text:
Why does this site give different answers about leaving a bad situation compared to Workplace.SE?
If you take a look at the various questions on Academia Stack Exchange where abusive, rude, or unpleasant situations are presented, I feel there's often a culture of dismissal. Many comments and answers always try to play devil's advocate, for example:

Trying to find a reason why a supervisor may only seem abusive but are actually just doing their job (and maybe their character is just not very friendly);
Excusing rude behavior such as harsh criticism with no constructive feedback simply because it's commonplace in academia;
Often proposing to give bad situations two, three, and more chances because giving up is shown as a lack of desire to grow in character (often for no reason but just "because it's bad to give up on a situation").

Only the most extreme situations usually result in answers that directly mention leaving the situation or going to the authorities (e.g. sexual assault).
But a look at similar situations on Workplace Stack Exchange paints a very different picture. For example, an abusive manager is never tolerated and most answers (rightly) point out that nobody should be the target of abuse and there's a general consensus to direct people to leave abusive situations as soon as there's a clear indication that they cannot be resolved properly. There is no merit in staying in a terrible workplace and fighting through it, sometimes it is just better to leave and find a better place.
Why do these complaints receive such different treatments on these two sites?

This conversation has been moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment. We can only move comments to chat once.

Comments were flushed, but since I've decided to vote for closing, I'll repeat that the question can't be answered usefully because it rests on a false premise.

@henning (and other close voters), I tweaked it very slightly to maybe be more on-topic without invalidating any answers. But I still strenuously disagree with almost every assertion nevergo made and don't wish my non-edit to be seen as endorsement.

Shouldn't this question be on Meta?

@shoover - Migration always begins with "does it fit where it is?" In this case, this question is an indirect way of asking, "why isn't academia more similar to traditional workplaces?", which is a perfectly valid question on main.

@eykanal We may have to agree to disagree. IMHO, questions about the site itself are why meta exists.

Since this question is closed, I'm going to write my answer here. First of all, this fact that this question is closed itself describes what's going on in academia. So, take it from here. I think you have a pretty big false assumption here. You are seeking the level of behavior, consideration, and treatment from universities to their students similar to what corporations do in relation to their staff. It's wrong from the beginning. Students are not employees of the universities. They are customers of the universities. This is the big difference here...

While you here that customers are always right, it's quite opposite in the academia. Customers (aka students) are always wrong and have no right in relation to universities' staff, including professors. I know a lot of people might argue that it is obviously wrong and may refer you to long books of university policies in relation to students, but in practice students are some sort of customers with very very very (add a bunch of more verys in your own discretion) limited right. The question is why? Because university is a some sort of business with pretty abusive behavior...

Students pay a lot of tuition and in a sense of a business that sells something, quite expensive due to crazy tuition at least in the US, universities give students pretty limited right. When you pay thousands of dollars per semester and you might end up to payoff your student loan for rest of your life, you expect much higher level of respect and some sort of guarantee that you would get your degree no matter what...

But look at here, see lots of hypocrites that decries the sanctity of science and tell you paying tuition does not entitle you to receiving your degree under any circumstances. Universities won't tolerate an hour of late payment of tuition, but they would tolerate lots of abusive behavior from the side their staff (mainly the professors, cause administrative staffs are more or less treated as second degree citizens in comparison to professors). It's foolish to expect universities to take the side of students and punish professors for their behavior...

Seriously show me one business that puts down their staff and take the side of customer in reality and universities are not any exception here. So your answer is that outside of academia your relation to a corporation is defined as employee and employer and it won't translate to university and student relation at all, where you are seeking the same level of behavior.

I suppose I disagree with the comparison between Academia.SE and Workplace.SE and your three points in general, but there's an answerable question here. I also agree with cag51's points that we (and at Workplace) always only get one side and that perhaps a bit of devil's advocacy is alright. Here I am writing from the perspective of US/Canadian academia.

But to get to the main issue:

[On Workplace,] most answers (rightly) point out that nobody should be the target of abuse and there's a general consensus to direct people to leave abusive situations as soon as there's a clear indication that they cannot be resolved properly. There is no merit in staying in a terrible workplace and fighting through it, sometimes it is just better to leave and find a better place.

As I mentioned in a comment, Workplace is full of software engineers, who tend to enjoy a favorable market in terms of employment. This means that for them, it's often very easy to apply for jobs and find a new one in weeks.
Why doesn't this work in academia?

