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Can people in western countries do graduation and post graduation in two completely different fields?
It might be possible here in India too, I haven't researched on it, but in one movie I have seen the guy is studying mathematics in MIT but his future plan was to study medicine at Harvard. I kept wondering how could he do that.
Here at India at 11th class we have to usually choose either Mathematics or Biology and then our eligibility changes accordingly.

Some universities require students to have similar bachelors degree, some other do not require similar degree and do not have specific policy on this; while others need a related or so near bachelors field. For instance, for a masters in engineering degrees; one with bachelors in applied mathematics or physics will also be able to study masters of an engineering field.
Answers to your question varies in fields and countries, and different education systems. My general advice to you would be to see the minimum requirements of the university you want to apply for to see whether their admissions office have any regulations on having related bachelors degree to the masters or not. If they are not providing you information on this, I recommend you to contact them by email and ask your questions.

At least in the USA, yes.  The US education system allows the individual student a great deal of freedom in the choice of field(s) of study.  You can do your undergraduate degree in one subject and your graduate degree in another.
Of ocurse, to get into graduate school in a particular subject, you have to have sufficient background.  Thus it is relatively uncommon for someone to get, say, a degree in history but decide to go to graduate school in physics instead.  It is possible, however.  In some cases people pursue jobs in one area and gradually develop an interest in another topic, perhaps gaining research experience in the private sector or taking classes informally in order to get the background they need for grad school.
Also, getting an undergraduate degree in a particular subject in the US does not mean you only study that subject.  You can take a wide variety of classes outside your nominal area of focus, and in some cases thereby get enough experience to apply to grad school in an another subject.  Also, you can "double major", completing more than one official course of study.  Thus someone may study multiple subjects in undergrad, and decide on one to continue in grad school.
Switching fields between undergrad and grad is not that uncommon, especially if the fields are closely related (e.g., math BS followed by physics PhD).  I've personally known quite a few people who have switched fields from undergrad to grad, sometimes with a long detour outside of school.  For instance, one fellow I know got undergrad degrees in political science and Asian studies, spent more than a decade as a corporate executive, and eventually went back to get a PhD in linguistics.

Hello Sir, Would I be allowed to do a MS in neuroscience if I do a BSc in Mathematics here in India? The thing is that I would probably get nothing as background knowledge officially.

@Neeraj: It's not really possible to answer that in general.  I would say that there is nothing stopping you per se -- no one will say "We refuse to accept you specifically because you have a BSc in math from India".  However, as I mentioned in my answer, you need sufficient background in the subject to be accepted into a program.  If you have little background in neuroscience you are unlikely to be accepted into a neuroscience grad program, regardless of what or where you studied.

In the US, medical school does not require any specific major. The specific requirements are one year each of biology, physics, and English, two years of chemistry (including organic chemistry), and a standardized exam (the MCAT). While it's most common for medical students to major in a field like biology, it's entirely possible for someone majoring in a completely different thing to complete the premed requirements and learn enough to do well on the MCAT, and a fair number of medical students in the US come from outside the sciences entirely.

Can people in western countries do graduation and post graduation in two completely different fields?

In principle yes, however: speaking from my alma mater (central european large public university, unrestricted access to most programmes, i.e., no need to convince an admission committee), the main hurdles to do a graduate programme based on a different undergrad degree boil down to two factors:

Formal requirements, as discussed by the other answers. In my university, this was really a design decision that each degree programme individually could decide. Many (especially humanities programmes) are by design very open to all comers. Others, especially technical fields, require either some technical degree or even one of a very few, closely related degrees. Exceptions could be made on a case-by-case basis, usually with the obligation of additional fundamental course work.
Practical issues. Even if you are allowed to, say, do an electrical engineering MSc based on a business informatics BSc, you are still expected to have the electrical engineering knowledge of a good EE BSc graduate right from the start. If your entire EE education was 2 credits in "Engineering for Computer Scientists", you will likely be in really bad shape and absolutely nobody will help you or feel bad for you. The consensus opinion will be that you had to know what you get into, and that you would now need to see how to handle this yourself.

To emphasise the second point again: I have seen a few cases where people tried to argue that, as their degree was sufficient formally for the graduate programme they enrolled in, we needed to accommodate for their very basic subject skills. This line of argumentation never works, and it should not. If you do a graduate in any subject, you are expected to have a least above-average knowledge of the things that you learn in the undergrad major of this subject. How you do it is mostly up to you.

in one movie I have seen the guy is studying mathematics in MIT but his future plan was to study medicine at Harvard.

This would specifically not be possible here. Meds is, due to its sensitive nature, highly regulated by law, and there is as far as I know no sidestepping the formal study progression here. The other direction (Meds -> Maths) may work, but I am not sure.


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Without teaching experience, but industry experience, how can I begin teaching at college level?
I have a desire to teach at one of the colleges/universities in my area. I think my experience in industry and my own educational background would be an asset to an IT program. However, I'm finding that when looking for positions, all require previous teaching experience. This requirement exists at the technical college, local community colleges and two universities in my area.
I'd like to start by teaching a night class or two. How does one go about translating valuable industry experience (combined with Bachelor and Masters degrees) to the teaching requirements that are desired by the institutions?

In the US and Canada, usually you would look for sessional instructor positions and apply. Look in the summer, when they are usually less strict about qualifications due to fewer students and faculty offering normal coursework. Many colleges do like it if they have industrial professionals associated with them.

@BenCrowell, the unqualified comment seems unfair. Based on my graduate studies at a state institute, I had two courses taught by non-PhD instructors. Both of those people were from the industry. My undergrad studies had many non-PhD part-time, instructors - especially for the lower level courses like you'd see at the community college level.

@BenCrowell a Master's degree is qualification enough to teach, as long as the college will hire the person.

As an aside, do you have confidence that you will be comfortable? Are you, for instance, at ease delivering seminars to a few tens of your colleagues or something similar?

@BenCrowell is reverberating the malignant and self-serving "union card" philosophy many academics have.  remember neither "academic" nor "PhD" are synonymous with either "scholar" nor "expert" nor "effective teacher".

I've seen community colleges hire people with less than a master degree to teach IT. These people did have quite a few industry certifications, held respectable positions in the local community, etc.  I heard people at the school saying "If anyone questions that person's qualifications, we have enough to support our decision." The CC in question was in a very small town, which I think had  a lot to do with that decision.
In the end, your qualifications might be just fine. The issue is whether a school needs someone. The only way to know the answer to that question is to ask. Meet with the appropriate people at some local schools and explain your situation. It is quite common for schools to use adjuncts: partly because they are cheaper, and partly because they have current industry experience.
I have never seen a school which is angry when presented with an additional labor choice. So, you do no harm by scheduling a meeting to see if they would be interested.
As far as the teaching experience, that is more easily gained than you might think. You can see my answer here to a related question.

From my own personal experience, I recommend seeking out adjunct positions at the community college level. To get some teaching experience, I sought out a school in my hometown which also had apprenticeship-type programs and they were looking for someone to teach a semester's worth of courses for these students. All I had was a M.S. in engineering at the time plus some industry experience. Seek out the current faculty at some community colleges in your area and ask them if they know of any positions for which you could take on as an adjunct. As far as I know, the position that I was able to obtain was not advertised; I found out about it from a professor at the school.

Look for positions for sessional/part time instructors and apply.
An example posting might be Sessional Instructor or Adjunct Instructor.
Most of them require some evidence that you've done well in a similar course, so it may be prudent to have transcripts handy. It may also be prudent to email the department directly and say that you're interested in adjunct teaching and to ask about opportunities that they have, and to express your qualifications.

One thing no one has said: Being good at your job does not necessarily make you a good teacher.  I have been the lead tech faculty for two good sized schools and have watched a lot of top-notch professionals flame out very quickly (almost including me!).
Make sure you look into the practice of teaching and have a plan so that when you go in for an interview you've got something to say about how you plan to approach your courses.
As for actually finding a job, universities ALWAYS need technical teachers.  Don't listen to the pooh=poohers who say you can't do it without a Ph. D.  In a lot of ways not having one but having boatloads of industry can work in your favor.  You also seem to be thinking "IT," but lots of schools have programs in subjects like web design and they're hard pressed to find teachers!  Take a good look at all of the curriculum offered and see where else you might be a good fit.

It wouldn't hurt to find out who does the scheduling for the department, and meet with them in person. Tell them your career goals, and ask them to keep you in mind should any unexpected openings come up. Leave them a business card.
Nothing may happen for a year or two. But, sooner or later, a professor is bound to retire, or take a sabbatical, or be unable to teach because of an illness. A college may be all set on paper, but then have a sudden, last-minute need to hire an adjunct.
This approach requires a little bit of luck, and a mighty good first impression, but it could open a door for you down the road.

