly exaggerating.

I believe I have to explain on a higher level and not like 3brown1blue videos.

Why?
Your job is to help students understand.
It's not beneath their dignity - or yours - for you to speak at a "low" enough level for them to easily grasp the concepts.
I'll bet that in earlier iterations of teaching this course, when your own understanding was less solid, your explanations were easier for the novice to follow.
As you increasingly mastered the topic, things that now seemed obvious to you (but aren't obvious to the novice)  "fell out" of your explanations, and those tiny omissions made it increasingly difficult for each new crop of novices, i.e. the new sets of students, to follow.

Your last point is called the curse of knowledge or _ the curse of expertise_.

I knew there was probably a name for it @PabloH. Thanks!

We also sometimes call it "expert blind spot"

I remember reading that among the studies that compared student evaluations of their teachers with student learning, only one study was really scientific, in that it 1) measured learning by an external, independent test (not by the grade), 2) was longitudinal, i.e. tested students *before * they took the course as well as after, and 3) also measured student performance in later courses, for which the given course was a prerequisite. There was a slight negative correlation between student performance measured this way, and student evaluation of the teacher. In other words, hard work is arduous, but it pays off. I believe there is far too much emphasis on positive student evaluations.
EDIT:
@CuriousFindings suggested I add references.
I am not sure if any of these 3 is the article I was trying to remember, but they all seem highly relevant:
Student Evaluations of Teaching Encourages Poor Teaching and Contributes to Grade Inflation: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, W. Stroebe, 2020
Why Good Teaching Evaluations May Reward Bad Teaching", W. Stroebe, 2016
"Student evaluations of teaching (mostly) do not measure teaching effectiveness", A. Boring, K. Otoboni and P. B. Stark, 2016

This answer is interesting, and would be greatly improved by adding a source for its claims

Thank you. You are right about sources. I will look into it as soon as I can.

"Studies have shown" that memory retention increases with the effort spent in the activity, among other factors.

You seems to have done an impressive update to your course, and this is what really matters: you should not adjust the course contents based only on negative evaluations of others.
Students will adjust their expectations to meet the expectations of the instructor, and changing the contents may lead to negative feedback since the students will “naturally” compare the course to the previous year.  The key is to assess if your expectations are realistic.
Constructive students feedbacks is one way to assess if your expectations differ from those of the students, but it is not the only way.  Presumably you can compare the contents of your course with what is offered elsewhere, and judge if your course is an outlier in terms of contents and workload. You can also discuss your evaluations and mode of delivery with colleagues to see if the criticism is specific to your course or a cultural feature of recent cohorts critical of all courses.
If indeed you judge that the negative comments (which presumably do not originate from a militant subset of disenchanted students) and other indications point to a  problem with the contents, then make the adjustment.

How would the students compare the course to the previous year? These are different students, I'd assume.

@user151413 students talk and there are always stories about the instructors and their courses.

I am always surprised how little students talk. Otherwise, it is entirely unclear to me how anyone could not do well in my exams, given that I always the same questions.

We probably function in different cultures: cross-cohort rumours cannot be avoided where I work.

That's what I had assumed from the time of my studies. It might be that this is more due to the nature of the courses I teach (specialized master-level courses with mixed audience), I suspect that in the standard bachelor courses with a very homogeneous audience this would be different as well.

If you'd like to better understand student reviews, you'll have to ask them. Ideally, in a conversation with a few of them, rather than a survey that doesn't let you ask clarifying questions.
As a Master student in CS myself, I'll go over your bullet points to give you my thoughts, but keep in mind that I have not experienced your course.

For the university level (master degree), I believe I have to explain on a higher level and not like 3brown1blue videos.

There are some very high-quality videos on youtube. They don't go in-depth as much as the university course should, but they are amazing for understanding the rough idea. In my experience, a lot of lecturers don't give an introduction and overview, they jump straight to the rigorous math and leave me wondering what exactly we are doing, why we are doing it, and whether this is something I should be able to follow or even come up with myself.
Personally, I prefer learning with just youtube and blog posts, plus the university course's exercises + solutions over a live lecture that I can not pause, vastly. All I need for that is clear keywords on the slides so I know what I need to google and how much I need to grasp of it.

clear and informative slides,

which you are covering well. However, other students who prefer a live lecture will gain less from the "informative slides" and would prefer them to be light on unneccessary details. "A good talk has very little text on the slides" vs "Good lecture slides make the actual lecture redundant".
Now one solution is of course to have a lecture and a different script for self-studying. Which is generally nice, except

explanation on a digital board + the slides (the only course providing recorded slides and board)

Make sure that it is clear which parts need to be looked at as necessary and sufficient for the exam. One course I had this semester provided additional video recordings as replies to some student questions, had lecture slides, video recordings where the lecturer stated more than was written on the slides, exercises that seemed to deviate from the lecture, graded projects that were fully off-topic in my opinion and distracted from actually learning anything, and reference material book chapters.
The book chapters were all very good! But reading the reference material from just a single day's lectures would already take me two weeks. And when I asked what was relevant for understanding, and what for the exam, the answer was that all material might contain something the other stuff does not was very unsatisfactory.
So please make sure you aren't overwhelming your students by giving them a lot of "helpful material" that they then have to work through in addition. (Or think that they have to).

we even covered the fundamentals of linear algebra and math in general as a bonus because I noticed that my former students had a problem understanding some topics because of this.

