text:
How should bathroom breaks be handled during written exams to avoid cheating?
It seems to me that it is impossible to prevent cheating (as in: communicating and getting help from outside) if one allows students to use the restroom during written classroom tests.
Excluding creative solutions involving full-body searches, Faraday cages or invigilators in the stalls, the most practical way to prevent it seems to completely forbid the students to leave the room.
Of course, this seems overly penalizing to students with small health problems or personal emergencies, since they would have to retake the test.
How is this problem dealt with in practice in universities? What is the best solution?

The duration of the exam has to come into play here. How long do exams at your institution take?

@Floris 2-3 hours usually.

A teacher of mine gracefully accepted that students have cell phones with them; so he offered all of us half a page and told us to keep our cell phones on the ground on top of the page. Now if we have two cell phones, or more than two? What if there is a hidden cellphone in his socks? And if there is something written on the bathrooms wall, or something that is hidden over there ... Just simply make a question which requires extensive thinking over a short period, eg mcqs a lot of them, 15 min, 30 mcq, 15 marks.

sigh my high school forbids bathroom use during our 3 hour exams, often leading to many turning in the paper much earlier than they normally would have to avoid urinating in their pants.

I agree that if possible it would be a good idea to break the test up into hour long segments followed by 15 minute breaks. IDK if you can remember your school days but a test longer than an hour is grueling. I think you should do that regardless of the inconvenience to yourself; this is a case of the needs of the many... Also, as far as cell phones go, I'm sure your school has some place where the reception is horrible. I'd test there. If that isn't good enough then you can buy RF shielding fabrics for the purpose; they are passive. You cannot use an active RF jammer  in the US though.

I saw one of your comments: still getting a significant advantage, which could mean the difference between a C and an A. I'm really curious as to what kinds of questions are on these exams that take 2-3 hours where a few minutes in a bathroom could give a student enough time to look up answers to 20% of an exam. Do you have 5 questions, each worth 20 points? I can't imagine that there would be enough material on the exam where I could look up solutions (and remember them for that matter) that would get me an A instead of a C. If that's how your exams work, they need to be reworked, imo.

@ChrisCirefice Check for instance http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-100c-real-analysis-fall-2012/exams/. Suppose you are stuck at an exercise and have the possibility to get a quick look at the solution sheet. Multiply this by 2 exercises that you couldn't solve, plus the possibility to check your work on the others. Granted, this won't save a completely clueless student from an F, but could easily turn a C into an A.

@FedericoPoloni If your exam is 4 questions wrong, the exam is wrong. I think it's unfair to judge ability in 4 questions. If I answer even 1 wrong, I'm at a C. That's not an accurate judgement of skill in any real context, though I suppose that the grading schema you use would affect the 'judgement' process. How are students looking at a solution sheet to an exam in the bathroom? How do they have the answers at all? The only way I could see them getting help in the bathroom is reading a proof or two, but I don't think that's enough time to learn/fix answers that make up 20% of the grade.

@ChrisCirefice Re how this form of cheating can happen: 1. go to bathroom, send exercise to friends 2. go back to bathroom after a while, get responses from friends outside. Re "don't do 4-question exams": this is the standard in maths as far as I can tell. I linked to an MIT exam text, and I guess every university does the same. It's not a yes/no answer, you can get partial points for parts of the proof.

@FedericoPoloni Agreed, this is also the standard (give or take a question) in Mathematics here in Belgium. Same for a lot of classes in Computer Science tpo.

@FedericoPoloni I'd be hard pressed to type out a bunch of mathematical notation on my cell phone in a 5 minute bathroom break. Though I guess they could set that up in advance. 4 questions is appropriate for a quiz where I come from (U.S.), but not for an exam (though there are some cases). Asking questions that inspire thought rather than reproduction of proofs/theorems is more suitable to academics. That test from MIT is my definition of lacking testing my knowledge/being useful at all. Reduce the incentive to cheat rather than police cheating, at least that's how I feel as a student.

my 2cents:
I often use bathroom breaks/the water fountain as an excuse to get up from the chair and clear my thoughts.
I am quite sure that if these breaks were forbidden, my perfomance would be impacted

@ChrisCirefice One does not even need to type the questions: copy them on a piece of paper in the classroom, hide it in your pocket, snap a photo of it when you are in the stall. As for the proofs, those have not been already explained and covered in the lectures. The students have to come up with the proofs of new statements during the test. It's one of the most creative kinds of exam you can imagine, and it's very close to a mathematician's work in real life.

@FedericoPoloni Okay, you may have a point about creative ways students find to cheat. However, I don't believe that students who are willing to cheat on an exam for an A (which may or may not significantly affect their university career) are going to get very far in the real world. Those who do make significant effort to cheat and who fail later in life to demonstrate their knowledge in say, an interview, will run into problems of their own. Its your job to teach them the material and trying to police cheating is only going to negatively affect those who don't cheat.

I was forced to memorize things as a student and I'm not good at that. I could have obtained a few extra points if these breaks were allowed. First suggestion (as in most answers) is "change your exams" (some allow materials, that would be good). Second suggestion is: "have planned breaks". Let's say split the exam in several parts, 1 hour each. If 1h is too much time for some medical condition I guess that's for few people, maybe they could opt for an oral exam or simply go back to first suggestion: "change your exams". BTW: I hate exams, practical work (if possible) is more useful IMHO.

@Trylks I really do not understand what you and all the other "change your exams" people are trying to suggest. Can you suggest alternatives applicable to a mathematics course that do not have the same problem? As you can see from the example from MIT, these exams are not asking for memorizing and repeating stuff. This could be an open-book exam and the problem would be the same.

@FedericoPoloni well, not exactly the same, checking some info in a bathroom break may be reasonable, but sending and receiving information isn't that easy. Besides, there are devices that generate noise so that wifi and mobile networks don't work, the price may be reasonable.

I usually always get up at least once during a test.  I leave my phone on my desk on top of my test to show the professor that I'm not being devious.  I usually request my students just leave their phone on a desk when they get up to use the bathroom.

@Trylks those devices are called jammers and are not legal in many countries, including Italy and USA.

Write a good exam. if the exam is good, this will be irrelevant. In my insititution, we are allowed to bring one Din A4 paper (handwritten) into the exam. there is literally zero incentive to try to cheat on the bathroom, because everything you could find there can be on your own piece of paper already. Just make sure the exercises are in such a form that its the application of knowledge is tested. In real research, you don#t know everything from the top of your head - but you know where to look and then how to apply that. test that in your students.

@Polygnome This is a common point in several answers, but I believe that many here underestimate the problem. At least in STEM, I believe that no matter how well your exam is designed, communicating with a smart friend can gain a student about two letter-grades (the difference between a D and a B, or a C and an A): checking final results, finding better solution strategies, etc.

@FedericoPoloni I disagree. Especially in STEM fields its easy to write good exams that are hard to cheat on. STEM exams rarely have single/multiple choice questions, which are the easiest to cheat on. I myself study CS, and I rarely had exams where it would have been beneficial to cheat(or the time it would take to cheat would be extreme, not fitting into a bathroom break).

@Polygnome It seems like we could design an experiment to test who of us is right. Proposed setup: given a 2-hours exam text which you consider "good", we write a short solution guide that can be read in 1 minute and gives the maximum amount of help to students. Then we give the guide to 50% of the students and compare results of the two groups. Sounds reasonable?

@FedericoPoloni No. Such a solution guide is not accessible to the student, even when he cheats. What you are proposing is having one student have the master solution and sitting outside the exam, and one student go to the bathroom to call him. obviously, even if one student tries to cheat during a bathroom break and get outside help, the outside person would still not have access to such good resources. Furthermore, if you have the opportunity to actually do such an experiment, go ahead. I would be interested in quantitative findings from a controlled environment.

@Polygnome I don't understand your point. Why do you think that using external help the students cannot obtain the correct solution? It's as simple as asking one of the many people that are available for private tutoring.

@FedericoPoloni Yes, external help will help the cheater, obviously. But the impact this can have can be severely limited if you structure the exam right. Allowing students to bring a hand-written paper into the exam will take away a lot of the advantage of cheating, it will already level the playing field somewhat. Forcing students to not only provide the solution, but also reasonable steps will severly limit the impact of external help (communicating all steps to someone on the bathrrom in a way he can remember until he can write them down on his exam is hard).

@FedericoPoloni Furthermore, where I study, having a phone on your body at any point during the exam means you fail the exam. I usually turn off my phone, put it in the backpack and put that backpack in the front of the room 8where everyone stores their backpacks). We are only allowed to have pens, something to drink, and something that can be eaten quetly on our desks during exams. So if any instructor ever sees a phone during the exam, the student fails the exam, period.

How do other uni's deal with this?
I've attended courses in two universities and have been an exam supervisor in another academical institution.
In all those cases only one student could go to the bathroom at a time.
A supervisor would accompany the student up to the bathroom door and wait until the student would return.
Sure, the student could hide a book, laptop, anything in the toilet stall.
If it's a good exam these methods are not going to get the student anywhere as a good academical test requires that the student can use his brain, not just reproduce knowledge from a book.
Therefore I think making a big deal of cheat prevention is not necessary.
What's the best solution?
Not allowing students to take bathroom breaks is inhumane. I think the solution I experienced and described above is the best you'll get without exaggerating.