If you want to stay in research, it's really hard to move at almost every stage of your career.

Academia is still heavily invested in the school calendar. If I was unsatisfied with my program, I would have to wait until the next fall to start somewhere. That's if I decided to leave in time to apply for another program (typically almost a year before starting; contrast this with employment). Even if I short-circuited the application cycle, I would still start in the fall.

And the chance of transferring to a school nearby - so as not to disrupt your life incredibly - is close to zero, unless you live in Boston, maybe. Most people, upwards of 90% have already relocated for grad school, so doing that again is a hard-to-overcome stressor.

Finally, PhD-to-PhD transfers are very rare and stigmatized, so people want to avoid them.

Leaving a studentship is much harder on your career than a job.

As cag points out, changing could mean delaying by a year (which is costly), but most importantly, people select programs based on their fit for their dream project. I'm speaking generally, but I came to my program because of the resources. Finding the same resources elsewhere is not the same as finding a more-enjoyable 9-to-5.

Do I fully support this model of academia? No, but you can see why someone would tolerate more to study something they're passionate about instead of deciding to quit running networks for Company A and instead run networks for Company B.

If I left my lab on bad terms, I would likely lose access to the data I have spent years building on. So poof goes a whole pile of projects. Whereas when you leave a job, those projects are someone else's problem. My career would be affected by leaving a bad situation much more than a random HR person's (just to pick on a different job).

Lots of people are passionate about their jobs, sure, and they would likely tolerate a crappier boss compared to someone who just sees their job as a 9-to-5 (which is totally OK). It's that in academia, everyone is expected to be that person, and so you can see what it may seem that what's easy to quit over in industry is harder in academia.
Finally, I haven't even touched on the hierarchical nature of academia. If you want to work in some field, probably your professor knows all the other professors in the same field. Upsetting them could - or feel like it could - basically get you excluded from the field of your dreams. Whereas employment networks are much larger and your line manager has much less sway over where you end up next.

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

"PhD-to-PhD transfers are very rare and tend to make people suspect a problem." Great point magistrally proving OP's point 3 absolutely true.

@EarlGrey "often proposing to give bad situations two, three, and more chances because giving up is shown as a lack of desire to grow in character" this point? I'm not sure I see the connection

@AzorAhai-him- if you transfer form a PhD to a Phd, it means you are "giving up" on a bad situations (who would transfer if in a good situation?). People suspect a problem = this is the issue: the people suspecting a problem, not the problem itself!
It is a problem when someone transfers from a PhD to a PhD, but it should not imply anything else that the Phd-Supervisor relation was not a good one, like a employee-manager, forcing the employee to resign. However, in the industry it does not carry that much of a stigma as in the academia.

@EarlGrey I suppose I see how you got there, but that's not what I mean. PhD-to-PhD transfers are stigmatized, yes, which traps people in their current program, which is why someone might think we say "give it two, three, and more chances" because the cost of transferring is so high. To be clear, I don't think that happens at all. I have never seen someone accuse a poster here of some sort of lack of character growth. If you think I am somehow on the side of "not sticking it out is a sign of poor character," that's absolutely not what I meant.

@EarlGrey The problem is that, given that the cost of a transfer for a student is so high, before transferring the inference is not simply that there was "not a good PhD-supervisor relationship", but that there was some major problem. Now, this shouldn't be stigmatized either, of course, but it gives those situations a very different weight than in the industry. I don't know exactly how to solve the problem - phD scholarships (especially good ones) are few and far between - let alone postdocs, and given this situation the cost of a transfer will always be high.

@DenisNardin part of the solution is recognizing the problem :) . focusing on Europe, I guess the solution would be having a constant influx of money towards universities&research centers, rather than the lottery of ERC, grants and other competitive money sources.
We can even forecast how much industry will spend on research, although we do not know exactly on which product. I would rather spend (public) money to employ data scientist & the likes to forecast these investments, rather than spending public money for the panels evaluating ERC proposals and "competitive"/lottery fundings.

@EarlGrey I of course agree with the government giving us more money (and more tenure track positions, pretty please :D), but it is not a solution we can personally implement..

@DenisNardin let's first recognize the issues. OT: https://erc.europa.eu/news/impact-erc-research-confirmed2020
"80% of projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC) are scientific breakthroughs or major advances." Which also mean that the ERC is providing a good reward for no-risk projects, because if it was the case that the european landscape was capable of producing so many scientific breakthrough, how come that the recent pandemy vaccines, as well as major breakthrough in data science, in criptography, in quantum computing, in chemistry are always coming from outside the EU?