This is great for the struggling students, and boring for the ones that already got it. Perhaps some students are giving you worse reviews because of this. If you can start this kind of lecture with a slide that summarizes what will be covered to allow students to see if they need this lecture or not (and tell them this is the intent), that could help.

diverse examples,

"Do I really have to look at those? I already got the main concept but maybe the exam will ask about this specific example..."
One thing you have not mentioned yet is how clearly you state the goals. I find clear goals very useful, such as:

What is relevant for the exam
(Exams are often just barely related to the actually interesting topics. Because the interesting part is harder to actually test.)
What is just additional info for those interested
What is not even really meant to be understood? (e.g. some proofs on the slides)
What are students supposed to learn in
This course
This lecture session / This exercise
the best possible video and audio quality,
exciting and interesting weekly tasks,

we also made the course hybrid: online, on-campus and recorded (the only course provided with this format at our university).

I love that! With all the thought you are putting in, you probably got this right. But for completeness: Hybrid can be a terrible experience compared to online-only. Things I've experienced that are negative examples:

Lecturer used laptop microphone for zoom, and worn microphone in the room. So everyone who was there in person understood perfectly fine, but whenever the lecturer walked one step to the side, we wouldn't hear anything online.
Chat was not monitored.
I find one of the biggest advantages of online lectures how easy it is to interact with the lecturer. I can simply unmute myself and ask when something is unclear. Compare that to raising your hand for ten minutes, then yelling "sorry?!" and still not being noticed, in the lecture hall. But even with this pro gone, just having a chat that the prof notices works well. Having a TA monitor the chat instead is alright too, but then no interaction is possible anymore.
Lecture took place in-person only, exercise session directly afterwards took place online-only.

I master the topic very well now,

That's great, but does this make the course harder as well? It sounds like you did a lot of additions that would be very useful for learning the topics of your course. But sadly, your course is probably less than a third of the total credits students are supposed to take in one semester. Where every lecture already is more effort than it is supposed to be. If I feel like I have to put in nights and weekends to fare somewhat okay in your course, that will negatively influence my review of your course.
Also, is your presentation still aware of the difficulties that people have with the topic when they first encounter it? Perhaps you've mastered your topic too well and assume things are obvious that you yourself also didn't grasp instantly.

we had to search by ourselves to understand

Keep in mind that this can mean multiple things. Maybe you did explain it in a way the did not understand, yes. Or maybe you explained things that were too obvious so it was confusing because it was not clear why you were even explaining in the first place. Or maybe it just took a while to really grasp it and reading it up online worked, but watching the lecture a second time a week later would also have worked... This is looping back to my initial advice:  Perhaps you can ask some of the students how it's going.
For example, you could casually do some small-talk with students in the break when there are no more questions. One time a lecturer did this and realized thanks to that that we actually had none of the ~five prerequisite courses he assumed everyone must have taken before his lecture ... he didn't realize that CS students didn't even have the option to take those prerequisite lectures and still his course was one of the recommended three to us.
He also started to summarize in between subtopics "What did we do. Why did we do it. What do we want to do next. How will we do it." after our casual feedback, and that made it a lot easier to follow.

This is touched on by Simon's answer, but the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) is discovering that people are remarkably bad at determining how well they are learning.  The vast majority of students will say that they are "a visual learner", by which they mean they want to sit back and watch an entertaining lecture.  SOTL, on the other hand, consistently shows that the best way to learn is to roll up your sleeves and struggle through the material.  Needing decent course evaluations for your promotion is the big downside of refusing to cater to students wishes.
The best counter to bad evaluations that I can think of is if you can provide evidence to your promotion committee that students are learning better under your revised course than the previous version (providing evidence to your students that they're learning better can also help their attitude).  If there is a subsequent course that a large portion of your students take, you could see how their grades from one course translate into grades in the next course.  But for a graduate level course (my interpretation of "master"), finding a subsequent course may not be feasible.
If you don't have a subsequent course, you could use performance on the final exam (or specific questions) as a gauge for their learning.  The difficulty here is comparing that performance across terms.  Even if you repeat a question, if it matches too well with a question from their homework, that will inflate those scores on the final exam.

This.  A course quality is not to be judged by student’s entertainment, but to the long-lasting knowledge they managed to grasp from it.  That’s what (good) tests are aimed to measure, and that’s what you should focus on.  Although it always feel nice, the goal is not to appear as a cool teacher.  That being said, by helping students to concentrate on the topic, entertaining lectures can improve the quality of a course.

EDIT: One of their common reasons, is that they could understand some topics better when they watched youtube videos.  For the university level (master degree), I believe I have to explain on a higher level and not like 3brown1blue videos.

Based on this student feedback, it might be the case that students are lacking some preliminary or basic knowledge of things you are assuming in the course.  It is okay to use your notes to explain things "on a higher level", but you should ensure that students who lack preliminary knowledge have access to resources to learn the basics before they get to your "higher level".  Students often lack competence in preliminary topics that are assumed knowledge in a course, even if they have passed a previous course that taught that material (often due to forgetting things, etc.).
Often in my own teaching I have found that it is useful to include some preliminary notes/resources to assist students to learn or refresh knowledge of topics that are taken as assumed knowledge in the course.
One thing that would be reasonable to do here is to pick a bunch of online videos that explain preliminary or basic concepts well (perhaps ask the students which videos they found helpful) and give links to those resources to offer students a refresher on those topics.  Don't be afraid to incorporate outside resources if these are good quality and freely available; this can be a useful supplement to your own course materials.  In particular, you can then frame your own notes and resources in a way that quickly goes on to higher-level concepts.  This can allow you the freedom to focus your own notes on important substantive material in the course, while also offering guidance on resources for gaining preliminary knowledge.  Even if your students find the videos more helpful than your notes, if they find those videos through links you have provided, they are likely to give you credit for that in their evaluation of the course.