"Not allowing students to take bathroom breaks is inhumane." That statement is way too absolute. I have recently surveyed other lecturers in other universities, and approximately 75% assume bathroom breaks are not a necessity for exams that take less than 1.5 hours.

I am more worried about students hiding a cellphone under their clothes and texting other people than about books and laptops hidden in the stalls (which are very easy to detect).

@Leitix in 2007, at University of Freiburg, a student with a health problem was not allowed to take the break, and consequently had to pee into a fellow student's water bottle inside the exam room. http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/harte-pruefungsaufsicht-medizinstudent-musste-in-trinkflasche-pinkeln-a-468887.html

divide exam into two parts and give a 5 min break after 1 hour, then distribute second part

Some instructors for low-level courses in my department do not allow students to take bathroom breaks during exams.  They announce the policy well in advance, so everyone knows to pee before they walk in the door, and anyone with a medical issue can get appropriate accommodations.  (I follow the one-student-at-a-time rule.)

@xLeitix To be honest I tacitly assumed an exam duration of 3 hours as that was the scheduled duration of all exams I took or supervised. However, my stance is that bathroom breaks should never be denied as sometimes you can't control your body. About the phones: if an exam has questions that can be answered with the help of someones text (which is even more brief than a book summary) I think the question is not well posed.

+1. If you think it's a good idea to deny people access to the bathroom (at least on long exams e.g. 3 hours where at least a handful of people might actually need it) just because one or two students might use it as an opportunity to "cheat", then you have your priorities seriously messed up. What's next, intrusive full-body searches? Spying on the student in the toilet to check on what he's doing?

@xLeitix What about the rest 25% ? It does not matter who doesn't want to use it or thinks there is no need. Someone always will need to go. That someone can be anyone.

It's too extreme - beyond the obvious like having a cheat sheet in front of you or openly collaborating, it's too much effort. It seems counterintuitive to me and confirms that educational facilities exist as a filtering system for potential employers, rather than cultivating an individual's awareness and understanding of the world around them. I guess the "you're only hurting yourself" response to cheating has become passé. And I understand there are times when passing a test can give you the rights to taking others' lives into your hands, ie medical or piloting etc...obvious exceptions.

As someone who has IBS (as do many people), I know what it's like to go from fine to emergency situation near instantly.

@xLeitix I am not sure I agree with the statement in question but how does the number of lecturers agreeing to it invalidate it? They would be the last person to ask to judge that…

Our school provides proctors to exams with lots of students, so that they can accompany students one at a time. Anecdote: I dress more like a student than a faculty member, and once when I was leaving a final exam (after I was called from my office to answer a question), a proctor asked me if I needed to be accompanied to the toilet. I realized he mistook me for a student and said, "Maybe after I retire as a professor and I can't do it on my own, but for now I'm good."

@coburne Perhaps it’s become passé because, at the university level, it’s transparently absurd. If potential employers can’t distinguish between an earned grade and one produced by cheating, then the university has completely abdicated its credentialing responsibility, which, romantic as academics may be, is the primary reason most students enroll in a university.

Forbidding use of restroom facilities is extreme and more than a little ridiculous. If a student is resourceful enough to defeat your exam's purpose (which should be to measure a student's capability in a particular subject) without your certain discovery given only the use of a few minutes and a toilet, then probably your exam needs some work and/or that student deserves whatever grade he/she is awarded.
What's more, forbidding the use of facilities comes with some liability. From Brian Freeman, Esq.'s Bathroom Rights:

...The same court said, in an earlier case, “However primitive and ordinary, the right to defecate and to urinate without awaiting the permission of government…are rights close to the core of the liberty guaranteed by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. When government undertakes to eliminate or to impair either or both of these rights, it should be required to make a strong showing of necessity for the restrictive measure.” Indeed, we all have the “basic liberty of access to the bathroom when needed.”
People who believe they have the authority to deny access to a bathroom, especially teachers and educators throughout the country, need to be aware that denial of a pupil’s right to use the toilet could carry significant liabilities. Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a state actor can be held liable for both compensatory and punitive damages, including paying for the winner’s attorney’s fees.
In addition to liability under § 1983, a defendant could also be held liable for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Depending on the facts of the case, other potential liabilities could arise from prohibiting a person from their bona fide need for access to a toilet. For these reasons, all people, especially young students, ought to be able to use the restroom whenever needed, without be required to first obtain permission.

I disagree with your first paragraph. As I wrote in another comment below, I cannot think of a modality for an exam in mathematics in which I would not get an advantage by communicating with a friend outside. I do not mean "defeating the purpose", but still getting a significant advantage, which could mean the difference between a C and an A.

@FedericoPoloni - Maybe. But I also know that those that cheat regularly are a lot less likely to have the kinds of friends that would be willing to go out of their way to assist them in that way. Eventually character catches up regardless of what you do, and I think the best any of us can do is only that which we deem to be right for its own sake. Willfully confining a crowd of people even against nature's calling because they might cheat is the kind of thing I would judge at least borderline misanthropic.

Sure -- I am not advocating locking them up, by all means. I am just pointing out that there is a problem which seems unsolvable, and asking how people deal with it. As you point out, forbidding breaks can be illegal, in addition to inhumane. What I find surprising, though, is that many people minimize the problem and do not believe that a brief help from outside can improve performance by one or two letter grades.

@FedericoPoloni - maybe so, but in the end someone who gets by cheating all of the time is going to need more than one or two letter grades - theyre going to need that knowledge they cheated themselves out of. After all, especially in a university scenario, they're buying it. I wouldnt stress on that score too much.

theyre going to need that knowledge they cheated themselves out of. — [citation needed]

@JeffE - I upvoted your comment cause it made me laugh. If only cheaters would write cite-worthy content I might even satisfy it. But ... Am I really supposed to cite even comments?

OP doesn't need to "eliminate or impair" anyone rights to urinate. If they would like to use the bathroom, they just have to hand out the exam. There is no "deny access to a bathroom". There is only a rule that you cannot go to the bathroom carrying the exam with you. You can stand up and go to the bathroom right away, without asking anyone's permission. We will go to your seat, we will take the exam and we will grade it.

@miserv your legal theory does not make any sense. Nobody is prohibiting anybody from leaving the room in which the exam takes place. That would be kidnapping. Whatever the student does can be classified in two categories (i) he/she can leave the room leaving the exam inside the room (ii) he/she can leave the room bringing the exam with him/herself. In (i) the exam will be graded. In (ii) the exam will not be graded (simply because the professor does not have the exam). In both cases the student will not be admitted again in the room once he/she left.

First as a student, and then over 28 years as a teacher (first at high school and then at university) I've witnessed all sort of cheating strategies: appointments at the restrooms, radios (when cellphones didn't exist), programmable pocket calculators stored with a wealth of information (and with the reset procedure duly intercepted in case the professor used to pass to reset all the calculators), girls with pieces of paper attached to the legs under the skirt, etc.
So, my point is: if students want to cheat, they will.
Strict vigilance might give students a hard time cheating, but do we really want to spend our time and TAs' time watching students and escorting them to the restrooms? During a 2-4 hours exam I can do a bit of useful work: research, preparing the next exam, grading other exam papers, reading a paper... and if I really want to spend some time doing nothing, I'd rather read a novel than staring at one hundred faces.
Therefore, my suggested strategy against cheating, any kind of cheating, is: design the exam as to make cheating as ineffective as possible, and as detectable as possible during the grading phase (multiple choice questions? no, thanks).

"design the exam as to make cheating as ineffective as possible, and as detectable as possible during the grading phase"
I like this recommendation, though some courses lend themselves more easily to this than others.  In my impact evaluation class, for example, I ask the students to design an evaluation study, given a specific scenario.  The students learned different evaluation strategies during the semester, so it's unlikely that two students will independently come up with the exact same study.  Takes more work grading than multiple choice, but you get the students to think critically.

"... as detectable as possible during the grading phase" Even if you can tell that a student cheated when you're grading, that almost certainly doesn't give you evidence that they cheated. Like, that would be enough to confront a student and ask if they cheated, but if they deny it, I have no confidence that my university's Office of Student Conduct would do anything based just on the content of their exam.

Yes, I second Mike’s point. At least at American universities, it’s quite difficult to get a student sanctioned for cheating-they have rights to a considerable judicial process. If there’s no evidence, then nothing is done.