Get in touch with the institutions you mentioned and offer to substitute. Like everyone else, teachers get sick from time to time or have to go on leave for a variety of reasons after the term has started. When you offer to substitute, you are offering a solution to a problem that is almost an emergency--most professors do not have understudies (yes, large universities have TA's but smaller institutions were mentioned in the question0. Once you have substituted a bit, you will be in a better position to know if you like teaching and you will have at least a minimum amount of experience.
You didn't say whether teaching experience in your field is required, or just teaching experience in general. If it's the latter, you could go overseas and teach English (or teach in an ESL program) or take an education course that provided for hands-on experience.
But I think the easiest way would be to substitute. You could also contact high schools as well, they try to put an emphasis on IT when they can and someone with your industry experience--even if just a few days per month--would be a real catch.

How feasible substituting is may depend on the institution.  Where I am, no outside substitutes are used at all.  If someone can't make it to class, a colleague or student will substitute, or the class will be cancelled.  My impression is that most U.S. colleges and universities are similar to this, but I may be mistaken.

He specifically mentioned community colleges in his question. I think you will find that the requirements in such institutions are a little less rigid with no guild for the professors. But for the two universities he referred to he very well could come up against this obstacle.

@user26732, I appreciate the feedback. Would lower level teaching experience (high school) be relevant to a teaching position in a community college. I don't have a teaching license, which would probably prevent me from getting any such position in a public school district.

It would be much harder to get licensed to become a high school teacher than it would be to get a college adjunct teaching position. And no, the lower level teaching experience would likely not help that much, not compared to simply making the connections and applying.

Rules are usually more flexible for substitutes. And there are always private schools.

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What are the benefits of an oral exam?
A recent question about reducing stress in oral examinations asserted that

Oral exams can have various pedagogical benefits in certain circumstances

Based on the reputation of the poster I'm inclined to believe this, but what exactly are these benefits? As an engineer who has never had an oral examination in my academic career (excluding thesis and standard presentations), it's not clear to me what the benefits are. The only intuitive benefit I can think of is for courses where the oral aspect is inherent in the subject matter, such as foreign language or debate. Are there benefits that are more general and not directly tied to the subject? Are there subjects for which an oral exam is never appropriate?

"As an engineer who has never had an oral examination in my academic career (...) courses where the oral aspect is inherent in the subject matter, such as foreign language or debate" - or engineering.

Much the same advantages as why companies call people to interviews. Except that examiner should not be persuaded off the likability of a person

I haven't seen a point raised that the student is able to clarify the question before answering.

Memorization vs. Understanding IMHO...

My PhD viva turned out to be a deeply interesting conversation, where ideas could be bounced around, rather than me just answering some predetermined questions.

Pedagogical advantages:

It is much easier to catch misunderstandings early and thus "rescue" an answer. After all, bad exam questions aren't that rare (bad as in: if the student has a very good understanding of the subject, they may be able to guess what topic the examiner has in mind).
Misconceptions can be corrected: while a written exam gives a snapshot of what the student understood or not, in an oral exam the examiner can ask the student to think again if the answer is wrong. Or can give a counterexample that takes into account the student's answer
In the end, an oral exam can be a discourse on a subject, which IMHO allows for better/easier grading.
Related: the difficulty can be adjusted during the exam according to how much the student knows.
Many oral exams I had had a "mixed" approach for deciding how deep into each subject to go: often 2 subjects were covered in depth (one by choice of the student, one by choice of the examiner) and a number of other topics touched. Particularly letting the student choose a subject of their liking (usually as the beginning of the exam) is not possible with written exams.

Practical consideration:

if only few students are to be examined, oral exams take much less time for the examiner.

Disadvantage:

If the examiner is somewhat off in estimating the difficulty of their questions, a written exam at least has the same questions for every student.

"is not possible with written exams" - well, it's unusual, although there are indeed approaches to allow for this. I remember a history teacher back in my secondary education who liked including one "essay" question in each exam, in the form of "Describe a part of a crusade from a crusader's point of view." (or whichever topic was being tested). Each correct statement would contribute a point to the maximum score for that question. Pupils were then free to write about daily life in the invaded places, the crusader chatting with a fellow crusader about the purpose and background of the ...

... crusades, an inner monologue of the crusader in which he ponders which areas of the world have already been "blessed" this way, etc. To a lesser extent, I have also seen this in academia; for instance, a written software engineering exam might contain a question such as "Describe a common quality assurance problem in large software projects." The concrete topic described and the focus (possible countermeasures? concrete technical effects? social reasons? ...) of the answer are then up to the student.

@O.R.Mapper So you effectively got a creative writing exercise in history? Seems... wrong.

@WeckarE.: I see nothing wrong with that. In a way, most exam questions are "creative writing", just that the requested information that must be conveyed by the answer is usually more restricted.

@O.R.Mapper Making it a point of view question requires creating a character, though, and rather a mini-story. Which is entirely outside the learning goals, I'd assume.

@WeckarE.: First, don't overthink it. Instead of writing (for an ancient Egypt-related task) "Senet was a typical board game used in ancient Egypt.", you write "While running out of the temple, I knocked over a senet board, interrupting a match of that popular game." The "mini-story" can be reduced to "walking along a street". This is simply to (in my view, successfully) make the task of describing some facts more enjoyable. Second, "outside of the learning goals" isn't much of a point; in fact, somewhat interdisciplinary questions were generally seen as desirable when I went to school. ...

... And, to come back to the topic, that seems just like claiming oral exams are bad because clear pronunciation, ad-hoc-forming of sentences, and a slight choice of topic during a conversation are "entirely outside the learning goals" when testing, for instance, the basics of programming or of biology.

@O.R.Mapper Yes, I'd say those are objections to Oral examinations as well. The main reason I have a problem with narrative questions though is because they s****d me over a couple of times as a student, because I DID overthink them.

@WeckarE.: Seems like something to learn then. In plenty of disciplines, you'll face the situation that you have to convey a concept to someone by telling a tangible example. Knowing how far to go in that example without overthinking it is exactly the skill that is trained by narrative questions.

@O.R.Mapper I have not seen it in practice, but in theory a choose your own adventure style written exam could have these benefits.  You have a multiple choice question and you choose A, B, C, or D. If you choose A, you go to the next question.  If you choose B you skip ahead to the 64th questions, etc.  Different students could end up with different essay prompts.  These are not practical b/c they take a tremendous amount of work to prepare (and if the student fails to follow directions it gets messed up).  But as things move to computers, I suspect we will see more adaptive testing.

Oral and written exams test largely different skill sets. Of course there is some overlap, but not that much. Some examples:
In oral exams you can test the ability to explain things much easier than in a written exam. On the other hand, actual problem solving can be tested easier (and more efficient) in a written exams. In an oral exam you can watch the students thinking (given that you asked the right question), and this gives you the possibility to ask very difficult questions or even question where no answer is known - of course in these cases you should not grade on the base of the "correctness" of the answer, but on the grounds of they approaches the student took. So you can somehow examine if the student did mastered the material to the point that it can be applied to new and unknown situations without the risk of "taking the wrong approach, ran out of time, no points" since you, as examiner, can give feedback on the taken approach but also you can see if the techniques are applied in correctly (even if they will not work out in the end).
A specific example of the latter: If you teach integration techniques and ask the student to find an antiderivative of a complicated function, the student chooses some technique (substitution, say). The technique is applied correctly, but then the student realizes that the substitution was not a good one. By contrast, it could also be, that the student know the right substitution, can explain why this has to work, but fails to work out the details. Both situations may also occur in a written exams, but the examiner can usually not infer what has happened.
Another pedagogic advantage is, that there is immediate feedback for the student, not only during the exam, but also at the end. For a written exam student have to wait somewhere between hours and week to get a grade or even pass-or-fail, while for an oral exam the result is announced after a few minutes (at least where I am).
From the examiners point of view, written exams scale better to large groups, as the grading can be parallelized (by hiring people to do it) or also automated to some extend, while oral exams just scale linearly in the number of students but have a smaller "baseline" (meaning that preparing zero oral exams costs basically zero time while preparing a written exam where nobody shows up, costs a few hours). For me, the break even point is about 25 to 35 students (depending on the topic).

"For me, the break even point is about 25 to 35 students" - really interesting detail. In the applied CS areas I am involved with, the break-even point is as low as at 5 to 10 students among my acquaintances. This probably depends a lot on department and exam culture.

@O.R.Mapper I keep an oral part in the exams up to 70-80 students.

I was just giving my estimated break even point, but I actually had oral exams for about 150 students...

Preparing a written exam where nobody shows up costs zero if you can recycle the unused text for the next session...

…if there is a next session…

actual problem solving can be tested easier (and more efficient) in a written exams – Depends on what you mean by problem solving. Solving textbook problems can be easier assessed in written exams, but that’s not a skill that anybody should be interested in per se (real problems are different). Solving actual problems cannot be reasonably assessed in any type of exam if you ask me.

I'd say you can't test real world problems in any exam - if you can pose some problem in an exam, it is not a real world problem because then it would be much too complex and vague. On the other hand, solving real world problem usually involves (among other things) solving many textbook problems.