*By providing diverse examples and tasks, of course, they need to search by themselves and it was intended. I think this is a legitimate learning technique as we cannot cover 100 of the topic in the course.

Structure the content into a tree by section and then subsections to reduce search time of content.

Provide a digital quiz for each section, and subsection to document a distribution of student knowledge. [Any distribution other than a normal is bad to see for a section]

Address all sections with a large percentage of quiz mistakes a review in class at a special time.

This is an interesting perspective, which I myself call “spoon feeding”.  I tend not to do this as I think this pretty granular level of organization should be left to students.  I would never do you 3. in class for instance as it would cut on the time devoted to covering material.

All the students are not always right. That is what one can say about evaluations. But you should try to do the best you can for them.
You are doing a job, but you are also training the next generation of productive citizens. If improving the course keeps you on track, and may help the students in the long run, I suggest continuing to do that. (It is definitely true that students need review on math. Mathematics teachers can tell you that, since we constantly review lower level topics in higher level classes.) Experimenting can also be useful, if you keep the correct framework in mind. Do not change just out of exhaustion. But try to find the time to plan for changing things up, and see how it goes, including how you feel about it.

I think that it is very important to acknowledge both limitations and importance of the student evaluations. There can be reasons for bad evaluation results that you either can't do anything about (such as general frustration about the impact of the Covid situation on the university experience), or where students have certain expectations that I'd proudly disappoint (such as all too detailed information about what will be asked in the exam and how certain potential questions should be answered).
However there is also very worthwhile information in the student feedback that may help you to understand why your singing and dancing latest update of the course doesn't work quite as well for the students as you think it should. It really pays off to read the feedback with an open mind and to develop an opinion about everything that is written (like, as I said before, "the students may have a point but I can't do anything about X" or "feedback Y reveals that the students have an expectation that I think is inappropriate, and next time I will say straight on that they shouldn't expect this", or "I wasn't aware that Z is a problem but according to the students it is, and I should do something about it").
Always have in mind that what the students write is their perception (sometimes by the way there are rather unique perceptions that are not shared by most other students). It is not "true" in any objective sense, and there may be reasons to create "dissonances", i.e., to do something for better learning that leads to some students being unhappy (as written in another answer, students are often not good at assessing how well they're learning, and they may sometimes learn more and better from a course that they like less). On the other hand, ultimately you do your work for the students, so their perceptions are important and shouldn't be discounted without good reasons.
One thing that I often do is a personal feedback survey, which the students can fill in anonymously, only asking as open questions "What do you like about the course?" and "What do you think can be improved?" after maybe 1/3 of the course (the official evaluation comes much later), just to see early on how they think it goes and to maybe change something, or to openly give reasons for why I'm doing something that some students don't like.
One issue that apparently hasn't been mentioned yet is that there are some psychological factors that are very important for making the students feel good, like whether they can perceive your passion for the subject, whether they feel encouraged to ask and contribute in class, whether they feel valued for their contributions etc., or rather negatively, whether you make them feel that you are frustrated by their lack of appreciation for your wonderful course. You can have the best course preparation in the world, still if you make students feel embarrassed and stupid when you see them making mistakes (in class or in exercises), and they're then scared to share their thoughts, this will not go down well (and rightly so).

Dumbing down your classes and assigning less difficult HW is one way to increase your evaluation scores. So, if you're after higher scores, go with the flow. Students don't see courses the same way, and putting in the time and effort is rarely worth it from the evaluations prospective. You'd have to change the system to achieve what you're striving to, which is better professionals.

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text:
All three LOR from math professors while applying for CS program
I am planning to apply to Master in CS programs in various top institutes. All 3 of my potential referees are from pure math background. Two of them work in Number theory and the other works in Representation/Algebraic Combinatorics.
I have worked with CS professors too, but they were mostly reading projects. With two of the referees, I worked on a research project and other professor's class I have TAed and attended.
All three are very important for my applications. They reflect my TA qualities and my research qualities.
However, I am applying for master in CS because I am not sure if I want to pursue math or cs in PhD. I spent a lot of time in math research and I feel a masters in CS will help me see how research in CS looks like.
However, will taking LOR from 3 math professors affect the chances?
A few more details: I am doing a double major in math and CS( mainly theoretical CS). And I have taken graduate-level courses in both math and CS where I have received decent grades. And I have TA experience in both math and CS.

In what country or countries are you applying for a masters?

@Buffy   Mainly US ( princeton, cornell columbia, UCs etc): The ones which focus on Teaching experiences as I do not want to take loans. I have a few in Europe like ETH Zurich and Oxford.

How aware are you of the standards and processes of admission to masters and doctoral programs, especially at top schools? Are you aware that masters in the US is seldom funded and seldom open to a TA position? To be honest, you seem a bit naive on such things.

@Buffy you are right. Princeton/Cornell/Columbia is funded by TA duties. In anycase, funding or not, it does not matter much to the question I have asked.

TA positions are usually only for doctoral students.

@Buffy I understand but the programs I am applying to offer TA positions. Please check out the programs pages.

Any particular reason for not asking for a letter from one of your CS professors, seeing as you are also majoring in (and have TA'ed for) CS?