@MikePierce Yes, indeed it depends a lot on how cheating is handled. In my country, cheating is handled directly by the professors, and the disciplinary board is involved only in critical cases. Summoning the students is usually enough to make them admit the cheating. Moreover, in my country, it's common to have an oral exam after a written test, and you don't want to arrive at an oral exam with the professor suspecting you of cheating ;-)

Not an example from a university, but from my school's finals (A level, wich will grant you access to take a class at university) which I find is neither inhumane nor impracticable:

Bathrooms are checked before the tests are starting. Out-of-class
access is restricted during that time for the specific bathrooms. Not following that restriction will lead to a penalty.
Every test has 2 supervisors, one of each gender.
Only one student at a time is allowed to use the bathroom at the same time from all courses participating in a test.
Time of leaving / re-entering the room will be noted on the test paper.
A supervisor of the matching gender will escort the student to the bathroom and can check it before/afterwards.
While the student is in the bathroom the escorting supervisor is advised to only enter the bathroom if the average time is exceeded massively (usually 2~3 min for men, 3~4 min for women) for privacy reasons.
Time is noted in a separate file with a sign of the respective supervisor outside of the room (also to doublecheck if students from different courses are outside of the room the same time for potential comparison of the tests from those students).

It was the same during my "Abitur"-exams. Plus they checked whether some active mobile phones were in the room (I think with a frequency scanner) - and typically caught one or two teachers who forgot switching their mobile phone off ;-)

I'm not downvoting, but I don't understand how this got so many upvotes. This idea is point blank stupid. What do you do with this poo-record afterwards? Find correlations? And God bless the supervisors - if 20 students wanted to pee during the exam, just count the time he spends outside the toilet!

Although this is not often how things are done, here is a suggestion for improving exams, whilst addressing your problem:
An exam is meant to test the ability of the student to apply what was taught in the course. If this knowledge is to mean anything "after the course", then the conditions in which the course is administered need to mirror the real world closely. This, in turn, should mean that the understanding needed to do well in the exam should not hinge on the ability to memorize (I am a big fan of "open book" exams — bring in the reference material, it cuts down on cheating), but rather the ability to synthesize and apply — two things that are very hard to get help with during a bathroom break.
The other solution is to divide the exam into a series of shorter exams — say 1 hour exams followed by a 15 minute break, followed by another hour, etc. The intermediate results are handed in before each break, so there is no point in obtaining help during the breaks. Regular short breaks will refresh the exam takers, and give them a chance to go to the bathroom if they need to.
In line with this suggestion, the idea that "people cannot concentrate on a task for more than 45 minutes" seems to be widely believed — see this  for example. If that is indeed true, the above makes even more sense.
And if the exam is such a coherent whole that it is not possible to break it up (for example, it requires three hours of solid writing of a single essay) then good luck to the person who attempts to get help during a bathroom break …
In summary:

allow the students to have reference material
break the exam into shorter pieces
test understanding and synthesis, not memorization

If you break the exam into pieces you end up with an organisational nightmare. For instance, you'll have to re-check IDs for every segment. Regarding breaks that leave everybody seated, we tried that but found no way to balance fairness vs comfort. So we give the full time and assume students are mature enough to take a short break when they need it.

I think that breaking a long exam into smaller pieces could work. Say, the students get one hour to answer 2 questions, which are collected. Then there is a break where they can use the restroom if they want to. Then they come back for another hour and two new questions, then another break... I would worry more about cell phones being used to cheat than textbooks stashed in the loo, or asking a friend for the answer. Open book tests where reasoning rather than memorization is stressed are another possibility. Students determined to cheat will always find a way.

One of the skills I want to test on an exam is the ability to organize their time in the face of several hard problems. (I always pass out the entire list of problems, give everyone five minutes to read, and then pass out answer booklets. It dramatically reduces the number of students who "run out of time".) Breaking the exam into smaller pieces would defeat that purpose.

@JeffE - that is a good point. As is often the case, there is no "absolute best approach"; I hope that my thoughts contribute to the discussion but I'm not claiming to be an authority. In fact I always encourage people to argue against any position I take - until you see more than one side of an issue, you haven't really grasped it.

Interesting question. We had similar discussions recently in our lab as well. Our conclusions after discussion were that, practically, you can either (1) let students go to the rest rooms and live with some potential for abuse, or (2) not let students go to the rest rooms (barring medical reasons, of course).
We could not come up with a solution to let students go to the rest rooms and prevent them from cheating, if the students are prepared and reasonably cunning. For instance, in our university some large exams have the policy that students that want to use the rest rooms are escorted by one of the TAs to the door of the rest rooms. While this prevents some avenues for cheating, it does not help if the student stashed the lecture material in the rest rooms or just calls his pal when inside. Another approach was at some point that mobile phones had been collected, but clearly there is no guarantee that every student has exactly one mobile phone. Essentially, we decided that collecting mobile phones is a futile effort (as also discussed here).

How is this problem dealt with in practice in universities? What is the best solution?

In my current university, the status quo is "let students go to the rest room, and live with the avenue for cheating". In my previous university, the rule was "there are no rest room breaks" for every exam taking less than 2 hours. For 2 hours or more exams, see above.

Collecting mobile phones doesn't help if somebody has two phones, as you point out. But it isn't even guaranteed to work for people who have only one phone: somebody could easily claim that they left their phone at home because phones aren't allowed in exams.

@DavidRicherby Sure. I am sure this is even the much more common problem. What do you do if somebody just says that he owns no phone? Unlikely, yes, but impossible to disprove without actually searching the student (which is, btw, clearly illegal where I work).

In almost all exams which I have taken, leaving the room while taking an exam was not forbidden.  BUT returning to complete the exam was expressly forbidden. The penalty for taking a break was confiscation of the exam material, with no possibility of resuming the exam. (Note that these exams were almost all less than two hours long.) Students were strongly encouraged to take a bathroom break immediately before beginning the exam.
This avoids the problem of actually forbidding the student to use the bathroom, but does impose a significant penalty. If you have not completed the exam before your bathroom break, you must hand in the incomplete exam and are not permitted to finish if/when you return.
Presumably, students who can document a medical necessity for more frequent bathroom breaks are entitled to special accommodations, most likely including taking the exam separately, as a proctored exam in the academic testing center. This is not a perfect solution to the problem (what about students who are briefly ill or suffer from test-anxiety that causes them to need frequent bathroom breaks?), but the solution has worked well in my experience.

This solution seems to fit very well with the Italian exam system, which has the peculiarity that a student can take a test many times a year without consequences for failing.

The basic solution to the problem of bathroom breaks and the possibility of cheating is to design the test in a manner that best negates the benefit of cheating.
For instance, avoiding multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank type questions is an obvious step. Similarly, including questions that require multiple logical steps to successfully complete makes the likelihood of useful cheating much lower. Similarly, having multiple copies of the exam with slightly different variants of the problems (for instance, using slightly different data or assumptions) will also make it harder to cheat in a meaningful matter—students may have to spend many minutes getting the answers they would need, for relatively little benefit.
Also, allowing students to have some access to course materials during an exam cuts off one obvious reason for cheating—to access materials that they wouldn't otherwise have.

This seems easier said than done, at least in my field. I cannot think of a modality for an exam in mathematics in which I would not get an advantage by communicating with a friend outside.

Obviously, you would also want to couple this with a one-at-a-time strategy. But also, how long would you spend talking with your friend? And compare that time spent with the length of the exam. It may not be worth it in the long run.

@FedericoPoloni: Mathematics seems especially suited for this! Even if they get some proof idea by text, bad students are unlikely to write it up well enough to pass.

@Raphael that only works for math classes at a level high enough that proofs during a timed environment are a thing. Anything below Calc III and that's going to be pretty rare.

Ask your students to copy and sign their name to an honor statement, e.g., "On my honor, I will neither accept nor give unauthorized aid" and then leave them alone to take the test unproctored.  You can do this even if your campus is not an honor code campus.
My experience is that when you make your students responsible and aware that it's their job, not someone else's, to ensure they're honest, that that goes a long way toward getting honest behavior.  You won't eliminate the problem, but you will reduce it significantly.  And I'm not alone in that experience:  In the 2015 documentary, "(Dis)Honesty:  The Truth About Lies", Dan Ariely, a Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavior Economics, describes various experiments to find out what conditions make people more or less likely to be honest.  What he found (among other things):  Honor codes work.

I feel that the effectiveness of this solution is going to be very culture-dependent. What works for the US may not work in other parts of the world.

I agree with @FedericoPoloni and I can easily imagine the effect of such an action at the time I was a student, when the attitude was essentially: It's a student's right to cheat, it's a professor's duty to catch cheaters.

@MassimoOrtolano, that's exactly the attitude you have to change and what you hope to change by asking them to copy and sign an honor statement.  That said, I agree that attitudes re: academic misconduct do appear to vary worldwide.  In 4 years as faculty at UWB, I was well into double digits in reporting suspected misconduct, all sustained except for a couple that resulted in warnings.  I can only think of two US students I had to report.  The rest were international.  I don't think they realized how  seriously we treat misconduct here.

This requires students to enforce upon themselves a system whose consequences can be, in the worst case, life-defining, and depends on there being no defectors in the class-as soon as two people start talking, all bets are off. I can see this working in an institution where nobody really fails, but not otherwise.

@KevinCarlson Isn't it a bit hyperbolic to describe the result of being found responsible for academic misconduct at "life-defining".   What does that mean?  Life as you know it is completely over?  Here at Michigan, the usual result is a zero on the assignment and a 1/3 letter grade deduction on the final grade.  That's usually enough to make students decide they will never do this again but that's hardly "life-defining".