I wrote an answer based on my personal experiences, but here is another based entirely on the literature.
From [1], well-designed oral exams can increase student success:

Scores on the oral examinations in advanced inorganic
  chemistry are usually about 15–20% higher compared to
  scores on written examinations over similar material. All students
  who performed at an unsatisfactory level on the first
  quiz in the introductory course earned a satisfactory mark
  after taking the oral quiz. Four probable reasons explain the
  higher scores:

The most significant contributor to higher grades is
  the self-correcting nature of the oral format—students
  always arrive at a correct response before moving on
  to the next question. This correct response, even
  though they might have been assisted to reach it, sets
  the stage for them to answer subsequent questions correctly.
  On traditional written examinations, missing the
  first part of a multipart question often results in answering
  all parts of the question incorrectly.
Requiring students to think aloud during the oral examination
  makes them think more carefully. This extra
  measure of care is often evident as a student will
  start a response, and then, even before they have completed
  their initial thought, will see a better way to
  look at the problem and logically work their way to a
  correct answer from a new starting point.
The oral examination tests a relatively small body of
  material and students are able to focus their study efforts.
  This focus is surely intensified by the knowledge
  that the testing will be done one-on-one. They do not
  want to do poorly in such a personal situation.
When testing some concepts, such as crystal packing
  or molarity, the questions are concrete in that students
  have objects to manipulate.

and this is especially true of weaker students:

Struggling students, in particular, appear to benefit from
  the oral examination format. The success of these students
  seems largely to derive from the increase in motivation as a
  result of personalized strategy instruction, an important component
  of the ICML. Personalized strategy instruction leads
  to improved performance and the satisfaction of doing well
  increases their desire to continue doing well. Many of these
  weaker students fear college-level chemistry before entering
  the course. Doing poorly on the first quiz confirms the view
  they hold of themselves as learners of scientific material. The
  personal, early intervention that oral quizzes provide enables
  them to perform better the rest of the semester.

Also, students think that oral exams do a better job of assessing what they know:

Student comments about the oral examinations obtained
  in anonymous course evaluations and personal exit interviews
  at the end of the term have always been consistent and enlightening.
  Most students believe that the oral examination
  provided a fair reflection of their knowledge. They were satisfied
  with their performance and would welcome oral examinations
  in other classes. Most students reported studying
  more for the oral examinations. Surprisingly, about half of
  the students interviewed volunteered that the oral examination
  provided a better reflection of their knowledge compared
  to written examinations because on written exams they could
  write something that was “fairly close” to being correct and
  get by with it. These students thought that the oral exam
  format made them demonstrate their understanding of the
  material.

For further reading, here's a small reference list:
[1] Roecker, L., 2007. Using Oral Examination as a technique to assess student understanding and teaching effectiveness. J. Chem. Educ, 84(10), p.1663.
[2] Luckie, D.B., Rivkin, A.M., Aubry, J.R., Marengo, B.J., Creech, L.R. and Sweeder, R.D., 2013. Verbal Final Exam in Introductory Biology Yields Gains in Student Content Knowledge and Longitudinal Performance. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 12(3), pp.515-529.
[3] Dicks, A.P., Lautens, M., Koroluk, K.J. and Skonieczny, S., 2012. Undergraduate oral examinations in a university organic chemistry curriculum. Journal of Chemical Education, 89(12), pp.1506-1510.
[4] Marino, R., Clarkson, S., Mills, P.A., Sweeney, W.V. and DeMeo, S., 2000. Using poster sessions as an alternative to written examination—the poster exam. J. Chem. Educ, 77(9), p.1158.
[5] Pearce, G. and Lee, G., 2009. Viva voce (oral examination) as an assessment method insights from marketing students. Journal of Marketing Education, 31(2), pp.120-130.
[6] Sayre, E.C., 2014. Oral exams as a tool for teaching and assessment. Teaching Science, 60(2), p.29.

One detail I have not seen mentioned in the other excellent answers: oral exams can be especially beneficial in classes where students work on a significant group project. An individual oral exam is a great way to assess

each student's role in the group (I have found the oral exam to be much more effective than other assessment methods for detecting freeloaders and making sure that their grade accurately reflects what they did or didn't do),
the depth with which they understand the part of the project they were primarily responsible for,
the extent to which they understand the rest of the project, and
how it all relates to the core course material.

This last item is especially important; an oral exam makes it easy to distinguish between students who just managed to hack together something that works, looks good on paper, and sounds good in a prepared presentation, vs. students who understood the material they were supposed to have been learning, and actually applied it to their project work. This is true of individual projects, too, not only group projects.
I also favor some "unusual" kinds of oral exams which have specific additional benefits. For example, I have used:

A poster exam, in which students prepare a poster and present it to peers and faculty in the department at a class poster session. (In this case, the oral exam is conducted during the poster session - the examiner circulates and spends some time at each poster, asking questions.) I like this approach because students get to practice creating a scientific poster, and (as described in Using Poster Sessions as an Alternative to Written Examination—The Poster Exam)

Students' communication and organizational skills, their depth of knowledge of a particular topic, and their conceptual understanding of the topic are probed by the poster exam. Students report that the poster exam is more enjoyable and a more effective learning tool than traditional exams.

An interview exam, in which students have a mock "job interview" with me. In the interview, I ask them questions about the topic of the course and their project work in the course, similar to the kinds of questions they are likely to get in a job interview. I like this because they tell me later that they were more prepared for real job interviews as a result :)

Mama always said life was like an oral exam. You never know what question you're gonna get.
The other excellent answers here highlight how oral and written exams test different student's skills, and how the interaction between student and professor is different. I would like to add that, in my experience, oral exams have also a training purpose: they train students on explaining things about topics chosen at random in a broad range. Is this a useful skill to develop? I will make an example, just one, and let you judge.
When I was a student, I used to earn some money by tutoring high school and university students on mathematics, physics, electronics and programming. Thus, I would arrive at the student's home to hear something like:

Could we do maths and programming today? I had those subjects this
  morning and there are a few things I didn't understand.

Yes, of course, we could do that. After all, I was there for that and get some filthy money in reward:

The professor explained the Riemann integral, but I didn't understand it. Could you please explain it to me again?

Isn't this a typical example of oral exam question? With the added difficulties that, at university, you had probably studied the Riemann integral a long time ago, and with more advanced tools than those you can employ to explain the topic to a high-school student. So you have to improvise an explanation, and possibly a good explanation for a high-school student, so that you can keep on earning money.
Once the maths part is over, and you start to relax, the student shoots the programming question (real question received from a 16-year old high school student):

This morning we had classwork, and the professor gave us the task to develop an assembly program to have a two-way communication between terminals: the top half of the screen should show the text received from remote; the bottom half the text keyed in by the user. We had two hours to develop the program, but I think everyone failed. How could I have done it? The professor really didn't explain how to manage two tasks simultaneously.

And so, for instance, you find yourself improvising a lecture on coroutines.
When I was a student, oral exams were the norm, and I've found them an invaluable (almost free) practice to develop my explanatory skills. Skills that, for instance, can be used to earn some money. Of course, if you don't have any background on a topic, you cannot make it up, but once you have a solid background, being used at explaining things helps a lot.

One of the great advantages of oral exams is that they can be interactive.  Oral exams allow you to adjust your questions based upon the level of understanding the student has demonstrated as they responded to prior questions.
This allows you to quickly narrow in on how well the student understands a subject.  If a student clearly understands a subject well, you can ask more advanced questions; if they are struggling, you can ask more basic questions.  (Alternatively, if a student clearly knows one topic very well, you can move on to another topic without wasting time asking further questions about it.)  In this way, you can often quickly get a very good sense of the student's depth of understanding.
Also, when a student is struggling, you can often get a good sense for why they are stuck, by asking them to talk through their thought process.  And, when a student has a misconception or goes awry somewhere, you can ask a follow-up question or probe related concepts to see whether this reflects a deeper issue or just a minor misunderstanding.  Or, maybe this student doesn't know how to approach the problem, but once they have an approach they're able to work through the details -- or vice versa.  These often become apparent pretty quickly in an oral exam.
In contrast, a written exam must provide a fixed set of questions to all students, with no opportunity to adjust based on answers to past questions.

You might notice that job interviews are typically more like an oral exam than a written exam; they're interactive, and with many opportunities for the interview to ask follow-up questions and probe the job candidate's skillset and knowledge and attitudes.  That's the benefit of an interactive format.

Benefits I see in oral exams:

It is harder to cheat in an oral exa, because - with usually precautions - an attempt is easier to detect.
An oral exams makes it pretty obvious if a student is only able to repeat memorized answers or if he really understands a topic, because then he would be able to make new connections and explain the wider context.

Side note: I have a degree comparable to an MSCS and I had to take written exams to pass courses. But at the end of my studies I had to pass an oral exams in each field covering multiple courses over several years. Only the oral exams and my thesis were used to calculate my final grade.

"It is absolutely impossible to cheat in an oral exam." - careful about that statement ;) There have been discussions on this site before whether looking at previous exams is cheating. With that in mind, it is imaginable that some people also consider talking to a previous exam-taker about an oral exam to find out about some "introductory standard questions" or similar a form of cheating. Otherwise, I agree with your answer.