@principles-investigator I feel the math professors know me better.

CS to Math and Math to CS is not an uncommon transition that students might choose to make between undergraduate and graduate schools. You are also majoring in CS, so you are certainly a suitable candidate. I will add that your own statement about why you want to study CS and not pure math will also be important here—try to bridge the two fields in a way that is meaningful to you, and how the program can help you further that.
Now to answer your question, I find that there are two possibilities:

If your school is at a comparable standing to the schools you are applying to, this should be fine for Master's programs, which generally accept a diverse pool of students—although one might still wonder why you don't have any letters from CS professors. I am of the opinion that it is better to address it than let it linger. You don't need to explain too much, but just explaining that you worked closely with (Math professors) Drs. A, B and C on such-and-such projects is sufficient.

If your school is not at a comparable standing to the schools you are applying to, I would consider speaking with at least one of the CS professors (perhaps the theory one), but I would also be applying to less ambitious safety schools in addition.

PS. Be aware that you may not get a TA position at the time of admission. These positions are competitive, and in my experience, they are offered to Master's students only when there are vacancies after all the PhD students have been assigned. In general, they may not care all that much about your undergraduate TA experience, but it doesn't hurt.

I assume you are in the US.
First, TA positions are scarce resources, which are usually reserved to Ph.D. students if the university has a Ph.D. program.
If you are interested in a Ph.D. apply for a Ph.D. admission if you are competitive. Most people who enter doctoral studies are not 100% sure that they want to get a Ph.D. and a number finish after an M.S. It seems to me that you are trying to get letters for a Ph.D. admission where creativity and the ability to work semi-independently become important criteria.
Most M.S. programs in the US are strictly "commercial": they give you something of value and they expect money from you. Scholarships are rare. Programs other than the very elite programs will only evaluate whether there is a good chance for you to finish studies. There might be exceptions for the social good, e.g. to diversify the CS work force. Good letters from Mathematics professors are good enough to determine whether you will successful. Good grades from a decent school are equally important.

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text:
Supervisor does not want to contact reviewer after publication
At the end of last week, a paper I wrote (PhD, second year) got a Minor Revision (IEEE Transaction, TAFFC), receiving good comments from all three reviewers involved. Two unknown reviewers plus an admitted psychologist were involved in the review, with the latter sharing very positive feedback and deep interest in the topic. Therefore, I thought it would be useful after the work was published to get in contact with this reviewer to collect more feedback and understand how to extend the work further, with the possible aim of collaborating.
I expressed this desire in written communication with all co-authors without deeply thinking about it. However, the last author (last author, FP, senior, former supervisor) appeared quite disappointed about my email, saying that this behaviour is highly unethical and never should any author try to contact the reviewers after publication. None of the other co-authors took part in the conversation.
I read here and there that it is possible to contact the editor to know the reviewers' identity and to have further conversations about the topic. Therefore, I completely do not understand their position. I was quite shocked at the beginning even though the conversation stopped there. Do you have any input about this situation? I am afraid of speaking with my former supervisor about it in person because I want neither to receive similar treatment again nor to annoy him.
EDIT: I want to thank everyone who spent time answering my request and allowed me to view this experience from a different viewpoint, especially from the one of the reviewers!

Did the reviewer sign their review? If they made their identity known it probably changes the answer quite a bit.

Please, do not overthink. Your supervisor disagrees with you on this point. It does not mean that he  is disappointed. Being disappointed is more of a personal feeling. There is nothing personal here, you made some suggestions and got a feedback that your suggestion is not Ok. No one should be sad about it.

If it will be published, the reviewer has the necessary information to contact you if they have an interest in collaboration or advisement. I think it's possible that if you somehow identified them and reached out, they'd be happy to hear from you and want to talk further. But just as likely if not moreso, they will feel some mixture of annoyance, obligation, or anxiety about it. In general, I think you're probably slightly misreading both the reviewer and your advisor.

"admittedly psychologist" ?!? What is "TAFC"? https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7417290 ?

@N.Virgo: no, the reviewer has not signed the review but specifically stated that was a psychologist

@yarchik: well, I experienced sadness and resentment bc of the harsh tone used in the reply, there was no need for that imho

@commscho: it's possible, although I have some past personal experience with my supervisor and I personally don't think I misread their intention, but I hope to be wrong about it. Btw the focus of my concern was different

@Karl see my first comment pls, I also corrected the acronym which is TAFFC

@thor9669 There may be disappointment in the supervisor that you were not aware that this is a potentially moral and ethical breach. Some academics are aware that there are many junior people that still need to explicitly learn the ethics of academia and out of no malice suggest things that are considered questionable, but he may not grant this leeway. I guess it is not always possible not to disappoint people, so take it as a lesson. Also, take this as an incentive to learn reading the room ahead of time. It's a skill worth developing. Observe, register, improve and put it behind you.

The request is not unethical, but it's certainly annoying. When I review a paper from someone who is new in the field, I do my best to soften criticism with a praise sandwich, and just generally set a tone that says "this is a good start and it's an interesting topic, you are not yet there, but keep at it." Twenty years later I can still remember the exact words of encouragement from reviewers of my early work, and they did make a difference, and I am still thankful.
However, it is also true that when I write a review, I want the task to end when I click the 'send' button. It's not an open offer to coach the author, nor am I volunteering to become an informal advisor.
Only knowing the details you mentioned, I'd listen to the former supervisor.