@NicoleHamilton I meant that the consequences of failing a course can be life-defining. For instance a student on academic probation may have their ability to continue their degree completely dependent on succeeding in a final exam. For another example, in math, many students at lower-level institutions find passing any math requirement a nearly insurmountable hurdle, and again the ability to continue in their degree. and thus to pursue their desired career, can hinge on the results of a math exam-even if they may not be pursuing a mathematical degree!

@KevinCarlson Our experience at Michigan is that it's unfair to the students to allow them to continue in a major where they're not doing well.  So, e.g., they get 2 chances to pass our intro CS classes.  If they don't, they can't be CS majors.  Better that they find something they like and can do well in.  So, I don't see the situation you describe in the same light you do.

@NicoleHamilton I brought up in my previous comments students who are not pursuing a mathematical degree but are required to take math courses. I believe essentially every American college and university has some math requirement, and for students with a weak background this can be deeply nontrivial to satisfy. In any case, it's lovely that you can get this approach to work at Michigan, but it absolutely does not generalize to non-selective institutions.

@KevinCarlson  LOTS of schools do not require math to graduate.  For example, Michigan offers dozens of majors in the College of LSA (Literature, Science and Arts) that require only one 3-unit "quantitative reasoning" course, which includes stuff like astronomy, economics, poli sci and biology.  Michigan does not require math to graduate.  The problem is students who want a career in, e.g., CS only because they've heard it pays well, but don't like the work and are unlikely to succeed.  We want them to find a major they actually like where they can be successful.

@KevinCarlson  I just looked at your school's (UCLA's) requirements for graduation.  They do the same thing:  they have a QR requirement but it's easy to satisfy without ever stepping inside a math class.

@NicoleHamilton Yes, my apologies for wildly overstating the case...I had forgotten how broad general ed requirements can be. In any case it is still true that most students in math courses are not math majors-if not from physical science, computer science, and engineering, they're from business, biology, or economics, where excellent math skills are not necessarily required for success in their degree, but a decent grade in calculus is. For such students the incentive to cheat on math exams can be intense, especially since exams are often the key method of assessment in math.

@KevinCarlson Engineering requires excellent math aptitude and skills.  If you don't have them, you should pick something else.  Some of the others may not require excellent skills but they require some and, same thing, if you can't do the typical lower division math that's required, that major is not for you.  I'm sorry if this seems unfair.  But it's more unfair to let people waste years in majors where they can't be successful.

@NicoleHamilton We should wrap this up, but to summarize my point: you suggested replacing proctoring with an honor statement. I suggested this was unlikely to work in math, for example among those bus, bio, and econ majors* who must take math, but do not care to, and who can and do succeed in their majors without succeeding in math, whether they could have succeeded or (maybe excepting econ here) not.
*The first three majors I listed were to be read as separate from the other three, which produce more such students.

@KevinCarlson If your claim boils down to insisting that honor codes don't work in math (or whatever), you're simply wrong.  They don't work perfectly, but they work.  It's not obvious you've ever been a student at a school with an HC.  And as a grad student, you also haven't had the experience as faculty of seeing how an HC works.

@NicoleHamilton In fact I have been such a student, but more importantly I have been instructor of record at an excellent liberal arts school, where I gave some unproctored assessments made possible by allowing retakes, and at a community college, where a faculty member would be laughed out of the room for suggesting it. “Not working perfectly”, for your proposed non-proctoring technique, means some students will get away with unlimited cheating, which is not acceptable.

Continued here:  https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/102201/discussion-between-nicole-hamilton-and-kevin-carlson

The solution is to give students one question at a time.  When the students turn in one answer, they get the next question.  Students can take a break anytime they want.  However, it is now more reasonable to have the students lose credit for just one question, if they have received that question but not turned in that answer.  If there are 10 questions in 100 minutes, students only need to wait a maximum average of 10 minutes to take another break (which is much more reasonable than waiting an hour).

Doesn't work -- student A can read all the questions early, go to the toilet, and pass them to an external friend Z who solves them (either in person or via a cellphone). Then student B later goes to the toilet and acquires all the answers from Z.

In India (at least in my university) a problem like this is pretty common. My university follows the following procedure:

A supervisor/external checks the bathrooms before the commencing of examination.
A security guard/volunteer is given duty to sit in front of the bathroom throughout the span of the examination. This duty could be given to whomsoever is free and ready to volunteer including the staff and the faculty. Every bathroom is assigned a volunteer.
The invigilator makes sure that only one student is allowed to use the restroom at a time.

This particular method leaves little room for students to cheat during the written examination.

"This duty could be given to whomsoever is free and ready to volunteer" -- this very stupid job should at the least get paid, no be given to a volunteer (since in academia, often people (eg grad students) volunteer because they are not allowed to decline.

@Thomas: Perhaps even more important is that the person who is free and ready to volunteer could easily be a person being paid by a group of students to be "free and ready to volunteer". Some reasonable attempt at screening volunteers should be in place.

If somebody asks to go to the washroom, ask them to leave their phone on their desk so that they cannot take it into the washroom. Apart from that, it is hard to micromanage cheating because you can't predict that a student will hide a textbook here or some notes there. Simply put into the syllabus that phone policy and you'll have covered a large portion of what the student intends to do. If I was going to cheat on a test, looking at my phone would be the first thing that I did.

Just witnessed around 20 to 25 people cheating on "bathroom trips" today after taking my last college engineering exam.  It was a really fundamental/fair exam so I(and many others) finished around 50 minutes early and was waiting in the hall for a friend.  I noticed the amount of people going to the bathroom during the 2.5 hour exam just seemed odd considering people rarely get up like this during lectures. Later I had to use the bathroom and when I entered the restroom there was a guy from class on his phone scrolling through lectures figuring out how to solve the problems on the exam. He found the solutions and went back in the room.  Well folks, I guess that's how you get A's in college these days.
The issue: Cheating is now taking place "outside" the classroom.
Solution: Assign faculty (TA, grad students, etc.) to monitor outside activity.
Issue: Some TA's are cheaters themselves and have friendships with undergrads
Solution: Professor will monitor outside activity and TA's will watch the class for cheaters.  If unethical TA's are giving answers to their friends, others in class will let the professor know about it anyway and the TA will be in some trouble.

I am not sure your solutions are practical. For example, how do you assign male TA to monitor activity in Lady's room?

I assume you took a picture (with your cell phone) and reported the cheater to your instructor.  Right?

not only that, also bugs in ear, PPL here asking and giving answers are ancient! not in touch with reality and cheating or spying technology

How do you know that 20-25 people cheated?

Maybe you're approaching the wrong problem. Instead of trying to avoid students that cheat, why not eliminate potential gains from cheating?
Example: Instead of asking students whether or not a piece of code will compile (easily compiled and checked online), ask them to discuss whether a piece of code is a good idea for a given problem. Nobody can effectively google the answer to

Is this implementation of List good when creating an application for
  doing X? Outline how you would improve.

Why do you think this question is less prone to cheating? You can get external help from a friend on this question, too.

I argued that this question is googled less effectively, not that you can't cheat on it.


text:
Is it advisable to use a URL link shortening service when writing an academic article?
Is it OK to present a URL using a link shortening service such as bit.ly? The reason I'm asking is that I think it's a lot easier to enter this URL (e.g., if you read it in a paper) as opposed to full URL. Or is this a bad idea?

you mean when writing a paper ?

In some countries, such shortened URLs are blocked (all of them, regardless of what they link to).

@DavidKetcheson whoa, did not know that, thanks!

Many Universities will help you forward links such as university.org/YourLink and that may simplify things.

@bobthejoe Maybe you are not with a university or at least (VERY likely!) the university doesn't offer such a link? David Ketcherson: Considering that I publish in a country where I know such a short-URL is not blocked, can't I ignore that? I mean I live here, I know that! I don't want / won't consider Cuba, Iran and North Korea in my URL service selection. Further, the www, political and IT-security stances constantly change, so any URL/services could be blocked, couldn't it?

@grunwald2.0: It's not about where you as the author live, it's where possible readers live. By using a link shortening service, you may be excluding e.g. Chinese researchers from making sense of your paper.

Related question on Writers: Is it fine to use link shorteners for research paper citations?

You should never offer a link shortener as the only option in an academic paper, for two reasons:

It's adding another point of failure: if the shortening service is down, then the link cannot be followed.  This is a particular worry over time, since the service may go out of business.
One of the big reasons why link shorteners are so popular is that they keep track of usage statistics.  I'd be offended if I thought an author was using this to monitor when the link was followed, where the people following it were located, etc.

So if you offer a shortened URL, it should only be in addition to the real URL, not in place of it.  However, I'd tend to avoid even that.  It doesn't look professional to me, and I don't think there's much savings for the reader.  (Online papers should have clickable URLs, or at least ones that can be copied and pasted, so this only arises for someone who has a printed copy but no online copy.  That can happen, but it's hardly a major issue.)