@DenisNardin and it can even be less money, but more homogeneously distributed. Right now, if you win an ERC, you ask to bring the project to different universities, until one university offers you "enough". So the university is taking the money "now", but it is committing with the ERC winner for the long term. How will it fund the long term? by embarking other ERC grant winners, because fundings are more and more moved to a grants system ... a gigantic Ponzi scheme!

At the end of the day, it boils down to two reasons:

Academic jobs are very specialised. You need a very specific experience to even start a project and then you often spend up to a year to really get up to speed. Moreover, PhD students (and many postdocs) additionally need somebody similarly specialised to supervise them.

Academia projects often have a long duration with a pay-off at the end: You have to get familiar with a specialised field of research (see above), plan and conduct a complex piece of research, write a paper on it, have this paper go through an (often long) peer review, often do some more work in light of the review, have it reviewed again, and published. And only after publication it is a serious contribution to your academic CV.
Something similar holds for PhD degrees: You have to finish it to be worth anything. Two half PhDs don’t make for a full one.

As a result, you cannot simply switch jobs: A specialised job market is small. While this affects supply and demand equally, you almost certainly have to move when switching jobs and it may take some time till a fitting job pops up. Many people in academia start looking for their next jobs years before their old contract runs out for this reason. Also, when you have not just completed a project, you wasted quite some time from a CV perspective. Finally, your potential employers (i.e., professors) are aware of the long time it takes to get you up to speed and are understandably very hesitant to hire somebody who may not complete the project.
Thus, leaving an academic position may very well be a move that ends your career (at least within academia) and may also lead to regret of not finishing a project on the long run. Therefore, many academics are more willing to tolerate bad conditions – not that this excuses them.
Finally, a few words on your observations regarding advice given on this site:

Many comments and answers always try to play devil's advocate, for example:

trying to find a reason why a supervisor may only seem abusive but are actually just doing their job (and maybe their character is just not very friendly),

We had several situations in the past where it turned out that a complaining student severely misjudged a situation or even behaved blatantly misbehaved themselves (and just consider how often we never get to know these things). Of course there is a fine line to be walked between advising reasonable caution and victim blaming here.

excusing rude behavior such as harsh criticism with no constructive feedback simply because it's common place in academia

Non-constructive feedback is inexcusable in almost any situation, but putting a high scrutiny on somebody’s work is indeed necessarily common in academia.
Both my personal experience as well as some questions we received show that some people have problems with this, no matter how you phrase the feedback.

often proposing to give bad situations two, three, and more chances because giving up is shown as a lack of desire to grow in character (often for no reason but just "because it's bad to give up on a situation").

I would not phrase it like this, but as reasoned above giving up is generally a bad career move in academia. For example, enduring a few more months with a moderately bad supervisor to finish a PhD is usually sound advice. Of course, at the end, the student needs to decide the lesser evil for themself, but it would be negligent not to mention the career consequences.
Also, no supervisor is perfect and given the strong individual dependence on supervisors in academia, supervisees will get to feel the imperfections more strongly (same applies for the good sides). This is different in most industry situations, where you have lesser dependences on more people.

Just one more point I've not seen above, academia has a severe and increasing pipeline problem, with only a small number of permanent academic position compared to the number of students and postdocs. This leads to the buyers market problem as highlighted by several people, but also a strong survivorship bias, where any toxic behaviours perpetuate themselves because the few who remain in the field tend to be those who tolerate or benefit from them. Young people drawn to academia are also, in my experience, particularly vulnerable to this type of survivorship bias because often their early educational experience was to be outstanding and to succeed where their peers failed. Of course, by the time you're in academia, chances are that you are just as outstanding as anyone else.

@Trunk Ough, glad I’m not getting my PhD where you did. In my experience, there’s often a camaraderie between those going through similar experiences, especially when they have to deal with similar or shared challenges cascading down from the whims and predilections of those above.

@Greenstick I agree that PhD students are often close and supportive to each other. However, there usually is a postdoc job for each PhD who wants it (there's a voluntary attrition rate here which I think is about 50% and relieves the competitive pressure). Then next step (postdoc to permanent) is where the squeeze comes, and where friendly relationships break down. I have seen several (former) friends devolve into kill-or-be-killed backstabbing and exploitation of others. It worked, and they got the jobs, and hence the survivorship bias and the reinforcement of these behaviours in perpetuity.