+1 for "I want the task to end..."

Yeah, peer review can be tedious enough as it is without receiving unsolicited requests for even more advice

Theres a big difference between "you're misinterpreting the tone" and "this behaviour is highly unethical". This answer doesn't explain why the former supervisor's words are the latter if the situation is the former.

If the follow-up email is to simply ask for more feedback, I agree. But I think it's perfectly reasonable to say something along the lines of "Thank you for your thoughtful review. I plan to follow up on your suggestion to do X and would like to extend authorship to you if you are interested."

I think you're  answering a different question.

@Vaelus thanks for pointing out to that bc it's a crucial aspect of my question, you got it!

@Jeff thanks for your suggestion bc it'd be a reasonable way to handle this situation

I hate to be crude, but this is a similar situation to when I was a young man, and my similarly aged male friends thought that every friendly waitress was interested romantically. Sure it doesn't hurt to ask, but mostly you are being a nuisance and making it awkward.
I write encouraging reviews to people all the time, it does not mean I have any shred of interest in collaborating. If I did, I would reach out to them (edit: only after the manuscript has been published, not mention the fact that I was a reviewer)
If this became the norm, I would likely agree to review fewer papers from early career researchers if every platitude was considered an overture to collaboration. Our interaction as impersonal as it may be ends when I submit that review.

Not a great analogy, actually. I doubt that scientific review is hormone driven. ;-)

@Buffy Actually, a great analogy. Not every approach is welcome. It's a different story if the reviewer offers to open up and likes the work so much that they offer to collaborate with author (after the paper is published, and with enough cooling period, of course!).

@Buffy any scientific activity is, in fact, hormone driven.

"If I did, I would reach out to them.": might be field-dependent, but in my field (theoretical CS) it would be perceived as strange to reach out to someone saying "I reviewed your paper and...". Reviewers are supposed to stay anonymous. In such cases reviewers sometimes try to start collaborating once they "discover" the result through a different route, but sometimes the fact of having been a reviewer is sufficient to discourage the reviewers from reaching out. In such cases it can be useful if authors go through the editor to express interest in reaching out to the reviewer.

@a3nm Agreed. It might be strange for the author to contact the reviewer, but it would be downright bizarre for the reviewer to contact the author.

@a3nm I meant I would reach out to them through an appropriate avenue, edit provided

There are very specialized circumstances in which it might be appropriate to contact a referee. [And then you wouldn't ask the editor for the identity of the referee, you'd ask the editor to forward a message to the referee containing an invitation to contact you.] The situation you describe is nowhere near any of them. Your coauthor was right to shut that idea down.

Actually, I think that the possibility of future collaboration is one of those  circumstances. Yes, the first contact would be from the reviewer if it is to happen, not directly revealing the identity of the reviewer. But an editor can suggest that to the reviewer if they wish.

@Buffy I disagree. A case where the referee has also made the contribution meriting coauthorship in their report qualifies for me, because there isn't any decent alternative. But if the referee is merely someone very much interested in the topic, it should be possible to find equally well qualified future collaborators elsewhere (who might of course be that referee, but noone has to know).

The post can be improved by including an explanation for why it would not be appropriate. The fact that there might be alternatives does not implicate that contacting the reviewer through the editor, leaving to both the chance to either accept or reject the suggestion, is inappropriate.

Consider a world in which it is common for authors to contact reviewers who provide positive reviews for collaboration.
In this world, let's say you are reviewing a paper by A Famous Researcher. If you provide a critical review, you'll miss out on the opportunity to woo them with a more positive review  and boost your career by collaborating with this famous person. On the other hand, there is no such pressure when reviewing a paper by An Unknown Researcher.
This creates a clear conflict of interest: a reviewer is conflicted between their duty to provide an honest review and the opportunity that providing a positive review may create. That's bad, and this is likely why your supervisor thinks this is unethical (and why I agree with them). As others point out, there may be occasional cases where circumstances outweigh the problematic conflict of interest, but keeping those cases special and occasional is important to preserving the integrity of peer review overall.
I don't think you should take their statement about this personally; part of their job as a supervisor is to educate you in the standards of academia, including what is and isn't considered unethical. They would be failing in their supervisory role if they did not explain this to you. Perhaps they could have done a better job explaining the reasoning as well as the rule, but maybe they were busy and found it most important to simply give clear direction. You should not fear discussing this with them further individually, you've not committed any foul by learning something new.

Not sure I follow the logic. If you provide a critical review and the author wishes to contact you through the editor, you simply refuse. So no problem there. Similarly, if you write a 'positive' review, this in itself does not in any way create a probability of being contacted. So if anything, the directionality in the ethical dilemma only exists if the reviewer makes the first move, which is not the case here. In this case, the reviewer wasn't simply positive, they also showed insight and deep interest. I don't think an author extending a collaboration offer in this case is unethical per se.

@TasosPapastylianou "if you write a 'positive' review, this in itself does not in any way create a probability of being contacted" - It doesn't only because people do not do what OP is suggesting. Note the first sentence of this answer: we're thinking about a different world here as a thought experiment. I don't think ethics are always that black and white or so isolated; while an individual contact in a situation like this isn't causing a problem, it's important for the field as a whole to avoid it as a common practice otherwise these problems occur.