Re #2, in today's Internet tracking is done by any good web server (Google Analytics is often enabled). I don't see shorteners as being worse. However, as one of my students pointed out, you might have a profile on the shortener's site (e.g., bit.ly) and others will find out (if you aren't careful to make things private) what other links you have shared.

@Fuhrmanator: That's a good point, but one thing link shorteners can do is give you data on who follows your link to someone else's URL, where you have no access to the server.

I don't think both point 1 and 2 are substantial. For 1, notorious shorteners like bit.ly or goo.gl will never go down. For 2, one can worry about privacy, but unless you online with anonymous identity, you can't escape from trackers. I think the best reason to avoid them is being not professional. However, since I have seen many professors don't buy their own domains for their websites, I don't think that using shorteners really make that harm.

Regarding privacy, just because other people are tracking me doesn't mean I should let authors do it too.  As for bit.ly and goo.gl never going down, that may be true now, but it's not guaranteed everywhere (for comparison, tinyurl was blocked in Saudi Aradia) or always (once popular services have been shut down in suboptimal ways after they became less popular, losing data that could have been preserved but wasn't).

As said above, there are some services such as goo.gl by Google if you are afraid that services such as Bit.ly will go out of business. Google will not go out of business any time soon.

For point 2), anybody can track you when you are visiting their webpage even without using a URL shortener service. They can record your IP and know your country.  The URL shortener just make it a little bit easier. Besides, I don't see it as a problem. It is actually useful to know if people are interested in your research in my opinion. If you don't want to be tracked on a website, the only way is to not visit the website or use some VPN, etc.

@Ooker, "notorious shorteners like bit.ly or goo.gl will never go down" and even if they go down, you can track URLs down using search engines such as AltaVista or Lycos which are even less likely to go down.

@Phil: Anyone can track you when you visit their web site, but URL shorteners allow them to track your visits to third-party sites (if you follow the shortened link).  When I download something from an author's web site, I know they are probably tracking it, but I'd be irritated if an author shortened all links to other people's sites so they could track those too.

well, I guess we should be fair with the author. If you write a paper, you definitely want to know how many people download it, right? It's the same like you want to know how many people cite it.

@Ooker: The issue is not the author finding out that I downloaded their paper on the specific occasion of reading the original material with the shortened link. The issue is that the provider of the link shortening service will add that information to a comprehensive profile of my usage behaviour throughout the day that gets extended every time I come across a shortened link from that particular service.

@O.R.Mapper I'm not sure what you mean. Say the paper is in the bit.ly/123, you go to that link and then later go to the bit.ly/456 which is irrelevant to the paper. What makes you unhappy?

@Ooker: That whoever is behind bit.ly can gradually compile a profile on the different kinds of topics I may be interested in (not only in research, but also privately).

@O.R.Mapper i'm not sure if Bitly does collect that data. However, if you really concern about privacy, then this is indeed need to avoid. I would argue that most of us don't need to care that much. Plus, my  is about the collecting of the author, which is only mentioned in Anonnymous Mathematician's answer, not the provider.

@Ooker. I don't control example.net. I have no way of knowing that you visited example.net. And I certainly have no way of knowing whether you visited it on foot of my recommendation, on foot of someone else's recommendation, as a result of a search, or your own accord. But if I give you a bit.ly link which you follow, then I do know all of that. This is the difference.

@ThatWebDude: Shouldn't be happening as much with the Google Analytics opt-out add-on enabled.

What if you use official shortenings, like fb.com or wapo.st?

Short answer: It depends!
Long answer: Shortlinks are very useful when space is essential, i.e. when advertising something on twitter. Futhermore, they can often be used for analytics which some of those services offer.
Otherwise, it is often better to provide a full link. It looks more professional and gives more information. Since it is a link, it does not need to be typed in, so it might even be better to show a description instead of the link. The full domain also allows users to decide if they want to follow since it gives additional authenticity when the domain is well known. A lot of shortened urls lead to spam sites, or sites that try to introduce trojans.

A better alternative is to use a DOI if one is available. The providers of a DOI are supposed to ensure that the DOI is always up to date and points to the correct resource and as such a DOI is a better insurance against link rot than the original URL itself.
DOIs are available for most recent papers (at least the ones I know of) as well as data etc. hosted on for example figshare and Zenodo. Apart from such resources, DOIs are generally not available and in that case I also recommend using the original URL directly.

What software support is there for this?

The issue is not so much software as paying the required fees to the CrossRef organization to register a DOI.  Most publishers now do this routinely for all of their papers, but it's not typical for individuals to be able to register their own DOI's.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say it's easier to enter. If someone is reading the paper online, it's a click (in the PDF) either way. And as @AM points out, link rot can then get you in two ways instead of one. In fact you should in general be leery about linking to URLs in a paper unless you have some belief that the URL will persist for the life of the paper itself.

I have no problem with shortening a link. In a paper, you won't risk your reputation just to have a spam or contained virus link, therefore people won't need to worry about the security. Also, I don't know if other services have this feature, but you can make an customized link as long as it is unique.
For example, this was my link to my dissertation: bit.ly/epHIVprotease. (Need not to follow it, I have pulled it down)
Anyone in my field will immediately understand what it says: electrostatic potential of a HIV protease. So it's also looked professional, I think.

So it may be great for a poster (I did it a few times). But not for a paper, for reasons pointed out by Anonymous Mathematician.

Yeah. It should be good for a printed paper or a poster or a presentation. But if you are worry about the server, you can choose goo.gl. It'll never die :D

Especially for a poster, I don't see the point. If you want people with mobile devices to directly follow links from your poster, add a QR code to the full URL next to the human-readable full URL rather than going via some third-party shortening service.

The link to your dissertation is dead.

@O.R.Mapper QR code is dead

@JeffE I know, I pull it down

@Ooker: Where I live, QR codes are commonly found in many public places - public transportation stops (pointing to extended itinerary information), ad posters and displays (pointing to the company website), store fronts (pointing to the online shop or whatever), business cards (replicating the info printed on the card), public wifi hotspots (pointing to the sign up page), etc. In real life, I see nothing that supports your claim.

@O.R.Mapper may I ask you where you live? I didn't cite my claim because there are many articles on the internet you can find about that.

@Ooker: I'm in Germany. Before writing my comment, I did a cursory check for the claim, but the first few articles that I could find that did discuss whether QR codes are dead came to a conclusion along the lines of "No, they are not, they are just applied incorrectly and therefore used much less than they could." But even without looking at my location, it is my impression that the use of QR codes on posters and presentation slides on international academic conferences is increasing.

Why did you take it down?  The fact that the link is dead undercuts your answer, don't you think?

@O.R.Mapper there are couple things that I can learn from that link. 1) The disagree answer gets more upvotes. It also encourages to use shorten links 2) To use QR code, one must install the scanning app in their phone, and have to read it in their small screen. 3) As some first commenters say, the use of both QR codes or shorten links are for awkward links which we can easily remember it. If we use shorten links, not only we can avoid the disadvantages of QR code, but also make those awkward links memorizable, as my example points out. So I think it makes more sense to use shorten links.

@Ooker: 1) That answer may have more upvotes as it directly responds to the question (QR codes on papers) rather than suggesting an alternative, more suitable use, as done in the accepted answer (pointing out QR codes on posters and such). 2) To use a link, one must input the URL on the small on-screen keyboard. To me, that seems more painful than installing a scanning app. 3) QR codes are not about memorizing the URL, but about avoiding its manual input. As such, adding a QR code seems advantageous even when the link is short and memorizeable.

@JeffE well, actually Google made me to take it down. At that time, I didn't have my own host and domain, so I had to use Google Drive to store it. I stored it in my "professional" account and trying to use my mundane account to access it. It turned out that it didn't allow that due to the conflict of cache. I didn't realize that until it blocked the access to it. Not only that, Bitly doesn't allow you to assign a new link to the old shorten link. Haiz. Anyway, this is a technical problem and I can't do anything.

@O.R.Mapper 1) You're right. However the accepted answer gets accepted because it answers directly to the where should QR code be used? question, while the other one answers the should QR code be used? question. I think it would be more suitable in here, not there. 2) I agree too, but keep in mind that the browser can remember the links, while I have never seen an scanning app that can remember the code. This also attributes to point 3)

@Ooker: The QR scanning app does not need to remember anything. At least the ones I know forward the scanned data to another app to actually use the decoded data. For instance, a URL extracted from a scanned code will be opened in the browser (which can then remember the link), wifi access data extracted from a scanned code will be forwarded to the OS (which can then remember the wifi connection), etc.

@O.R.Mapper ah ok then. Well, then we still have point 1 left. Also, I still think that in QR code, your screen is limited

@Ooker: That's inherent to mobile devices. Whose being suitable for viewing what you link to was my premise from the start, see my first comment: "If you want people with mobile devices to directly follow links from your poster"

@O.R.Mapper that makes sense in poster environment. Ok, I'm with you with this. But in presentations, people tend to have laptops on hands, and it's hard to scan the code on the projector's screen. Also, what if in the poster case, people use tablets? And what if they really need to go home and type the link on their laptops? I use iPhone but don't use Mac so the links can't be shared between two devices. Memorize the links is still handy, right?