Oh, actually our department had a public wiki in which the students shared notes about their oral exams. I wouldn't consider this cheating, because that was a public resource. But reading other students post isn't more helpful than reading the courses' scripts or books. Since we had to take written exams first it was quite clear that we know the topic. The oral exams are about being creative, make connections, have a discussion. To be able to do so you need to really know the topic, you cannot stand a discussion with a professor we memorized answers...

"It is absolutely impossible to cheat in an oral exam." I'll just throw this here... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N7SOj4PB2c

Okay, I am convinced that it may be possible and updated my answer.

I cheated on an oral exam - for Spanish - in high school.  If there is a test it can be cheated on.

@blankip: How did you do that? Why didn't your teachers notice? Perhaps we need to define first what we consider a oral exam? The oral exams I had to pass in my career looked like this: I was the only student in the room and there were at least two people (usually a professor and an assistant teacher, sometimes a recording clerk as a third person) asking me questions. I cannot believe that a student is able to cheat in such a setting. Oral exams with multiple students or just one teacher might be a totally different thing...

I was the only student in the room with my spanish teacher.  I head developed my own encrypted language when I was in highschool.  I would write the answers down to a test on a cheap 10 cent folder.  The teacher would see a folder full of random letters and numbers.   The folder sat right on top of my desk and she watched me gaze at the ceiling and down at the folder as I conjugated my verbs based on my notes.  Got an A...

It is just plain stupid to allow a student to place personal belongings on the table in the exam room. If a teacher makes it that easy to cheat...

An oral exam provides more information and therefore more insight into how the candidate understood the matter. My view might be somewhat math-centered.

You can (and imo should) ask students to explain their thoughts, to think out loud. That way you can not only see whether they are able to come up with the correct approach eventually, but also what other concepts they identified as relevant, what made them decide to use or not to use one of them, and so on. You get an idea of how well they have the subject structured in their mind.

You can detect nervousness, help the student overcome that, and distinguish the resulting mistakes from incompetence. See this answer to the post you referenced for details.

You can notice mistakes early on, and correct them to help with other steps that build on this. In written exams you are left to guess whether the student would have managed step 2 if they hadn't made a mistake at step 1. Or if they would have managed to tackle subsequent independent questions if they hadn't wasted this much time as a consequence of some silly sign error. But even if you think they would, you can't reasonably grade based on that assumption.

You can concentrate on concepts instead of tedious computations. So for example you could say “suppose you had these things given, how do you compute that thing from them?” and have the student outline the approach without touching a single number. In a written exam, such a question is often problematic because it's very hard to clearly define what constitutes a complete answer and what does not. Which results from the lecture may they use without reproducing the proof, and which proofs should they include? How detailed should they be? I'd feel ashamed as an examiner if I found one exam where a candidate spent a lot of time writing pages of text, just to receive as many points as another did in two sentences. So we tend to let them compute something concrete, and they know they are done when they have a final result. But often having an idea is the interesting part, doing the computation is a waste of time (and often would be done by a computer in real life scenarios).
Note that some people will have problems if the questions become too abstract. So in many cases it might make sense to give them some explicit numbers for the items given in the question, so they can manipulate these if they want to. But make it clear that they don't have to, that it's the idea which counts, not them actually performing the computation.

You can do multiple-choice questions and ask for a reason for their choice. That way you can distinguish guesswork from knowledge. Again the benefit is that in an interactive setup you can control the amount of explanation given, while in a written exam that amount is very hard to define in an objective fashion. Even if you say “write one sentence”, some people may concentrate on minor aspects of the argument, leaving a major point unjustified, while others will worry how to cram their three distinct ideas into a single coherent sentence.

You can also build on choices in a way that's not possible in a written exam. A question like “decide if the system of equations has a unique solution; if so, find that solution” will tell students that the answer to the first part of the question is almost certainly “yes”. And if it is not, it will seriously confuse some who expect it to be, so they waste time looking for their mistake or performing the second part even though it's impossible. I've sometimes tried to come up with different but equally complicated tasks based on such a distinction, but that's really hard. In an oral exam you can ask the first question without giving any hint as to the answer, then continue with the second part only after the first has been solved correctly.

You can adjust the difficulty of the questions to the candidate. That way you judge the amount of knowledge not so much by how many questions the candidate answered correctly, but at what difficulty they started having problems. It might be a good idea to inform candidates of this at the beginning of the exam: “I like to drill deep, till I hit rock bottom. There will be questions in this exam which you cannot answer. Don't let that worry you.” This may give you a more fine-grained idea of their knowledge, as you spend more time mapping out the boundary of their knowledge, instead of wasting time on questions well within or well outside their knowledge.

"You can adjust the difficulty of the questions to the candidate. "  Some of the better computer based exam engines do this, based on what questions the students have already got right.

I don't think this has been touched on but the most obvious answer is an oral exam best prepares the student for a real job.  There is really nothing in school that prepares you on how to react to questions or debate during a typical work meeting.  An oral exam can allow the student to practice a real world situation.  And if the teacher is good at the oral exam they will slightly alter their approach to the different personality types.

Well, I can think of many reasons to prefer an oral exam instead of a written one.
An oral exam always has the benefit that you directly face your professor or the guy that's examining you, having the effect that grading experiences a subjective influence.
A lot of people, and I assume professor aren't excluded, are willing to help others if they "see" that someone's trying. The examiner is therefore closer connected to the student which eases up the strict grading conventions usually applied to a written exam.
Also, the fact that questions, the student doesn't understand right away, can be formulated differently, increases the chance of given a correct answer or at least, in case of not knowing, gives additional information to the testee which wouldn't be provided in written form.
Hope that helps!

I'm not sure that I'd count more subjective grading as a benefit. Some people are naturals when it comes to explaining, sharing their thought process while thinking and just appearing open and interested even in a high stress situation. Others not so much. Is it really a good thing that this should influence their grade?

@Sumyrda “Is it really a good thing that this should influence their grade?” — Yes, absolutely: being able to explain something is arguably a very important part of understanding it, and should be graded (hence essay questions exist). But I do agree with the rest of your comment; subjective grading, while it may sound great, is terrible. Because it grades sympathies rather than knowledge. For instance, it’s well established that we subconsciously rate good-looking people better. It’s almost impossible to not let this influence such a subjective grading.

@KonradRudolph You phrased it way better than I did. Of course, being able to present and explain what you learned is an important part of academia and so it should influence the grade. But if we grade based on that, then we will subconsciously also be influenced by a whole lot of other things like how often the student says "uhm", how nervous they seem, their body language, ... which are all irrelevant to the grade imho unless a significant part of the class was about presenting, in which case the final should be a real, prepared presentation including a discussion with the audience.

To elaborate somewhat on the argument that oral exams allow you to assess understanding while written exams do not:
In theoretical physics and mathematics (for non-mathematicians), there are essentially four types of task you can have in a written exam:

calculating
proving
producing a definition
deciding whether some statement is true or false

The main goal is that the students understand the concepts and formalisms introduced in these courses. Trying to solve these tasks contributes to to this goal if done honestly, and having understood the concepts helps to solve these tasks. However, these tasks also require less relevant skills such as calculating or guessing the approach from the solution or with luck. Moreover, some can be done with blunt memorising – in particular since some of these topics only have a very limited amount tasks suitable to exam conditions.
I know many people who passed these courses by memorising algorithms and standard exercises, blunt calculating and brute-force arithmetics. On the other hand I know many people who had trouble with these exams as they couldn’t (or did not want to) bluntly memorise stuff or are unable to perform correct calculations under pressure.
While the tasks in an oral exam may be superficially similar, you can assure yourself that the student did not just memorise that particular method: Dig deeper by asking them to elaborate certain decisions or ask for the foundations they are using. As you can dig in an arbitrary direction, it is much more difficult to prepare for this by memorising. Also, the impact of such skills as calculating or guessing, buy not letting the student stumble into dead ends or acknowledging the effort.

As a student I  found 1st year group theory great, as there was a countable number of possible exam questions, and they had all been asked with the fast five years….

@Ian: And how did this benefit your learning of the actual subject matter?

I only had to pass this course, as the first year of Comp Sci was in common with Maths, but I did understand the important bits like how to do a proof by induction well.   However the written exam was more a test in if a student could work out the minimal they needed to learn to pass it.

It can allow feedback from the audience of the speaker
It can build confidence on the topic or debate
It can act as a dry/practice run for future verbal confrontation throughout the students career
It can reduce grading stress

Here is a link to other helpful hints:
    http://www.speaking.pitt.edu/instructor/oral-benefits.html

According to the theory of multiple intelligences, different people respond better to different senses, leading to one person learning better from written (visual) material, a second learning better from audio material, and maybe a third learning better by using their hands.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences
Written exams cater for the writers, but other very smart people can do poorly at them. If you have a mix of written assessment and also other methods such as oral and hands on practical, then you will be able to test each student in a manner to which they are suited.

On Skeptics.SE: Are there auditory, visual and kinesthetic learners?