@BryanKrause I got your point and your example was a clear one. Just want to comment on the last part. I would not have taken it personally if they had explained my "unethical behaviour" to me but that wasn't the case and that's why I posted here. They should have taken the time to answer appropriately instead of simply shutting me down. Anyway, thanks for your time

Trying to contact an anonymous reviewer might be considered unethical because it is an attempt to deanonymise someone who has provided a report under the assumption they are anonymous. While this is especially true if the report is critical, it remains theoretically the case irrespective of whether the report is positive or negative.
There may be particular special circumstances where breaking that anonymity may be appropriate, usually with the reviewer's permission.
This obviously doesn't apply to a reviewer that identifies themselves. Although I'd assume that they had given all the feedback they had to give in their review.

Opinions can differ but I find nothing wrong with communication after publication. There is no conflict of interest and there is no attempt to influence decisions. It doesn't conflict with blind or even double blind review - after publication.
If you don't know the identity, an editor might (or not) put you in contact, perhaps by letting the reviewer know you'd like them to contact you if they wish. So, both editor and reviewer would need to first agree.
OTOH, it is not a good idea to fight with your advisor while they still have influence in your career. So, at minimum, it might be worth waiting to try to initiate contact.
I think the advisor is overly cautious and not sufficiently regarding the value of collaboration in a field. But that is an opinion. Just don't jeopardize your career over something that can wait.

It is rather uncommon to attempt to contact a reviewer post-review. Naturally, there are numerous ethical concerns to be considered (including, but not limited to, anonymity). What would be the point of anonymity if this were common practice? The fact that you are also working with co-authors only further compounds the situation. You simply cannot unilaterally make decisions like this witout their approval. That said, move on from this experience and remember the important lessons you have learned.

"What would be the point of anonymity if this were common practice?" I was always under the impression that the chief purpose of reviewer anonymity was for double-blinding during the review process: the reviewers are unaware of the author (in theory) and the author is unaware of the reviewers, thus minimizing bias in both directions. Given that, the anonymity would only be relevant up until the full peer review process was completed, or at the latest, up until publication.

@JustinHilyard also minimising the potential for reprisals or sycophantic reviews.

Some reviewers like to remain anonymous and others put their names to their reviews. I'm in the later camp as I'm always prepared to stand by my work. I have received emails from authors thanking me for my input and I don't think this is unethical. In my mind it's part of being a community of scholarship member. However, if I received an email asking for additional feedback I would likely find that onerous. My role as a reviewer is done. My advice, what you propose isn't unethical but reflect upon the reason why you want to contact the reviewer. I wish you all the best

A blind review is less about you feeling uncomfortable with revealing your identity. Others might feel pressured to return good reviews to you. Remaining anonymous (even with some degree of confidence, you might have a clue who is the reviewer) reduces this risk.

Hi I can see your point.

As opposed to several answers here, I believe you should attempt to indirectly contact the reviewer.
Indirectly means that you write to the editor, explain that the reviewer has interesting points and you would be glad to discuss further. And ask for your missive to be simply forwarded to them.
The editor may follow-up or not.
The reviewer may follow-up or not. They may be happy or pissed off. You never know but if you do not ask you may miss an opportunity.
The thing to absolutely not do is to creepily try to identify them and email-jump with a TADA! foundyoudoyouwanttoworkwithmeandwriteariclesplease!

Why is it creepy to email someone and be like "I liked your paper on X and I also work on X. Do you have any advice for me? Would you ever be interested in collaborating on X?"

@Jeffrey Emailing someone like that is not creepy (though it is overstepping to just out of the blue ask a stranger for advice). But Internet-sleuthing or -stalking to try to identify someone who is deliberately anonymous is.

Why is the reviewer identified? Did they self identify in the review? Although I agree with everyone who doesn't expect the relationship to continue after a review, I also don't self identify. It's possible the reviewer is seeking contact. You might want to thank them graciously and see whether they offer to do more with you.
Or you may have entirely the wrong end of the stick here. Your supervisor may think that the reviewer self identified and helped so much to ingratiate with the famous supervisor. Your supervisor might be saying the reviewer is being unethical, and may even know them. I would talk to your supervisor in person before doing anything else. That's always the best move after getting an email you don't understand.

An informal way to go about this might be to check the editorial board and/or list of reviewers for that journal and look for psychologists. Then see if any of them have written papers on your topic. If so, you might email them about those papers (e.g., asking questions or praising aspects of them) and start up a conversation without mentioning the review. Even if you don't find the right person, it might lead to some good conversations and potential collaborators.

I would not like to be reached by such a method. Talk to me on a conference, that is less fishy.

@usr1234567, you don't like people to email you asking about or praising your work?

@JeffreyGirard It’s the intent to underhandedly circumvent reviewer anonymity that is the problem.


text:
How can I shift my mindset from engineering to research
How can I shift my mindset from viewing my research project solely as an engineering project, given my background and extensive experience in software engineering, to better embrace the research culture and mindset as I pursue a Ph.D. degree, overcoming challenges and avoiding strict adherence to engineering aspects?
The main point is about my supervisor; he always criticizes me for setting a plan, defining the scope, and outlining early on. He claims that it limits my imagination, innovation, and potential, insisting that I should keep things more exploratory.

What is wrong with treating it mainly as an engineering project? Doesn't an engineering project overcome challenges? In experimental physical sciences one often has to get things done and working just to take the data you are really after.

The main problem is with my supervisor he always criticized me because I set a plan I define the scope I sit the outline early on which he claims that it limits my imagination, my innovation, my potential and I have to keep things it's simply more exploratory.

One thing you need to do:  Look at exiting research and extend it.  So based on A's algorithm:  You can cover new cases, extend to a different field, use more variables, make more efficient, etc.