@Guest That’s fair, I can see how it may change through career stages. That said, I was responding to the comment by Trunk that specifically took a darkened view of ‘PhD students or Fellows.’ Sure, every grad school experience is different — but I strongly disagree that these people aren’t in some sense doing it for knowledge. If a program drives people towards toxicity and distractions that come with it, I wouldn’t expect it to produce high quality research consistently. I’m also quite perplexed by his attack on research in Oregon; it’s frankly without merit.

Academia shares features with at least two other industries which are notorious for abuse of the coalface workers by their bosses: fashion and (especially) Hollywood.
All of these industries run on insufficiently supervised patronage, and this is a well-worn pathway to widespread abuse. "Close" relationships between young hopefuls and their backers on the inside are required for a successful career, they're all competing for very few shots, and the expectation of this is ingrained in the culture. The relationship is obviously wholly unbalanced and the powerful side is granted fairly unconditional paternalistic trust to act, while the low percentage chance of success becomes a stick to drive the powerless.
"That's the culture, this is what you signed up for, I call the shots without oversight but it's your fault when you (probably) fail".
If you set up a situation like this where something as important as prestigious career prospects are dangled in such a precarious way, over naive newcomers to a seller's market by the established insiders acting with carte blanche behind closed doors, abuse is inevitably fostered.
UK politics has been reported recently to foster similar bullying and harassment issues, for largely the same reasons. I fear what politicians, academics, etc. call "networking" and "reputation" is just coercion and nepotism. Roll on open science and disinfecting sunlight.
EDIT: Here is a relevant site which I just found, full of sources: https://elephantinthelab.org

This is a great answer.  I think those examples are actually quite a bit worse than academia, but I think they illustrate the point very well!

I am all for open science, but I don’t see how it would address this problem.

@Wrzlprmft the more of the overall process that is visible to all rather than being gatekept by the established "respected" minority the better. If science looked less like shadowy reviewers putting the kibosh on threatening research; only those juniors with formal association to a recognised superior and institution being allowed to contribute; and only those same prophets of the new secular truth being deemed worthy of criticising the same, things would be a lot more egalitarian and scrutinizable. If the work is more open the culture might well follow. Public eyes should be on everything.

@Wrzlprmft Note that this is just one suggestion of several, but I believe the public believe academia is already like this. Academics have allowed the public to labour under the view that openness and scrutinizability are part of the culture, while in fact it is all about avoiding the scoop and blocking your opponents in review. The UK's CFS PACE trials were an unedifying example of researchers refusing to make their data public. This morally hazardous atmosphere breeds pressure to act unethically, and guess what is the flow of such pressure? This whole situation is unhealthy and juniors sufr

"I think those examples are actually quite a bit worse than academia" At least Academia doesn't have "casting couches". A professor sleeping with their students is liable to get fired.

@nick012000 https://elephantinthelab.org/sexual-harassment-in-academia/ , for example (I was originally looking for another long-form piece but this suffices, just type "sexual harassment in academia" into Google for a litany of news)

@benxyzzy: it is all about avoiding the scoop and blocking your opponents in review – There may be some overstaffed and overresearched fields where this is different, but for most researchers this is far from the truth: They don’t have opponents (“In real life, people don’t have archenemies, Sherlock.”) and they know damaging scoops are unlikely. In fact, the earlier you are in your career, the more likely a damaging scoop actually is, as a single scoop could actually harm your career. Once you are tenured, it’s just one of many and your career is already made.

@Wrzlprmft - you are clearly not in medical research is biological research... I'm not saying that deliberately bad reviewing behavior is the default, but everyone I know has competitors (there they see them as opponents is down to personality), no one would dream of submitting a grant or paper without excluding several people from, and I think more of my projects have been scooped than not.

You could add professional sports to Acting and fashion and politics.

@IanSudbery: I freely admit that I am far from your typical representative of those fields (but then, who is?), but for whatever it’s worth, I spent my entire academic career at institutions that either hand clinic or biology in their name so far and have not encountered the stance you describe.

A good answer. And it really ties with @benxyzzy 's answer. Namely, all three fields of employment: academia, fashion and Holywood (as well as some of the ones mentioned in this answer's comments) have tons of prospective wannabe workers.
This is essentially what leads to managers/employers having the power. The fact that while every person is individual, it usually doesn't matter much which exact actor/actress, athlete or postdoc you take on. At least unless he/she is demonstrably significantly better than others. Which is especially hard to say about people at start of their careers.