@ff524  Is the Skeptics question focused on how you acquire new information and skills most effectively?  That might not be the same as the way you demonstrate mastery most effectively.

@aparente001 The first paragraph of this answer is about learning styles; I am drawing Sir Adelaide's attention to the lack of empirical evidence for this. If there is reliable empirical evidence showing that there are "mastery demonstration styles", a reference to that evidence would certainly improve this answer. (While references are generally not required here, if an answer hinges on an assumption of something that there is empirical evidence against...)

@ff524 - My point is that I understood the focus of the question to be more about how one demonstrates knowledge. // I am interested to hear why you find oral exams helpful.  I hope you will make a contribution here.  Like the OP, I was curious about that when I read your other question.

There is a lack of empirical evidence for most teaching theories: it is very hard to control for other variables, and most studies I've heard about do not describe proper statistical significance of the outcomes. It also seems that whichever theory you choose to apply to help increase learning outcomes, you'll get a response. This would indicate that the teacher caring enough to try to improve learning outcomes is a significant factor in itself. Regardless, circumstantial evidence does point towards people responding differently to different methods.

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text:
Reusing content in papers, conference preceedings and lecture notes
In physics, it seems to be common practice to reuse your own introductory material, verbatim, multiple times in online lecture notes and conference preceedings, and a final time in a journal article. In most instances, it isn't indicated that the material was previously posted elsewhere, and the original documents may not be referenced at all.
This surprised me. During my undergraduate studies, we were given strict warnings about plagiarism, including self-plagiarism. I understand that authors are reluctant to reuse introductory material once it has been published in journal articles because it would violate copyright.
Is this practice really above board? and does it differ from other fields? If so, why?

Research ethics: At least around mathematics, self-plagiarism is defined much more narrowly than plagiarism. Essentially, in order to self-plagiarize, you have to write a paper that contains no new results whatsoever (compared to your older work); just having some overlap is not a problem. Verbatim self-repetition is not regarded as problematic (although it will make people think you are lazy or a bad writer) as long as it does not pretend to be new material. Repeating research papers in lecture notes or textbooks is not considered wrong.
Some even take the point of view that publishing the same result many times (first sloppily, then better, then really well) is legitimate; see Rota's "Publish the Same Result Several Times" advice. (Note: This advice is probably controversial, particularly these days, when there are few "obscure" journals, and when there is no reason to publish a crappy draft when you can just post it on the arXiv. But a second publication that subsumes and improves on a previous paper won't usually be considered improper. Also, you can publish a draft of ongoing research in conference proceedings and then re-publish it in a proper paper; that's what conferences are for.)
Copyright: There is, as always, a noticeable disconnect between what is legally required and what is actually done. In terms of the former, there may well be problems. In terms of the latter, you shouldn't worry. Unless you copy and republish a whole book, no one will sue you. (And even annoyances such as takedown requests to your university tend to be rare -- and don't always correlate with actual breaches of copyright.) Academics disregard copyright six ways from Sunday; if they suddenly started to care, research and teaching would probably slow down to a grind for a year or so until the most important sources are rewritten and published as open content. You should almost always ask yourself "what will the reader think", not "what will Elsevier think", at least if you are planning to get hired by academics rather than by Elsevier :)

But what if the academics who are hiring you are as stuck up as some of those commercial publishers? Do you have an actual source that says that verbatim self-copying of a little portion that is not the key part of the paper is actually considered okay in mathematics?

@user21820: I have no sources on it, but I've just seen it happen so often that it cannot possibly matter. Academics (even editors) usually are not deeply enough involved with publishers to care.

Hmm are you saying that (usually) editors of mathematical journals don't even use software to detect plagiarism, or that they do but disregard it if the copied part is not put up as a major contribution in both papers?

@user21820: I have not seen editors use plagiarism detection software so far -- though I would probably not know if they did, and either way it's likely that they will in the future. But almost anyone in a serious journal would know to take a critical look at the results produced by such software rather than just consider a numerical value it spits out.

I see, yea I would expect that. But who knows, if a publisher makes copyright demands down the road...

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text:
In choosing a postdoc, how should I prioritize mentorship versus research opportunity?
I am an experimental physicist looking for postdocs in applied physics and materials science. In choosing groups to inquire about a position, I am trying to determine how to prioritize potential mentorship versus potential research opportunity. I see large "super" groups with huge numbers of postdocs and students. These groups have a high potential for research with lots of funding. However, I am worried about entering an ultra-competitive environment where I will receive very little mentorship from an advisor. I am wondering if choosing a smaller group will have an advantage because of receiving quality mentorship, despite the fact that the research topics might not be as leading edge or popular.

I think that the choice of mentorship versus. research opportunity* entirely depends on your own way of working/your preferences.
If you are very good at working independently, enjoy working on your own and have the ambition to become a full professor then I would pick research opportunity over mentorship.
If you need or desire a lot of guidance, or flourish when you have lots of discussions with someone 'higher up' and you don't really care whether you do cutting edge science or just good science then you might be better of going for mentorship over research opportunity.
*As a sidenote, mentorship and research opportunity don't have to conflict necessarily. There are small research groups with excellent mentoring that do very cutting edge science


text:
Submitting paper to journals and/or conferences in different fields
I know there have been numerous questions on this site discussing the submission of papers to a conference and a journal (simultaneously and subsequently), but I'm curious about a slightly different scenario. Perhaps this is a duplicate but I couldn't find any answers already posted.
If I'm working in a field where there is cross-disciplinary work, is it okay to submit a paper to a journal or conference in each field? For example, a submitting to a medical journal for a novel medical application and a computer science conference for a novel algorithm? Obviously in one the focus would be more on the application of the approach while the other would focus on the "how", but the basic experiment/research and probably most of the content would be the same for both.

this is not uncommon at all, especially if the two communities are normally quite distinct.

I guess you'd want to be careful that each paper acknowledge the other's existence, so no one would get the impression that you're trying to double-dip...

While I agree with Brian Borchers' answer that you cannot submit the same material to two different places, the example that you give in your question (e.g., the medical application vs. the algorithm) is a good examples of where "the same work" may create entirely distinct papers for the different communities.
In my experience with cross-disciplinary publication, it is typical for one of the papers to come first, and then the other to come later and cite the first.  This can easily go in either direction across the two fields.  To, illustrate, considering your example:

You might publish the medical application paper first, based on the main experimental results, and in this paper it would be inappropriate to go into a detailed exploration of the properties of the algorithm: validation of data resulting from its application is where that community's interest stops. Then you might later publish a paper for computer scientists that "zooms in" on the algorithm and explores it in detail.
Alternately, you might start by publishing the algorithm paper, laying out all of the theoretical foundations in detail (which will likely fill a conference paper quite tightly), but stopping before the experimental data, which the computer scientists are not in a position to peer-review in any case.  Then the medical application paper can come afterward, citing the algorithm paper as an established fact in its methods.

The important things to make such cross-disciplinary publication clean and ethical are:

Always explicitly cite and declare relationships between your work.
Never try to squeeze "extra" publications out this way: your cross-disciplinary publication choices should instead be based on routing in-depth discussion of particular aspects of the work to the communities that can best review and appreciate it.

Yes. One shouldn't confuse scientific/scholarly progress with status-points-scoring rules, etc. Cf. my comment @BrianBorcher's probably-realistic answer...

@BrianBorcher has a good answer as well but there can only be one

Two important things that you need to consider:

If the papers share any substantial amount of text, then you would be guilty of self plagiarism.  If this is discovered then its likely that one or the other or both papers will be rejected before publication or retracted after publication.
In submitting to most conferences and journals a condition of publication is that your article is an original contribution.  If reviewers become aware of a duplicate publication of essentially the same research (even if the text is distinct) then they can and should reject the paper as not being an original contribution.  Some editors might retract a paper after publication if they discovered that you'd published essentially the same research elsewhere.

It might be reasonable to submit two different papers to journals or conferences in different disciplines as long as the papers really do contain different material.  However, it's utterly inappropriate to reuse text or even to submit two papers that report essentially the same results.
Statements by various publishers about duplicate submission/publication don't include any exception for publication in journals from different disciplines.   In short, the answer to your question is "no."
Some statements on publication ethics that discuss duplicate submission and duplicate publication:
http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/overlapping-publications.html
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/jpepsy/for_authors/multiple_publications.html
http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/duplicatepublication

While this may be an accurate report of (contingent) facts, those facts would/do create a situation in which a population of scholars/researchers will not hear of something potentially of value to them because it had already been "status-published" in a different milieu. My opinion is that that's crazy. What we need (in my opinion) is a useful and functional distinction between "status-publishing" and "making-public-publishing". Could have some tags at the top so status-publishing-search engines don't get confused, heaven forbid. :)


text:
In PhD admissions, if a correspondence is opened with a prospective student, is it common for a professor to just stop replying?
If a prospective student contacts a professor about his/her work or group and the professor engages (asking for more info, acknowledging the student's existence ;-), etc), is it common for the replies to just stop? I would think courtesy at least calls for the standard easy let down, e.g "Perhaps we should talk after the admissions process," but on the other hand I understand how busy professors are and how spammy prospective students can be.
So I ask those of you "in the know," if you've engaged a student, do you feel inclined to at least let them know you will not be responding anymore? Or do you ultimately just find it easier to not respond (for example if the info you asked for isn't up to snuff)?
(I'm specifically asking about CS/ENG people, but any discipline is free to respond)

I'll admit that I sometimes just stop because my e-mail becomes overwhelming. Yes, it's a great idea for faculty to give a "let down" but it doesn't always happen.