I come from an engineering background, and work as a professor doing basic science, so I think that I can understand both sides here.
You are not wrong in trying to approach research from an engineering-practice/project-management perspective. In fact, most researchers I know would benefit from training in project management, particularly in outlining the scope of a project. And a common, and very valid, complaint from grad students is that of mission creep/scope creep. Yes, grad students get to write a research proposal before they move to candidacy, but these are nothing compared to the minimum standards expected of a project manager in an engineering field.
However, this is the issue from the professor's side: it's called "research" because you don't know what you will find, and it is futile and even counterproductive to try to establish the true scope of the project beforehand. In other words, if you can outline the scope of the project to great detail, then you are not doing research, aka "finding out new stuff."
Here's my recommendation: keep making detailed plans, and keep defining the scope of the project as the engineer that you are, but keep these details from your advisor. When meeting with him/her, use more general language, make sure to mention that you are willing to go wherever the project takes you to. A lot of grad students want to come into a professor's office and say "OK, so if I do 1, 2, and 3, I get a PhD, correct?", but no good professor will agree to that. They will reply with something along the lines of "when you spend 3-5 years exhausting a reasonable amount of inquiries within this narrow subject, and write an acceptable thesis."

You appear to be creating a false alternative
It seems to me that you are creating a false alternative --- engineering project work versus research, instead of engineering project work leading to valuable research outputs.
An ordinary engineering project seeks to solve some engineering problem, usually leading to a practical solution in some physical/computational system, or some object/process that you have built/fixed/refined.  For research work in engineering, in addition to creating a practical solution to the problem, you also need to communicate your work to other engineers in a scholarly form.  There are a few additional requirements for this in terms of the process and outputs:

1. Publication: After you have solved your engineering problem, you will publish a paper explaining the problem, your methodology and solution, and the results you achieved;

2. Literature review: In your publication, you will need to contextualise your problem appropriately by adding a literature review telling the reader about previous research relating to the various topics under consideration;

3. Novelty/Substantiveness: To be publishable as academic research, some aspect of the problem or solution should be sufficienty novel and substantive that your paper adds to knowledge in the field and has some "value add" for the field.

Nothing in these research activities is in conflict with the parallel goal of doing good practical engineering work on your problem.  Moreover, there is certainly nothing in engineer research that requires "avoiding strict adherence to engineering aspects" --- quite the contrary!  Instead of seeing these things as opposing activities, it is better to see them as parallel activities that augment and support one another.  Good practical engineering work supports high quality engineering research, and good engineering research supports the rigour and quality of practical engineering work.


text:
Why do statistics journals generally have low impact factors, long publication times, and low acceptance rates?
I've been investigating statistics journals to submit my work to (specifically, an application paper). Many journals are specialized, others quite general.
However, I've noticed that top journals in the field (e.g., sub-journals of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS)) generally exhibit the above traits. In many cases, the impact factor is less than 2. In certain cases, the time from submission to publication is 1.5-2 years in duration. In the majority of cases, the acceptance rate is ~10% or lower. Some of the most celebrated contributions to statistics have been published in this way. This trend has been previously investigated by van Nierop (2009) for example (Title: Why do statistics journals have low impact factors?). Interestingly, the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) currently enjoys an impact factor of 3.7, but long times between submission and publication. A similar trend exists for RSS Series B: Statistical Methodology.
Long wait times appear to explain why impact factors are so low, but the association is not causal.
For important work, these trends can be discouraging. A solution however exists in the form of preprints to avoid potentially being "scooped".
Could someone weigh in on this? CV has many seasoned statisticians who've likely served on journal editorial boards at some point in their career.
Reference
Van Nierop, E. (2009), Why do statistics journals have low impact factors?. Statistica Neerlandica, 63: 52-62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9574.2008.00408.x

Is the readership also small? Low impact factor and long review times could both be related to that. And, are results known early due to preprints?

Possibly - if certain journals aren't well indexed. But statistics journals in general have strived to increase accessibility and readership AFAIK, especially in applied fields.

Coming from mathematics, those impact factors sound high to me, and publication times sound normal.

In my mind, the low impact factor of journals in the mathematical sciences is primarily due to the fact that the impact factor only takes into account citations within the first two years after publication. Many statistics and mathematics papers are well cited, and have a very long "shelf life" in that they are still cited many years or decades after publication. In contrast, other fields are more "broad" rather than "deep" in that new knowledge broadens what a field knows rather than deepens it, and in those cases even the most important papers typically have a steeper drop-off of the number of citations over time.
In other words, I believe that the issue is not reflective of something specific statistical/mathematical, but reflective of the way the impact factor is computed.

This seems like an empirical question; I wonder if anyone here knows of any literature exploring this.

This is why web of science also lists a five-year impact factor.

@JohnMadden there is but it's still being reviewed

These are two issues. Long turnover times can indicate difficulty to find good reviewers and/or serious scrutiny of the work. That this is so for a statistics journal may indicate that the field is looking for robust, long term contributions.
Impact factors should always be interpreted in the context of a scientific domain. For example medicine has staggeringly high impact factors (with journals way beyond science or nature) making an impact factor that most other academics would consider very high, rather mediocre in that field. Frequently impact factor percentile within a given category is therefore used, where generally q1 (top 25%) within the category is considered a good impact. Perhaps your journal scores high within the stats category, something to check

+1. Different fields have enormously variable standards of paper output per time (in math, one paper per year can be plenty; in psychology, professors routinely publish more than 10 per year), and the number of citations in a single paper can also vary a lot. If you publish one paper per year with 10 references, each one of those will get fewer citations than if you publish 10 papers with 30 references each.