Behavior is a function of consequences. Tenured professors can get away with a lot of negative behavior because they face no consequences. Thus the throwing of chalk and keys and shoes or what have you at students by prestigious professors at prestigious places is tolerated, until there is sufficient moral opprobrium. Until there are consequences, unethical and unprofessional behavior among tenured faculty will persist.
This also applies to CEOs and other leaders. Look at Bill Gates. He stole ideas from other people. Look at Martha Stewart. Did she suffer from not honoring her commitment to Macy's? Did anything negative happen to Bill Gates after unethical episodes? None that anyone can see.
People are motivated to overlook negative behavior as a one-time event. Also, as colleagues, they depend on each other. And professors will not express dissatisfaction with their colleagues because it damages the reputation of the department, and besides, bad-mouthing other people isn't such a good idea anyway. If someone in your department has some say in your job promotion status, what would calling out bad behavior do to you?
People also seek out ways to blame the victim. Look up the "just world theory." If someone is victimized, other people tend to look for proof that the victim was complicit and therefore deserved it.
I've also noticed that academics tend to idolize other academics, on top of having a higher opinion of themselves, being academics. If a researcher is very good at research, he/she can get away with more unethical behavior. This is not limited to academia. Bobby Fischer was an anti-Semite, but the entire chess community didn't punish him because of it, because he was so valuable to chess. He also cheered for 9/11 and said that America deserved it. But people gloss over these things and emphasize his contributions to chess. An ordinary chess player would never get such treatment. Just as there are many toxic chess grandmasters, there are many toxic academics, and everyone else tends to turn a blind eye and focus on their own self-interest.
A good book, for more information, is Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, by Jeremy Pfeffer.

Most academics are not tenured.  "Thus the throwing of chalk and keys and shoes or what have you at students by prestigious professors at prestigious places is tolerated,"  That is not true.  Personally, the only worker I have seen throw things was a decidedly non-prestigious high school teacher.

Tenured academics can be punished by assigning them unpleasant duties within the terms of their contracts.  They can loose their jobs if they do not perform their assigned duties.

+1 for "People are motivated to overlook negative behavior as a one-time event." and " If a researcher is very good at research, he/she can get away with more unethical behavior."

"Tenured professors can get away with a lot of negative behavior because they face no consequences"  Source?

@MartinArgerami What consequences are there for a tenured professor for being a bad thesis advisor?

@AnonymousPhysicist Look up Serge Lang.

@Mehta: at the very least, having trouble renewing a grant. In cases where the prof has a lab, poor production from the lab, which again will make it harder to get funding. And there are places where profs are fired for not getting funding; and in places where they are not fired, they are likely to have less income because of the poor research production. In other places, a prof with poor research output might be switched to a teaching stream, where the teaching loads are much higher and the salary raises lower.

@MartinArgerami "poor production from the lab" define poor. Is it absolute or relative? if it is for grants, likely to be relative. Relative to labs having good production? How it is obtained? by exploiting armies of underfunded overworking PhDs? you need to train them for
6 months, keep them productive for 18/24 months, then discard&repeat with the next one. Not that difficult.

@EarlGrey: but you don't know that. You "showed" me that my knowledge of the scientific world is statistically irrelevant. Yours is irrelevant too, then.

@MartinArgerami no I just showed you that if you live in Geneve and know many people owning Lamborghini and Mercedes, you should not forget that the most sold car is a Toyota Corolla.

@EarlGrey: but you are implying that it is common for supervisors to "discard and repeat". What are your sources?

@MartinArgerami Statistics about people I do not know, an opinion piece published by Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03489-1
plus some sparse peer-reviewed publications
https://systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13643-020-01443-1 (reference therein)

@EarlGrey: the first article says that the majority of graduate students are content. The second mentions lots of causes of mental health issues for graduate students, including toxic relations with supervisors, but does not imply at all that toxic supervisors are widespread. "Discard and repeat" is not common; you just made that up.

@MartinArgerami I just mentioned that the good lab may exploit armies of PhD, and the number of good labs cannot, necessarily, be large: good labs will be the top 10%, let's say 20%? we are discussing relative terms.
In fact,the majority of the students are content, but way less content than same aged people working in the industry. This is a (the) shame: how came that one of the most beautiful role in life (being a researcher into the unknown) burns so badly the people undertaking it? If anything, PhD should be less stressed than their peers working in industries during stagnation years.