Often there isn't anything to continue. Student says HELO; prof sends ACK and REQ for more info; student sends info; prof can send ACK but there isn't any other REQ and student doesn't have a REQ. Protocol isn't clear as to whether a FIN/END message should be sent by either party.

Yeah I hear you. But when the student send the requested info, should you provide feedback? Not necessarily like "You look like a great/terrible candidate," but rather "Thanks for the information, I will do X, Y, Z with it" or something. If only to clarify why you asked

Although we sometimes do so, it is not the job of professors to correspond with prospective students.  The program office or maybe graduate admissions office does that.

At least with all the departments in the USA that I'm familiar with, doctoral grad admissions are done by faculty in the department and not by any central office.

@geoff - We'll read it to form a better opinion of the candidate, but I would like to assume that the candidate knows that already?

@RoboKaren I'm thinking based on this question that a FIN/END on the part of the prof would be appreciated by the student. Nice summary. :-)

But we don't know if the client has any more requests. It'd be nice if there was a status code (aka reply format) that temporarily tore down the connection without suggesting that the channel was permanently closed.

As a faculty member, I try to respond to all prospective students but many times the questions are too vague, tautological, or impossible to answer:

Will I get in? Impossible to answer.
Will you work with me if I get in?
Tautological. If you are in my field of study and you get in, it's likely because I want to work with you. But I don't want to say yes because that may be misread as saying that we will accept you.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of your program? Not easily answerable, self-serving if I deem my own area strong and likely to insult faculty in the areas I deemed week.
Tell me more about your research. Too open ended. My CV is online.

I don't mean to sound harsh but questions that can be easily answered are the most likely to get responses.
Faculty do welcome e-mails from prospective students, especially those in our fields. When you get 150+ applications, it might be easy to miss someone in your specific area, so a personal message saying that you are applying is always welcome (especially early in the semester --- Sept or Oct -- before things get crazy).  Questions that aren't answerable on our website are also welcome (for example, not all department websites list which students are associated with which faculty; asking about our team members in those cases is welcome).
If you pique our interest (and we have the time), we may ask for further info from you -- for example, a paper you wrote or other writing sample. While I try to send a simple "thanks" ack message to these responses, I may be asking for something in November that I won't look at seriously until February with the other application material. So don't take the lack or brevity of acknowledgement to mean anything significant.
Note that we may not want to send an e-mail prematurely closing down discussion as we may feel that this is rude to an applicant who may have more questions. So we are in essentially a typical asynchronous communication hang condition.
That being said, I do often wish that I could respond in http status codes:
100 continue
200 ok
303 see other
307 temporary redirect
402 payment required
404 resource not found
406 not acceptable
412 precondition failed
417 expectation failed
503 service unavailable

Are there examples of questions you do consider appropriate?

Asking about our grad students is welcome. My department website is crappy and you wouldn't be able to find which grad students are working with me (or with other faculty). If you would like to chat with them, I'd be happy to pass along their names. In http status codes, that'd be a 303/307 response. :-)

My experience as a PhD student would lead me to believe that sometimes professors get bogged down in the process of teaching classes, writing research grants, doing/planning research and all the other day to day activities that their institution demands of them.
I would think you are the low person on the totem pole at this point. That might be different if you were a rising star but the vast majority of us are not recruited, we apply for admission. I might send one last email and in it let them know that you just wanted to check in and relate that you completely understand the time constraint they are under but you would like to make sure they had received what ever you had sent and if they were to busy that was fine and to just contact you when they had the time at a much later date.

If a prospective student contacts a professor about his/her work or group and the professor engages (asking for more info, acknowledging the student's existence ;-), etc), is it common for the replies to just stop? I would think courtesy at least calls for the standard easy let down
  do you feel inclined to at least let them know you will not be responding anymore? Or do you ultimately just find it easier to not respond (for example if the info you asked for isn't up to snuff)?

  In an ideal world, yes, but you are contacting us, asking us to take time to engage with you. If we did this for every applicant, it would require many hours per week of work, on a task we did not initiate. Declining a student is also not pleasant and a non-answer is often substituted.

Some information you, and others, might find helpful:
Professors, like most people these days, receive many emails daily. We would love to receive emails from prospective students looking to work with us when they are high quality students and a good fit to our needs. The problem is that too many of the emails are "fishing," and are a waste of our time. That sours us (or at least me) on the others before we even read them. Sometimes I try to be courteous and reply before filing the email, and hope to receive some information that indicates this student is a good fit. Sometimes I have nothing more I can add at that point in time, and am waiting hoping that I will later. Sometimes the emails just get lost in the queue after the student responds.
From my experience:

 Many of these prospective student emails are written using poor grammar, or very informal speech. This indicates the student is not serious about this pursuit. I only want students capable of high quality professional work. If the letter asking for a position (=asking for a job) is poorly written or very informal, what will the student's work be like if invited to join my team?
 Many emails indicate the candidate has not done his/her homework. I am a female professor (in "CS/ENG") and receive many emails addressed "Dear Sir." Those students never looked at my webpage. My picture is there. I want a student who is capable and motivated enough to do his/her homework. If he/she isn't going to work hard when asking for admissions/funding, what does that indicate about the level of effort the student will expend when pursuing the degree?
 Many emails say the student wants to work in my field, but the listed area of interest, or the examples of areas of past work, are not in my field. Some students write to every professor in the department saying that field is his/her interest (we do talk with each other). Being flexible is good, but the PhD is a targeted field of study. This also indicates lack of sincerity, and lack of industriousness.
 Many emails are simply trying to get past the admissions committee hoping for funding. I usually don't know if I will have funding in the coming year. I am not in control of the funding the department will offer. I certainly can't promise anything far in advance, and won't promise it right away. I am much more likely to take a student who has applied and has passed the admissions committee and fund that student, if I have funding available to grant. If the student has really impressed me by a good introduction, and follows up professionally, his/her chances greatly improve.
Hint: Often funding comes right when the school year starts, or a student who was in line to receive funding doesn't come opening a department funded slot.  Unfunded admitted students are likely to be funded at that time.

Suggestions:

 Write a very professional letter.
     Do your homework:

 In what area does the professor work?
What courses does the professor
   teach?
What papers has the professor written recently?
What work is
   still open related to those papers?
 Is it an area you are truly
   interested in?
 What skills and background do you offer that would
   make it worth expending more of our effort to recruit you, and the significant effort to advise you once admitted? This needs
   to be more than just having earned a BS or BS/MS with decent grades.
    Can you show me that you are industrious and capable of advanced work by showing an interest that is not superficial?

 Write a targeted letter.
 Proof read the email.
 Have a friend proof read the email.
 Proof read the email again.

Good luck.


text:
Does one invite adviser / cohort / lab to one's wedding?
For a PhD student getting married in the middle of the degree, is there an established etiquette for invited your peers and/or your adviser to the wedding?
Obviously, circumstances of the wedding affect the answer. But for the sake of argument, assume we're talking about a medium-sized affair in the US that includes extended family and friends (i.e. it's not a small, intimate affair).
For a specific example, I'm talking about a small lab of 8-10 people plus the adviser, most of whom have at least 2-3 years of working together.
The issues I think need to be considered are:

Does an invitation cross any boundaries?
Similarly, does the lack of an invitation imply some offense?
And lastly, is it all-or-nothing binary? That is, do you invite everyone or no one?

As the answers imply, this is pretty much a personal decision - but remember your partner is also involved (!) and you probably want an approximate numerical balance of attendees. So don't even think about "inviting everybody from your lab" unless (1) your partner can reasonably invite a similar number of guests, and (2) you both want to organize (and pay for) a reception of that size!

There's a similar question over at the Workplace you might find useful: "Send wedding invitations to some co-workers but not all"

If you're in a culture/context where the wedding ceremony is public then it would probably be good to invite many of them. That doesn't mean you have to invite them to the reception!

Just invite the people you would like to have come.  If there are other students, post-docs, faculty, or staff that you are close enough to that you would want to have them at your wedding, then just invite them.  There is no established protocol for who you should invite, and no one is likely to be offended if you invite some of your lab-mates but not all of them.
This is, fundamentally, a workplace issue, rather than an academia issue, although the laboratory workplace for a graduate student poses some unique challenges.  Whether to invite your advisor is just a particular example of whether to invite your boss to the wedding.
I got married halfway through my Ph.D., and I invited a few other graduate students.  I did not invite my advisor, and I know that he was not offended.  When I got back from my honeymoon, he even gave me a small wedding present.