Why do statistics journals generally have low impact factors

If you flip the question it makes more sense: that is, the real question should be: Why does "impact factor", a metric ostensibly designed with the express purpose of measuring impact, fail to say anything useful about the relative impact of publications in an entire, very large and impactful, scientific discipline?
In other words, the answer is that it's the fault of the metric, not of the discipline of statistics. Impact factor is just a notoriously bad metric (even within the disciplines which have high impact factors). See the very long "Criticism" section of the wikipedia article about impact factors.

... long publication times

Does this actually matter to anyone anymore these days? What matters is the time to acceptance, since that's when you can claim your publication as "in press" or "accepted", and reap any career rewards associated with publication, whether it's pending or has already occurred. As for the actual "time to publication", if you post the preprint version of your papers on arXiv or some other preprint repository, you will have no reason to care about when your papers are published.

... and low acceptance rates?

You talk about acceptance rates at top journals in statistics being 10% or lower. But these are top journals! That means they will have low acceptance rates by design. A journal that indiscriminately publishes much of the content that is submitted to it will simply not become regarded as a top journal. Conversely, in top journals a low acceptance rate is a feature, not a bug; when you are curating a top journal, your goal is to be as selective as you possibly can while filling the quota of pages you aim to publish each year, and this leads naturally to low acceptance rates.
The above is true for any discipline, not just statistics. So while I don't know for sure, I'd guess that the premise of your question is simply false: journals in statistics do not generally have a lower acceptance rate than journals in other disciplines.


text:
A good book about mathematical thinking
I am a qualified mathematics teacher but I have left teaching because I could not tolerate the behaviour of students. Now I am a mathematics tutor and I love that I get to teach students who are eager to learn. I had fantastic results with tutoring. Some of my students had failed repeatedly and after working with me they got top grades. These were master's students. I also have a couple of school students who are like little scientists and love to work with them. I know that success comes down to enabling them to understand the intuition behind the concepts.
However, I do not want to help my students to only improve their grades but I want them to learn to think mathematically. I would like to create tutoring groups that focus exactly on teaching university-level students how to think mathematically. However, I am finding it tricky to find an appropriate book to use as a foundation for tutoring. I do not want to assume too much knowledge. A first-semester university student should be able to follow it. So far I have thought of using a book about abstract algebra for this purpose. This is because that was the subject that changed the way I saw mathematics and it got me comfortable with understanding and writing proofs. I am not thinking of just going over the abstract algebra but concentrating on understanding the reasoning and motivation behind it all. Enabling them to see how theorems are born etc. Now I am thinking that maybe abstract algebra might be too much. I am looking for a book that helps university students learn how to think mathematically and most importantly how to write proofs. I want to emphasize that it mustn't assume too much knowledge. Thank you in advance.

This is really a question for https://matheducators.stackexchange.com.

If you search Amazon for "The Nature of Mathematics" you will turn up some related books. The top choice isn't cheap, though. I actually wrote such a book, though won't promote it here, nor is it listed early in the amazon recommendations.


text:
How to interpret Chair’s email?
I’ve recently had an on campus interview and in response to my thank you email, I had this back from the SC.
“You are certainly welcome! It was wonderful to host you, and gratifying to see you validate the committee's confidence in your candidacy.
We will be in touch soon. “
How would you interpret this? It seems unnecessarily positive but I may be grasping at straws.
For context: I’ve been in U.K. universities for the past decade where hiring decisions and informal offers arrive in days if not hours. This is my first time applying to a TT job in the US so please indulge my need to fret. I was the last on campus interview 2 weeks ago and in my exit interview the chair was very non committal about timelines. The HR rep said the call would come from the Dean. This Uni has been slower than promised at every step of this process so I get the sense they have a clunky behind the scenes process.
Is all hope not yet lost?
Edited for grammar

Interpret it as a pleasant response to your thank-you note, and wait and see.

Continue applying. At this point nothing is anymore in your hand. Having an option is good, having more than one option is better.

Sounds like you were a pleasant person to talk to, but they are pointedly not offering any further information. US universities are on the weeks timescale. There is nothing in the email that says how clunky anything is

See the last part of the linked question -- we are not mind readers and cannot tell you anything that you don't already know (though the top answer below does make an excellent attempt at it).

Stop grasping at straws, and don't expect to hear back for at least a month.  US universities are run more democratically than UK universities, so hiring decisions frequently require discussion and approval from the departmental search committee committee, the department as a whole, the chair, a college hiring committee, the dean, and the provost.

Thank you. This helped me to lighten up a bit. Waiting is rough but good to hear that no news isn’t always bad news.

Fun graphics. :)

@paulgarrett - I got it from a Facebook post of one of your colleagues a few years back.

Ha! Good! :) :) :)

We are responding because you gave us a reason to reply.
We are interested in you, and your interest in us shows us
that we were right in being interested in you.
We will let you know when we have something to say.

The confused wording in the middle comes out of the desire to be hopeful and kind, when not having anything of substance to say.
It's the Academic equivalent of "Business Jargon", where insecurities push a person to use words without (much) content to avoid the negative perception of having little to say.

Appreciate you attempting to decipher. This was my thinking too but after a couple weeks  the temptation to read between the lines has got the better of me.