@Ooker: In presentations, many people now have mobile devices. Including tablets. Which usually come with cameras that can be used for scanning QR codes these days, as well. They can manually copy the link from the device, e-mail it to themselves from the device, etc. Indeed, depending on your location in the audience, scanning the QR code on the projected slide may be difficult, but that again just implies the silde should contain both the text URL and the QR code. In all, I think this is rather a topic for a new question.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
Where to describe the pros and cons of the related work in a paper?
I just start writing a paper. This is also my first time doing so.
I have a problem describing the pros and cons of the related literature. I am not sure where I should place them.

Some of the papers address the pros and cons of related work in INTRODUCTION section so that they can claim why their research is superior. e.g. after pointing out the cons of the related work, one may claim that they work has fixed this and thus superior. So it is like the research motivation and work desctiption come directly after the pros and cons. They are all in INTRODUCTION.
The second style I have seen is writing them in RELATED WORK section.

Both ways seem fine to me. And I am even confused with these two sections! I notice that there is usually some related work described in both INTRODUCTION and RELATED WORK.
So where should I put them? INTRODUCTION or RELATED WORK?
FYI, I am in EECS field. But any generic advice is welcomed.

Which EECS field?

@JeffE Mobile computing, sensor networks, a bit of signal processing. :)

One criterion is how important these comparisons are for understanding your work.  At one extreme, you may be writing a paper whose sole purpose is to address a gap in the literature by doing something in a better way than other papers or using different hypotheses.  In that case, nobody can really understand your paper and its purpose without an explanation of how it relates to these other papers, so you would need to discuss this in the introduction.  At the other extreme, you may be mentioning related work only for completeness or because it might interest the reader, with no necessity at all for understanding your paper.  In that case, you might as well not clutter up the introduction with it.  Most papers are somewhere in between these extremes, in which case you'll have to make a judgment call (and may end up with a compromise, such as discussing some related work in the introduction and other papers in a section of their own).

I've seen a variety of styles used in Computer Science.  One that I personally like a lot is where the Introduction has a succinct summary of the pros and cons of related work, with a more leisurely and detailed "Related Work" section towards the end of the paper.  The idea is as follows:

You want to set the stage for a quick summary of the specific contributions of your own work.  To do this, you need to briefly summarize the related work in the Introduction -- in particular, pointing out the problems that your work addresses.
The reader's time and attention is precious, and you want to start discussing your own contributions soon instead of meandering about talking about other people's work. The initial summary is therefore necessarily brief (I'd suggest aiming to get to your research by page 2 of the paper).  If necessary, include a forward pointer to the Related Work section later in the paper.

In my field (business management) this is always done in the literature review which normally follows the introduction.

Introduction This paper will show that the key to motivation within a team is.....
Literature review Jones (2012) believes that money had no influence on individual performance but this paper will show evidence
  which directly contradicts his claims. The fundamentals of his theory
  are quite strong and informed this current research; however, there
  were a few points that he did not seem to fully consider...
Fuller (2010) had a very thorough study of motivation and which
  covered interpersonal interaction quite well, however, ...
Methodology
  ....

I've also see some papers where people put the literature review at the end of the paper but it seems less common.

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


text:
How to obtain a fair recommendation letter from a professor who knows me via course, not research?
The normal case is that students should obtain a recommendation letter for graduate school from the professor under whom the student has performed research.
Currently, I am taking a course conducted by a field-famous professor, from whom I wish to obtain a recommendation letter for my grad school application. However, due to some reasons, I am not able to do research under him, which implies that our only connection is that course that I am currently taking.
If so, maybe one year later, he may refuse to write me a letter, because he does not know me well, or even has forgotten me. Even if he is willing to write me a letter, being not familiar with me, he may not be able to write a decent letter for me.
(By "decent", I mean a letter that actually can help. I know that as long as he is willing to write me one, he can simply say "the student obtained a good grade from my course". I don't think this kind of letter will actually help, IMHO.)
So besides obtaining a good grade for this course and frequently asking valuable questions, what can I do to impress him so that I can obtain a decent recommendation letter for my future grad school application? How to make him understand me better?

Visit the professor and explain your plans and your wish to have him provide a letter in a brief but structured way. Slip in some of your (positive) thoughts concerning his course and, if you were inspired by it, the importance of the course for your current interest. I do not think you can do more. If the person is not interested, I doubt you can do anything to change the view that would not be annoying in the end. It is possible the person has forgotten you but if you stood out even a little in the class, my bet would be the opposite. As I see it you only risk getting a no, and not much could be done to change that.

I would add that if the course contained a project or a presentation, then to ask if those had any positive impressions on the professor. One thing to also do would be to speak with the professor EARLY in the class and express an interest in the material and to mention as well that you're interested in doing further research in the area.

I would suggest the following, but it all depends on the situation at your university, how much time and effort you are willing to exert for this, and how complicated are the reasons that make you unable to do research under him.

Unpaid research: Suggest to do some work under his supervision without a return (without being paid)
Teaching Assistantship: Try to be his teaching assistant in one of his courses, this will open a lot of doors for opportunities to approach him and give him a good impression about you.
Approach his students: If he has PhD students try to approach them and suggest helping out in something just for the sake of learning, by time you'll get in close contact with your guy.
Show off: the basic approach of all, drop at his office and brag about yourself, and ask him for a recommendation letter based on your relation during the course and your grades. Although I don't see this very meaningful, but I see some recommendation letters where the referees say how much the student has learnt during an internship that the referee had nothing to do with.. But it works and some universities accept such recommendation letters.

"Approach his students" doesn't seem incredibly useful. PhD students might want to talk about research, but typically don't have projects for even younger students, and even if they had some jobs that could be done by an undergraduate, they should be doing the work themselves.

Sometimes it's a win-win, when a PhD student supervises an undergraduate's work that contributes to the former's thesis. I wouldn't see it as abandoning a responsibility since the PhD student will also invest time and effort in the supervision and guidance.

Nor would I recommend "Show Off" as an option. I would seriously doubt that given the time costs involved in writing, someone would give you the time of day if they didn't know you.

It is very good to let the recommendation to show you are very good at learning new things.
Although it is not directly upvote your research skills, the strong learning ability helps find new research topics, and master the research-required skills fast.


text:
Should I prepare a research statement or cover letter for postdoc ads. with general descriptions?
I noticed 1-2 advertisements for postdoc positions in which they provided the general description of what they want as publishing and improving the state-of-the-art in a more or less big subfield of Y. The ads. were generally asking for sending the documents without specifying what exact documents they want to receive. One of them contained something similar to

The exact subject of research depends on your personal preferences, as long as it fits this area.

So, besides sending a CV and academic transcripts, I was thinking about preparing a cover letter or a research statement (or both). The problem is that they did not specify what sort of skills they need or what specific research objectives they are interested in, so I'm afraid how to tailor my cover letter or research statement.
In fact, as the research area is of interest to me I have ideas of what sub-problems are important there and how to approach them generally. However, I do not know if they fit the group's research goals.
Also, when they did not specify, do I have to prepare both the cover letter and research statement?
BTW, I apply in Computer Science in Germany!

Nobody here can know about the documents that are required, but typically a job announcement has a contact person. Ask them about such details.
The position sounds similar to many postdoc positions in mathematics - they want someone who can do research, be useful to the university, and co-operate with locals. I would suggest taking a look at what the faculty and PhD students are doing at the moment and trying to find shared interests there. Check out the faculty website, personal webpages and Google scholar profiles - wherever you can find list of publications.
You do not need to be doing precisely the same thing as they do, as long as you can make a case that there might be cross-pollination and that you will be doing good work.
If there is a current line of research they are pursuing, mention that. If you could help them move or expand their research, also mention that. You are not setting anything in stone, but rather trying to figure out possible shared interests with the locals. The details of what you actually do will get decided once you are there, most likely.

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


text:
Why do faculty members prefer students at their own institution for part time research positions?
I recently graduated with a bachelor's degree and have been looking for part-time research positions since I can't find a job. I have not heard back from any professors at institutions other than those at the ones I attend. Why is that?

"Graduated" means nothing. High school? Doctorate?

@Karl bachelors

Particular country or field?

All of the previous answers are correct. Plus: Student workers also have a different legal status. One can, for example, hire international students as student workers even though they are not allowed to work because they do not have a work visa. But that is only allowed if they are hired at the university they are enrolled in.
That underlies a general principle: You can only be a student worker at your own university; at other universities, you'd just be a regular employee with all that entails.

I don't think the question is about "student workers" at all, actually. The OP has graduated.

@Buffy Hm, true. The title of the question suggested otherwise, but you're right!

In the US context, it's typically impossible to employ someone as a research assistant (a specific job title) unless that person is already a student at that university.  Funds for graduate student research assistantships are often specified in grants with the understanding by the university and the funding agency that this money will go to graduate students at that university.

Familiarity
Universities prefer to enhance their own reputations rather than enhance the reputations of other universities
Part-time research positions for recent graduates are scarce, and especially scarce following pandemic funding cuts

And often there is money to support current students that can’t be used for non-students. Scholarships, work-study, etc.