The small wedding present attests of its large acceptance of this situation, I think

I can speak only to my experience, where I got married (very) shortly after I defended, with a relatively small wedding.

Peers: I invited only those people who I genuinely considered friends, who I wanted to be at my wedding. This was also what happened with most people who got married and invited me (or didn't invite me). There was always only a subset of people who got invited, and no one took offense at this.
An invitation doesn't cross any boundaries that aren't already there. I have had advisors who I didn't have "that kind of relationship" with. On the other hand, I also had a former advisor who was very involved in my wedding. It entirely depends on the people involved.
A lack of invitation won't necessarily cause offense, unless the person is of the belief that they're in the "close personal friends" category and it turns out they aren't. But that's a peril for all wedding invitations, and generally people are pretty understanding.
It's definitely not binary.

Here's my take. I got married last summer about a month before my PhD defense. I invited 4/5 members on my committee, 0 from my cohort, about 3 from my grad program. My two PIs, because we had a good personal relationship and talked about matters other than just school frequently, and 2 of 3 other members because we regularly met outside of school for happy hours at the local pub. I also invited another professor not on my committee who was frequently at happy hour. Break down your lab/committee/fellow grad students as such:
1) As coworkers whom you have a personal relationship with
2) Coworkers who are just coworkers.
I would invite people in class (1), but not necessarily everyone in class (2). That being said, you do have the potentially awkward situation of conversation about your wedding in front of people you are not inviting if you invite some but not all of class (2).
You need to balance your concern about cost (lots of people invited) with feelings (who would be hurt if not invited?), with who YOU want to have there. If people are upset about not being invited, just cite economics - weddings can be expensive on a per-guest basis.

If these were your very best friends you wouldn't be asking, you'd have asked them anyway. If you ask one you have to invite all of them, so separate it and have an extra party.
If they all live locally you can have a separate party after work, maybe just pizza and drinks.
Or if you can only be together during work hours, bring a cake and share it at break time, or bring hot snacks or order pizzas in for lunch.
Adjust according to your budget, of course.
They will feel they need to club together and get you a small present, so have a suggestion handy for something you need. After the wedding you bring a thank you card and pin it on the notice board.

If you'd rather not invite people at your lab/research group and are worried this would be interpreted as a declaration of antagonism, bring something like a cake and drinks, to the lab, either a few days before or after the wedding. Consider even bringing your fiancee with you (e.g. perhaps just to bring a cake from the car or something like that). That way you don't have them at the wedding but you haven't snubbed them.
I'm not saying that's my recommended option - that depends on your relationships with people - but it's an option.


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When to remove college leadership positions from CV/resume?
This easily could be moved to the Workplace site, but I ask it here because I am in grad school and it's relevant to me finding internships, jobs, and/or academic positions.
When is it time, or is it ever time, to remove college leadership positions from one's CV or resume?
I was captain of a varsity athletic team in college and president of a social fraternity. Given only that, I could easily see someone saying "big deal, how does that show me you can write my software/prove this theorem/etc." However, in grad school, I have been president of my department's grad student association and started a popular journal group in my department (to list things that could be bullet-ed). I assume my adviser would also likely highlight similar leadership activities within our research group in any professional recommendation.
The reason I ask this question is primarily because I think those positions show a behavioral theme or track record. In all positions (other than the reading group, obviously), I was elected by my peers, and I can name specific accomplishments associated with each. Even if I am looking for research positions, I imagine that leadership/entrepreneurial spirit is a desired quality (?). Maybe I'm completely off-base. Hence my question. If relevant, I am within a decade of my undergrad.
So should I draw attention to those roles on my CV or website?

I'd suggest removing them as soon as you stop being a student or reach your late 20s, whichever comes first.  Keeping that stuff on there too long may cause hiring managers and others to view you as stuck in your past and possibly adolescent.

I can see reasons why that would be the case (namely temporal relevance), but could you please elaborate on your thoughts?

Okay.  I've added another sentence which I hope will help clarify my thinking.


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Is there any Master or Ph.D. programme that involves Mathematics, Philosophy and Biology?
I majored in Business and Economics a few years ago and right now I'm looking for a master or PhD in Mathematics because I am quite passionate about it, but I just don't really know in which program and/or university I should apply, because what I want is kind of a relationship between Mathematics, Philosophy and Biology.
After finishing my degree I realised that Mathematics is what I truly hungered for and which motivated me. I feel the need to understand the existence of the universe as it is. I am a seeker of the truth, and the only thing I know is true is Mathematics, so I want to give my brain and life a good use, not for the mundane.
Im aware that human behaviour is mostly a reflection of nature, I want to understand nature by learning the universal language of Mathematics.
I need some advice in the following questions:

Is there any well-known Master or Ph.D. programme that can englobe Mathematics, Philosophy and Biology?
Although I did not take any Mathematics minor, should I go first to the Masters or go directly to the Ph.D.?

Lastly, I am free to study anywhere in the world.

Have you read about mathematical biology?

Topics that come to mind are public health, epidemiology, biostatistics, bioethics, and medical ethics.


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Should my class be more rigorous, and how?
I just finished my first semester teaching. The class average was about 88% +/- 9. This seems high to me. The class is normally taken by third and fourth year students. I don't want to push the current grades down, but I don't know if I should make the class just a little more difficult next time I teach it, or how to make it more difficult if I should.
I don't have a lot of information about how the previous professor ran the class, but based on his syllabi I probably covered about twice the number of topics he did. So I assume he spent more time on each topic and covered them in more detail. I don't know how much I could do that, I feel that it's important to introduce the topics I covered, and attempting to add more detail to each topic would take up time I might not have.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to know if a class if difficult enough, and how to adjust the difficulty?

What is the "+/-"? SD, SE?

@AzorAhai-him- Standard Deviation.

Why do you want lower grades?

Have you asked the previous professor, or others in the department, about the expectations?

@AzorAhai-him- I'm not looking for lower grades specifically. I am worried that I'm not properly preparing the students for future coursework, MCATs, GREs, etc. If the class is too simple, the grades are likely to be higher.

Grades aren't going to tell you whether you're properly preparing the students for future work.  You need to think about the learning objectives for the course.  First, are the learning objectives appropriate as part of the degree program that the students are in.  Second, assess whether the students are achieving those objectives.

@user137 Then your question is at odds with your goals. If everyone is scoring well in your class, doesn't that mean they're well-prepared for future coursework? I don't know about the MCAT, but the GRE is just the SAT, round two ...

I do not think that "rigorous" is equivalent to "strickt" or "difficult test". 2) If you want lower grades, you can make a more difficult test - but does it mean you teaches more? 3) The most common grade in American universities is A (from context, you seem to teach in one). Compared to that 88% seems actually low.

If this is so unexpected, is it possible that your weighting is off?  Always good to rule out a simple coding error in your grading calculations/spreadsheets.  If not, and you want to adjust on a curve, that's a different ball of wax.

it's probably worth stating where this is, and what the course is on. In the UK for instance, this sort of average would be pretty much unheard of, whilst from what I gather, in the US it wouldn't be too out there

I would be careful about making drastic changes based on your first class.  It's possible that, rather than the work being too easy, the students were all above average.  You cannot empirically know which based on just one set of students.

Folks, you'll be surprised to learn that in some universities the authority enforces "maximum A ratio", which may vary from 10% to 40% across unis and depts.

You are asking the question incorrectly. The grades alone don't tell whether the course is too easy. After all, upper division students have already proven themselves in earlier courses and the ones still there should be better "on average" than those in the first courses.
To improve the question, ask yourself what it is necessary for students to actually gain and know from your course. Ask how you are measuring that. Ask whether the students, by your own measurement techniques actually have demonstrated that knowledge. If the answer is that they are learning the material then giving out lower grades "on average" just disadvantages many of them for no reason at all.
But if their answers on exercises or exams indicate that they aren't learning the material then it might be that higher grades is disincentivizing them to study hard. In that case you need to provide proper incentives. That might be things that lower the average, but it might be other things as well.
For some, but not all students, a bit of "stick" will get them moving. For others, carrots are much more effective.
But the point of it all is learning, not grading. If your grades don't measure learning then you have a bigger problem than you think you do.
But the main question is answered by comparing your syllabus to the requirements of the course and the field and making sure that you are fairly measuring that the students are able to demonstrate competence.
And, if you do conclude that it needs to be more rigorous, then the ways to improve things is to give more assignments, readings, exercises, whatever, depending on the field. Make them harder, require better solutions, etc. Learning requires hard work, just as does excellence in, say, athletics.