To answer the question OP: Because they can, simple as that. This is basically a labor supply and demand issue and professors at this point enjoy having an over-supply of labor. It's the same reason workers in low demand industries get treated like shit.
And academics go to great lengths to try to maintain their privileged position by gate keeping based upon academic standing when it comes to research.

This answer makes no sense. These days there is an under-supply of professor positions, so the argument would work the opposite of what you say. And, what does "academics try to maintain their privileged position by gate keeping based upon academic standing when it comes to research" mean, what is the problem, and how would it be avoided?

@MartinArgerami Fourier is saying that professors enjoy high supply of people willing to do PhDs, so they have little incentive to treat them nicely, because there will always be more.

@AzorAhai-him-: I want to know where those professors are, and how many they are. Because for all the professors I know (a few hundreds, say?) taking a Ph.D. student is quite the committment, both timewise and moneywise. And I know lots of cases of professors sticking with not too good Ph.D. students. I have never seen such "high supply", and in any case it's not like you can just eject a Ph.D. student you don't like and replace him.

@MartinArgerami I don't know - maybe Fourier can answer that. I don't know about you, but my department accepts around 20% of applicants, about 10% attend. That's high supply. People regularly apply to work with people who are well-known to be jerks (and we tell them that at visiting students' weekend, and they still come). If you need minions, there's a new batch every year. And depends on the department - sometimes you can "eject" someone.

@AzorAhai-him-: I don't really follow. You are saying that there are professors who hire "minions", don't care about their productivity, mistreat them, wait till they quit, and then repeat the process? What's the logic on that? How would the prof benefit for doing that?

@MartinArgerami I didn't say anything about quitting.

@AzorAhai-him-: ok, I understand even less, then. If they don't quit, but "there always be more", these bad profs keep getting Ph.D. students without replacing the previous ones? How often do they repeat these iterations?

@MartinArgerami I'm afraid I really don't understand what's confusing you.

@AzorAhai-him-: I have been in academia for the last 35 years. While I have seen some not-too-great supervisors, I have never seen a supervisor that mistreats students "because there's always more available". I haven't seen it, and I cannot imagine how it could work, so I'm asking for details and/or examples.

@martin alright, I still don't understand what's confusing you.

Professor success is not tied to his workers well being, in fact he normally selects against it to get maximum return. The posts on this place basically revolve around justifying why ridiculous demands are legitimate "because it's what academics have to do to be successful". This mentality purely comes from a saturation of students desperate to eat as much shit as needed in order to get ahead in their field. Most don't have any other options.

@MartinArgerami My attempt to rephrase FourierFlux's point would be: professors can and do make demands of their PhD students that a boss in industry would not make without losing a substantial fraction of their employees. The reason this works is that there are enough willing PhD students who will put up with these demands, so that any individual PhD student cannot successfully push back if they have an abusive advisor.

@Andrew: I see what you mean. Thing is, it is simply that the dynamics are completely different than those of boss-employee in industry. While it is obvious that unfair treatment of graduate students exists (proof: we are talking about humans), I strongly disagree that it is the norm (as you and others imply). And the same way that some supervisors get away with things that would be unusual in industry, it happens that graduate students often get away with things that would immediately get them fired in industry.

@MartinArgerami I don't necessarily think it's the norm (I personally had a very good PhD advisor that I got along well with), but I think this is a common enough situation that it's worth having these discussions openly. I also absolutely agree a relationship between an advisor and a student is not the same as a boss and employee. My overall point would be that PhD students should know their options and, if they decide to do a PhD, know why they are doing it, and understand that it will likely entail substantial dedication to their work -- with all the joys and hardships this entails.

I also think it means that a very, very important thing that undergrads going to grad school early PhD students should be aware of, is that choosing your advisor is a very important part of the process. I knew this going in and I think it was a big part of why I liked my PhD.

@MartinArgerami you know hundreds of professors? good for you.
"In 2013, the National Center for Education Statistics counted 181,530 professors, 155,095 associate professors, 166,045 assistant professors, 99,304 instructors, 36,728 lecturers, and 152,689 other full-time faculty"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_States
Let's say Europe has 1/10 of the uni of the US, with 1/5 of the professorships per each uni? knowing hundreds of professors is still statistically irrelevant.