@JonCuster, but that fails to explain why the OP does hear back from their prior institutions.

I think bullet point 2 is a red herring. The others are meaningful, but I doubt that "part time junior research positions" have any effect at all on reputation. I think that your first bullet, however, is likely the dominant one.

@Buffy - although hearing back does not mean an offer. He might well hear back because of his first bullet - they know him.

Bachelor graduates are not qualified for research. Nobody outside of a PhD program will hire you when you still need 1:1 supervision.
Unless of course they know you well already, have seen you work in lab courses, have taught you perhaps right what they might hire you for, in those lab courses.

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


text:
How common is it for universities to cover tuition and offer stipend for Master's students for RA/TA positions (USA)?
From my googling I found that only about 30% of the universities I looked at (in Computer Science) offer Research Assistant (RA)/Teaching Assistant (TA) positions to Master's students that cover tuition (i.e. USC, UMich). Is this normal, or did I miss something? I thought it was standard but a lot of universities like UChicago, Northwestern do not cover tuition for TA/RAs.
Side question: is the answer to this different across areas of study and departments or is tuition coverage for Masters RAs/TAs determined across the whole university?

In math, in the U.S., nearly all PhD students have RA/TA support including tuition, but RA/TA support (in math) for MS students varies widely.

This does vary quite a bit among different disciplines, even within the same university.  In Computer Science there are many more reasonably qualified students than available TA/RA funding, but since some students are willing to pay for an MS degree (they'll make it back quickly by working in industry after the degree) the programs often end up with lots of students paying their own tuition.  Such MS programs typically don't contain a meaningful research component but are based on coursework alone.

As far as I know, the contract between the University of Michigan and the relevant union (Graduate Employees Organization) requires appointments as teaching or research assistants (at 20 hours per week or more) to include tuition waivers. But the departments decide who gets such appointments. In general, in my department, Ph.D. students do and Masters students don't.

VtC as not focused enough. If you want to focus on CS, that's probably fine. 30% sounds right, even high.


text:
Can I use any book as a source?
I am writing a research paper (graduate level) on eating disorders. Many books have been written on this topic, ranging from pop culture type to scholarly works.
How do I know if a book is sufficiently reliable to use as a source in my paper? Am I looking for an author with a Masters degree? With clinical experience? With personal experience? Certain publishers? Or does anything go?

Your tag and your question are inconsistent. Should they be brought into sync?

@Buffy is there a tag for graduate school research?

Research as a tag is not often needed, as many other tags already imply it.

In which field? English literature, social psychology, or medicine?

@henning social sciences

No field that I am aware of has a list of "officially approved sources". So there is nothing which formally forbids you from using a specific source.
However, your work will be judged based on not just its own qualities, but also the sources you use, and how you use them. Quoting a source just because it has a good, concise definition of a term is no big deal. But that same source might not be a good source for facts and numbers. Your average "pop culture" book will not document how those numbers were obtained.
Now for your specific case, I understand that the topic is eating orders, and not the public perception of eating orders or a similar meta-topic. In that case, you will likely be using academic definitions of your terms. So even if the pop literature would offer some concise, readable definitions of particular terms, they would likely not be the definitions used in the other sources that you will be quoting. So be consistent, and use the definitions from the academic sources.

"This shouldn't cause a problem: You needn't rely on a single source" Unfortunately, the reliability of a statement does not increase with the number of its repetitions. In mathematics life is easy: you just verify the proof yourself. In medicine you usually do not have an option to repeat the study and decide whether it is crap or not this way. All you can do is to find the original article (not a reference to a reference to a reference to...) and see if it is written in a clear and convincing way (so the design of the study makes sense and is well-explained, the statistical evaluation is correct, the conclusions do actually follow  from the observations presented, etc.) If it is the case, you can use it as a "reliable source", if not, the doubts remain. Unfortunately, the common medical writing is often not up to these standards even when the research itself is good (my ex-wife is a doctor so I've seen plenty of articles and heard her comments about them as well). Then you are forced to take into account secondary indicators like how reputable the researchers or their institutions are. In general, it is better to err on the side of declaring  something that makes sense crap than on the side on declaring some crap making sense, so just be as skeptical as you can and look for all kinds of possible flaws.

You seem to be denying the existence of scientific consensus. Although consensus doesn't imply truth, it is an agreed upon position and, ideally, a position without evidence to the contrary.

@user2768 I would put it more mildly: I prefer not to rely on the consensus when it is possible to argue from a more convincing standpoint. The reason is that it changes too often and is influenced by too many side factors. Medicine is still reasonably conservative in that respect but if you look at social sciences, their consensus points remind you of a wildly rotating weathervanes that just make you dizzy.

Citation Machine gives a list of questions to examine when using an unfamiliar book:

Source credibility can impact your grade. Here are questions to guide
  your evaluation process: Contributor/Author
Is the author well known and frequently published?
Are there any reviews available for the author's work?
How easy is it to find contact information for the author?

Publisher
Is the publisher well known and well respected in the industry? Do they have a website?
How selective is the publisher in determining what they publish?
Are they also the main retailer for what they publish?
Does their other content seem legitimate and credible?

Currency
When was the source originally published? When was it last updated?
Are you citing the latest version? If not, how does that affect your argument?

Accuracy
Does the argument the author makes appear anywhere else? Is it backed up with data or other sources?
Where does the information presented come from?
Are there grammatical or spelling errors? Any dead links?

Relevance
What is the tone of voice? Does it appeal more to an academic reader, or is it more casual?
Would someone not familiar with the subject be able to understand the source's topic after reading it?
What is the intended audience of the source? Is it similar or different from your intended audience?

Bias
If the source is a website, does the site have ads? Do they affect the content?
What is the purpose of the source? Is it to persuade or argue? To entertain or inform?
What is the author's tone of voice? Do they seem to only present one side of the argument? How do they address the counter argument, if at all?

Citations
Does the author give credit to sources where they received information and conducted research?
Do the sources they used seem legitimate?
What sources refer to the one you are using? Do those seem legitimate?

Reproduced
Is this the original source? Has it been reproduced?
If it was reproduced, when was that done? Who reproduced it? To what end?
If it was reproduced, does it have copyright information or information on the original source?

Complete
How much information can be learned from the source on a particular topic?
Does it talk about a broad topic, or a specific element of a topic?
Are there larger, more popular sources on the topic than this one?

Credible
After reading through the various questions above, does this source seem credible?

As a first approximation:

Meta-analyses and reviews are probably more reliable than single studies. Prefer them. If there are several, check that they agree. A review might be a (text)book, but articles are usually more common. Meta-analyses are probably articles.
(Text)books aimed at researchers and graduate students are the next step.
Particular experimental articles contain the state of the art, but you will need to check if they are reliable with more care than the other sources

To check the reliability of an article, check the methodology, check Pubpeer and consult senior researchers to figure out if there are problems with the articles or if the researchers have a good or a bad reputation, and check if there are several studies claiming similar results.
You might also want to check if the publisher is a known predatory publisher or a reputable scientific publisher, though this is by no means a reliable indicator. Wikipedia pages of publishers are a good place. I might also check the level of the journal in the Finnish Julkaisufoorumi database https://www.tsv.fi/julkaisufoorumi/haku.php?lang=en - it is curated by Finnish scientists. Level 0 journals are not up to the standards, for whatever reasons (e.g. lack of peer review, content is not scientifically interesting), while 1-3 qualify as scientific publications. The database also contains Danish and Norwegian journal levels, where levels 1 and 2 indicate a scientific journal. The level of a journal does not ensure the quality or correctness of the article, but it gives some evidence. Publisher likewise.
Note that it is often difficult to get a definitive answer on whether a source is reliable or not, but if there are too many worrying aspects, best find something else to cite. Also, senior colleagues are an invaluable help, but remember that they might have idiosyncratic opinions, so better ask several.

How do I know if a book is sufficiently reliable to use as a source in my paper?

Ultimately, you don't know whether sources are reliable. This shouldn't cause a problem: You needn't rely on a single source. For instance, you can write statements such as, "Alice and Bob found ..., whereas Charlie ..."

There are ways of judging sources, even if they do not give "ultimate" certainty. Mentioning this in the answer would improve it significantly.


text:
What is the equivalent of the Mexican distinction "Titulo de Ingeniero en Sistemas Computacionales" in the U.S. higher education system?
An individual has a degree from a technology institute in Mexico. His diploma says, "El Tecnologico Nacional de Mexico otorga a [name] el titulo de Ingeniero en Sistemas Computacionales." In English this would be, "The National Technological Institute of Mexico awards the title of Computer Systems Engineer on [name]." Is this equivalent to a Bachelor of Science in Computer Systems?
Note: This question is related, but seems specific to Venezuela

The Engineer's degree has no direct equivalence in the US. It is a five year post-highschool degree, the same as a 5 year master's program in many US Computer Science or Engineering departments. It is therefore equivalent to the German Diplom-Ingenieur (or the post-Padua MS).
In the US, it might be considered to be the equivalent of a B.S., but it is really more. If you check the plan of studies, which is much more prescribed than in the US, you will see an impressive amount of courses, but relatively little electives. I personally would equate it with an M.S., but nobody asks me.
Titles in Latin America in general reflect the old French system.