Whilst learning is the desired outcome and is therefore the primary consideration (rather than any particular set of grades), you are correct that an unusually high average grade can be an indicator that a course is presently too easy for the level of the students that are taking it, and there is scope for more ambitious learning expectations.  You may be able to get some guidance by looking at other courses, and especially by speaking to the "Head of Education" in your faculty, or in the university overall.  Bear in mind that a high average mark can have other causes, such as especially strong or hard-working students, or particularly good teaching of the material.  Nevertheless, if you look carefully at the content of your course and the quality of the students, you may be able to determine whether you are giving them material that is insufficiently challenging.
One effective method you can use to diagnose whether a course is difficult enough is to simply ask your students how that course compares with their other courses.  I have used this method very effectively over years of teaching, both during and at the end of my courses.  In particular, after your course is completed, and the grades have been sent out, you can ask your students how their grade on your course ranked compared to their grades on their other courses (e.g., was it their highest grade?) and ask them their impressions of how easy/hard they found the course compared to their other courses.  The advantage of this comparison is that it "controls" for the students and their general effort level.  There can be some logistic difficulties in contacting students after the course is completed, but you can send out a message and hope for response.
I use a method like this to calibrate my assessments appropriately to the class.  At the end of every class-test I do a straw-poll where I ask the students to tell me whether they felt that the section of the course they just completed (and the assessment that went with it) was: (a) easier than expected; (b) at about the level they expected; (c) harder than expected.  For timed class-tests I also ask them whether the time allowance for the test was: (a) too short (i.e., they wanted to write a lot more); (b) about right; or (c) too long (i.e., they had left over time they could not use effectively.  A simple show of hands lets me know the general consensus of the class, and this has been very useful for me to recalibrate assessments, etc., in order to get my courses to the level of difficulty that I want.
Assuming that you decide you want to add more to the course, you will first need to decide whether you want a broader scope, or more detail within the existing scope.  Personally, I generally prefer to give high levels of detail at the expense of scope (to avoid superficial presentations of topics) but I have seen some courses where the lecturers go the other way.  Any change you make to the course is going to require your time, so ultimately you will have to determine whether your time is well spent on this exercise.  In my experience, if you are teaching a course again and again, a high initial time investment can pay off in the long term.  (Contrarily, if you are teaching a course that will soon be discontinued then it probably is not worth the effort.)

OTOH, the straw-poll can be thrown off easily.  I remember getting comments from some communications majors that my first-semester Spanish course was harder than their toughest senior-level communications class (in reality, the level had been brought down a bit from where I was used to teaching it at other universities).  I just replied to them that that's more likely an indictment of their program's rigor.

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


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How to do a good remote presentation?
Due to COVID-19, I'm working from home, and I'm going to give a presentation from home. I wonder if some of good practices when giving presentation directly are still good? For example: do not put too many words in the slides => but now the audiences only have the slides to stare at, should I put more words?

One big difference with in-person presentations is that it is harder for you to judge whether the audience have understood you, because you can not see their faces and reaction, and even if you can the reactions are often delayed a bit. So one piece of advice is to ask regularly if there are any questions and if everything is clear, especially after explaining a concept that is important for understanding the rest of the presentation.

Practice with your technology to make sure you have the bugs worked out (e.g., your microphone sounds good, you know how to do things without fumbling, etc.)

Differences between a real in-person and a remote presentation are quite many, but the main key points of keeping an audience engaged remain the same. Assuming the audience can access the slides somewhere before or after the presentation, I would suggest to have pictorial representations of main concepts - use schematic diagrams and small bullet point sentences to assist them. Play around with bold fonts and highlight colours for texts, but not too much of any of these. There are many other good practices for giving a scientific and technical presentation, do perform a google search and find your preferred ones.
For a remote session, it is best to choose a platform where you can share your screen and keeping your video on, which actually adds a real feel to the presentation for the audience. It is good to have a plain background and silent environment as much as possible. If you choose a virtual background, make sure the software platform has had enough practice with it so that it can recognize between you and the background without patches of your face disappearing in the background. Structure your words more like a conversation and less like a monologue because even though the audience might be the best in this field, it is easy to zone out in such a session, so it is best to put in elements that attract attention and makes your talk easy to follow. Also, remember to number your slides/equations, etc so that they are easy to refer to.
Also, keep track of the time, if there is a chair or convener, probably they will give warnings, otherwise time yourself and don't rush or be overly slow, try to keep a steady tempo. A neutral tone is also a strong requirement for remote sessions because if your audience is spread across the planet, you don't want to come across as either a rude person or a bore.
I remember the speakers from remote sessions whose talks were natural and didn't seem too rehearsed and plastic. In the end, the content matters the most, but it is always pleasant to see it presented in an easier way - just like in a good paper.

No, I'm pretty sure that more words to stare (squint) at aren't going to be a big winner. If you can't switch back and forth between yourself and your material in a seamless way, then send them the materials prior to the presentation and refer to them as you go. Number them, perhaps to make reference easy.
But some sort of screen splitting software would be better, perhaps.
And assure that there is room/time for questions and an effective way to answer them.
And attend to what is seen in the background as you speak and make sure that you don't get interruptions from people/pets as you go.

May not be relevant for your situation, but I had added audio to my ppt presentations for building excel models using the Solver.
The students can work on the example in parallel, pause it as needed and, perhaps, mute me as needed :)
Feedback was good, as my students were in all the world's time zones so one single presentation was not going to cut it.


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What are pros and cons of submitting a PhD thesis to ProQuest?
Many people published their PhD theses in ProQuest, and it looks cool. The thesis is indexed by ACM as a book, so you can list them in the publication section in your CV. I wonder if there is any disadvantage if I do the same?
To be honest, I really doubt that anyone will ever read my thesis. But I have spent 3 (extremely painful) months to complete it. So I want to decorate it a little bit.
My university has a public repository for PhD theses, it is googlable, but not indexed. I already put my thesis in ArXiv.

Have you looked at related questions like this, or this, also with respect to statements contained therein such as 'The role of ProQuest for dissertations is not a "publisher". Even if you "publish" your dissertation with them, it is still considered "unpublished" work in many fields.' Given that the crucial change is getting indexed by ACM, rather ...

... than being subject to any form of reviews or quality control, it seems reasonable to check whether "you can list them in the publication section in your CV" is really an advantage gained by using ProQuest, or whether it is rather the higher chance for permanent availability of your thesis document to other researchers, while having your thesis show up in your university's thesis repository might be totally sufficient for citing it and listing it somehow in your C.V.

so you can list them in the publication section in your CV — You can list your thesis in your dissertation even if you don't submit it to ProQuest.  In fact, you must list your thesis in your CV, even if you don't submit it to ProQuest.

Since your thesis is already on ArXiv, it's already permanently (and freely!) available.  So I don't see any advantage to also making your thesis available through a more painful interface that requires your intended audience to give other people money.  Presumably the results in your thesis will also be (or have already been) published in other indexed publication venues, so even having your thesis indexed by ACM isn't a clear advantage.

@JeffE Thank you, can you turn your comment into an answer, so that I can close this question.

I don't think my comment answers the question.  I don't see any advantage to posting your thesis to ProQuest, but I don't see any real disadvantage either.

I don't see any advantage to posting your thesis to ProQuest, but I don't see any real disadvantage either.
Since your thesis is already on ArXiv, it's already permanently (and freely!) available. So I don't see any advantage to also making your thesis available through a more painful interface that requires your intended audience to give other people money. Presumably the results in your thesis will also be (or have already been) published in other indexed publication venues, so even having your thesis indexed by ACM isn't a clear advantage.
You can list your thesis in your dissertation even if you don't submit it to ProQuest. In fact, you must list your thesis in your CV, even if you don't submit it to ProQuest.
(JeffE's answer.)

Why must you list your thesis on your CV? I think in many cases saying you did a PhD and saying the institute and general subject area would be sufficient?

"So I don't see any advantage to also making your thesis available through a more painful interface that requires your intended audience to give other people money." Indeed, this is a disadvantage; someone might accidentally pay ProQuest for something they could have (legally) obtained for free.

I see two disadvantages: 1) if you want to edit your thesis (to append an errata, for instance), you have to change it in two places. 2) Any non-consistent modification in the metadata can also result in duplicate entries in aggregotors like dissemin or google scholar. With @PersonX 's comment, that starts to count a bit.

@Clément: you cannot edit your thesis after submission anyway. You can edit your arXiv preprint, which then becomes an "updated version of the thesis" or something like that. And confusing google scholar is unfortunate but unavoidable; google scholar is an AI built of heuristics, so it getting confused is in its character.

Just wanted to add to the discussion that some universities or graduate schools (mine included) require students to submit a Ph.D. dissertation to ProQuest. In fact, that is a part of graduation requirements in my school. Having said that, it is my understanding that a dissertation, published via ProQuest, is referred to as "unpublished doctoral dissertation" in citations (and should be, at least, per APA Publication Style Guide). I think that the underlying logic is that a ProQuest publication is considered a publication to e-repository, rather than through peer-reviewed outlet.

To JeffE's answer I'd add that there are better tools to make your thesis discoverable, unlocking publications from poorly-indexed institutional archives. ProQuest seems one like many; there are also problems with academic social networking websites.
I see you are from the UK; EU has a very nice DART-Europe E-theses Portal. Make sure your university joins it! It's also useful when you're searching sources, in my experience.
Alternatively, see Peter Suber's tips on how to self-archive your work; Zenodo is a valid repository nowadays, and gives you a DOI.