From your description, this sounds equivalent to an MEng rather than an MS.


text:
PhD Length: are shorter PhD degrees (from different countries) valued differently in other counter countries where PhD Is a longer process?
This question is partially inspired by the question about degree nostrification.
In some countries a PhD is a 3-3.5 year degree (Denmark and the UK for ex) whereas in others like Sweden a PhD is usually 4.5-5 years. Quick disclaimer, I don't mean the time by which a person takes the degree, but rather what is considered "normal pace".
Additionally in the US many PhD programs include some overlap of masters-level courses, I have heard.
Does this get taken into consideration later down the road, when applying for positions, in academia or in industry? If so, how? I am thinking specifically in terms of: a) work experience, and b) age/seniority limits for applying for grants etc.
Edit: Reading some of the answers, I perhaps need to clarify a couple of things:

It's not a matter of whether shorter/longer is better? Just a simple question is whether a PhD is the same wherever, regardless of the length of the program

I did not mean the time it takes an individual to finish the program, but rather what the program is intended to include.
In Sweden, when I was doing my PhD the departments define what a PhD program from that department includes. For me it was 1 years worth of coursework, 3-6 months of department work (teaching, outreach, IT support etc) and the remaining 3 years corresponding to research (not necessarily in that order), totaling a 4.5-years long program. In other departments the teaching was 1 year long, and their PhD program 5 years in total. It's this "planned time" what I a referring to.

I do not take into account the time to complete a PhD because every project is different; unless the applicant says it took him/her 10+ years to get a PhD degree :)  What I look for is the quality of an applicant's publications.

@Prof.SantaClaus I think you missed the disclaimer in the question. It's not about any individual, but rather the education system in which the said individual gets their degree

Nitpicking, but "MSc level courses" seems overly specific, "master's-level" would be more correct, it seems.

@AzorAhai good point, edited to change that.

I'm not sure about Denmark, but in Japan or I believe the UK where PhDs are typically 3 years, essentially all of that 3 years is for research (not coursework or teaching), so I believe the amount of expected time on research during a PhD is comparable with Sweden, as well as the US.

From a Canadian view point (system more similar to the US), there's definitely some snobbing of the short european PhD. But in the end, publication record is the most important thing.

As far as I have ever seen, the length of your PhD program is irrelevant as far as considerations of future employers, etc. People (in academia) will mostly look at your publications, and possibly reference letters and reputation of your supervisor(s)/university. In particular, in all cases I know of seniority/age limits for grants count from date that your PhD was issued. (The only exception I have seen to this is the seniority limit for junior (W1) professors in Germany, which is some cases include your experience during your PhD, but this is state (Bundesland) dependent I believe.)
In some cases, your time as a PhD may (or may not) count as relevant work experience. In Germany, for example, this can factor into the determination of your salary scale, and the length of time that you can be employed under fixed term contracts.
Since one of the primary criteria by which freshly minted PhDs are judged for post-doc positions, is their publication output, as short PhD program can put you at a competitive disadvantage compared to PhDs coming from longer programs due to have less high quality publications out by the time you are applying (which also will have had less time to make an impact). A knowledgeable selection committee may account for this, but that is not guaranteed.

I had heard on occasion that people that have done shorter PhDs are generally expected to do longer/more postdoc research, but that's just anecdotes. I would love to see some figures or more concrete statements of requirements

@posdef but is that just to buy time to build up a publication record?

There's a case where it could matter: you are not eligible for some postdoc/research grants after some years have elapsed from the time you were awarded your PhD. Of course you are not eligible for other jobs without the PhD, so it goes both ways.

It is relevant, but only to second order. Your degree is your degree, what matters in academia is your publications, what matters in industry is your skills.
Say you want to go further in academia. You will be judged primarily on the amount and quality of your publications. Clearly, if you did a 4-5 year PhD, you would have more time for research, and in my experience a good 4-5 year PhD come out with a publication record comparable to that of a 3 year PhD who also did a 2 year post doc.
If you want to go to industry it is a bit less clear, as you will primarily (but definitely not always) be hired for a particular skill set developed during PhDs and post docs, and not so much the degree in itself.

But don't a lot of the US 5 year PhDs have a not insignificant coursework component?

Clearly, if you did a 4-5 year PhD, you would have more time for research  Not if the PhD took that long because of an excessive teaching load

I am answering considering the countries mentioned by OP.

No, it should be valued equally through all the countries, especially in the Europe.In 1999 in Bologna the Ministers of Education of 29 have signed an act for European Higher Education Area. The main keys of it:

European students and graduates would be able to move easily from one country to another with full recognition of qualifications and periods of study, and access to the European labor market;
European governments would fit their national higher education reforms into a broader European context;
Higher Education (HE) in the European region would increase its international competitiveness, as well as enter into dialogue and improve cooperation with HE in other regions of the world.

This is why Europeans has an opportunity to go study abroad with Erasmus and many other things. For this purpose ECTS system was created and many other things had happened.

True, the initiative was there, but at the end of the day whoever thinks that a 3 year PhD program is worth as much as a 5 year one, is plain silly.. Also ECTS grading system never really stuck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECTS_grading_scale

The number of years spent in a PhD program is totally unreleated to its worth. Think about spending three years in a Graduietenkolleg vs. having a 5 year full position including teaching obligations. Even after Bologna.

@Posdef thinks I'm silly, I guess.

@JeffE I get the subtle jab, but if we are being more explicit, are you seriously suggesting that an intended 3 year program gives you as much as a 5 year program? If that was the case, it would be idiotic to spend the extra two years, wouldn't you say so?

Yes, I am seriously suggesting that (1) a three-year PhD program with no teaching obligations, where all students enter with a masters degree and (2) a five-year program with significant teaching obligations, where most new students enter with only a bachelors degree produce researchers with roughly equivalent skills and research records, on average.  Ultimately, PhDs are judged by the strength of their record, not the duration of their PhD program.

I am an American who did a PhD in the UK where they are very short. My colleagues in America who did a similar, biomedical engineering type PhD often took seven years whereas I was in and out in less than 4.
My experience was that the UK system has somewhat adapted to this and a one or two year post-doc in the UK, in the same department you graduated from or perhaps have been collaborating with, is extremely common. It is to everyone's advantage to have this arrangement as it gives the young researcher the needed time to continue research momentum and produce a portfolio of solid publications before moving on.
It is of course very important for one's career to move onto a post-doc at another institution, for Americans this is more frequently done right after the PhD (with perhaps a bit of RA employment in the lab, to make ends meet between graduation and the next position) while in the UK there is more often a local post-doc first.
My answer corroborates the other answers which point out that publications are what going to matter. No one is going to care too much about the PhD credential. You may have written only one solid publication in seven years or several in three, and that will determine whether you make the cut and move on. Not if your PhD is more "light" or "heavy", long or short.

The purpose of a PhD is to advance scholarship through the production of original research, usually embodied in a thesis. Every PhD research project is unique, and some take longer than others, especially if the researcher needs to acquire new skills for the project. Ultimately, achievement is measured according to the thesis itself, as well as other outputs (especially peer-reviewed outputs). If someone cannot be bothered to even skim-read the thesis and/or other publications, the proxy criterion would be the reputation of the supervisor, not the programme.
As for PhD programmes, the shorter ones usually get started with the thesis immediately (reflecting the expectation that most people embarking on such programmes already have a Master's degree and have already decided what they are going to research), whilst the longer ones tend to have various preliminary courses before commencing the thesis itself (reflecting the expectation that many people embarking on such programmes do not have a Master's degree -- those who complete the preliminary courses but then leave the programme may be entitled to claim a Master's degree as an exit award).

Disclaimer: I am not in a PhD program, but my wife is and she has brought this issue up before. I can only speak from what she's told me and from what I heard from my advisor when I was in my Master's program. (We are from the U.S.)
There doesn't appear to be any hard and fast rule that shorter PhDs are worse, other than maybe less time to publish works and build your portfolio (as mentioned in other answers). In the U.S. there may be some preference for U.S. students and graduates when looking at jobs if all else is equal. This makes sense, considering potential complications of international work visas, etc. Obviously plenty of academics, researchers and professionals from other countries are able to find jobs in the U.S.
However, what my wife has heard from people in her field is that if you get a degree in the U.S. and then leave the U.S. to teach in academia it can be much harder to get a teaching job back in the U.S. later in your career. She thinks it has to due with the reputation / prestige of U.S. vs non-U.S. institutions. I.e. you took an out-of-country job that must have been easier / not as difficult to get, so you may be less qualified than your peers who got a teaching job in the U.S.
I don't have any data to support that claim further (un)fortunately (and again, there are plenty of counter-examples, particularly for more prestigious academics). I don't know if that is true for U.S. students who choose to study abroad.
As with many subjects, the 'good schools' in your field will get recognized regardless of location. The best thing would be to ask around in your field, and obviously put out the best work you can during your degree.