Many of the answers essentially are answering this version of the question: Assuming you are a PhD student who wants an academic job, why is it in your best interest to "make it work" with an advisor you don't get along with? In that sense, I agree with many of the answers that boil down to... in normal circumstances, as a PhD student, you don't have many moves you can make to go around your advisor without hurting your academic career.
However I think there are other levels on which to think about this question.
One interesting level is: Why is it culturally acceptable in academia that some advisors are abusive to their students and have a lot of power in the field? I think there are many contributing factors... an incomplete list would include (a) there are people in any field (not just in academia) that treat their peers well and their subordinates poorly, and it's usually difficult for peers to "see inside" the culture of a lab, (b) research funding and promotions are based on grants won and publication records which incentivize long working hours and doesn't incentivize developing a "healthy work culture" in the same way that engineering firms are incentivized to do so (although you should also be skeptical of claims to have a "healthy work culture" in engineering firms, but that's a different story), (c) professors typically don't get management training and are not supported by their departments or funding agencies to pursue such training, (d) academic research is hyper-specialized and by the time you become a high-level expert in your area with a tenure-track faculty job, you are one of a handful of people who are qualified to do that job. Basically, academia is very hierarchical, and professors at the top of the hierarchy don't have a lot of oversight, while as a PhD student at the bottom of the hierarchy you don't have much ability to directly challenge the people above you in an unhealthy situation. Of course, ideally your advisor will encourage you to challenge them and will engage with your ideas -- mine did -- but there is no requirement that your advisor will be good.
Another level is: should a PhD student put up with a work environment they find toxic? This is really impossible to answer without getting into the details of a specific situation. On the one hand, it is certainly true that that directly challenging your advisor will make your life much more difficult as a PhD student if you want to stay in your program and in academia. Additionally, life is not perfect and there are bad bosses everywhere (in and out of academia). There is often a period of transition in going from being an undergrad to working as a professional that involves growing pains where you don't like your boss and working full time, and you just need to get through this part of growing up. On the other hand, as a talented and hardworking student, you do have other opportunities for a career that are not in academia, where your career is not as reliant on one person or one organization. It's worth knowing what these options are, and you won't hear about them (or you won't hear accurate things about them) if you only talk to people who are in academia. Sifting through what is normal growing pains, what is a truly abusive situation, and what your priorities are, is a challenging process specific to the individual. Probably academic stack exchange can only help with some parts of this -- for example, you are choosing a forum where the answer-ers are academics.
Context: I recently transitioned from a physics postdoc to industry.

I do not believe there is any difference between academia, industry, and anywhere else in society.  There are a few bad people in every group.  Claims that academia is some how a special industry are common, but I do not remember seeing any of them backed by evidence.
The three examples you give are all bad behavior.  I have downvoted and criticized answers like those several times.  More broadly speaking, assuming that the person asking the question is wrong without having any evidence to support that assumption is bad behavior.
You also have a meta-question:  Are the Academia and Workplace stack exchanges different?  I think they are different.  This site has many professors on it, or people who think they will become professors.  The Workplace stack exchange, which I rarely read, is probably full of workers with few managers.  If you asked a bunch of managers, or a bunch of future managers, what they thought about manager misconduct, they'd probably have a bias to excuse it.

"I do not believe there is any difference between academia, industry, and anywhere else in society." -- Really?

@Trunk In some countries there is no special employment law for academics.

I wouldn't say that bad behavior is "excused or dismissed" -- we can be quite harsh in castigating professors for bad behavior. Rather, I would submit that:

Professors deserve a little more "benefit of the doubt" than a typical boss, and
When professors do behave badly, students have fewer options than typical employees.

With respect to the former, the reality is that most students are just starting their academic careers. Many have never had a supervisor before, and few are familiar with academic norms. Further, being a student is inherently stressful -- the long hours and poor wages, the precariousness of the position, the uncertain future, etc. -- which can warp students' perspectives. In contrast, professors have undergone a very rigorous selection process (based primarily on their own success in research) before being allowed to supervise students, and some have supervised many students successfully over a long career.  So when we have only one side of the story, it is perhaps natural to consider alternative explanations rather than only accepting the student's side of the story.
With respect to the latter, there is little that students can do to "punish" a tenured professor, except in the most extreme cases. Unlike industry, where leaving a job after just a few years is common and acceptable, leaving a PhD position without a PhD to enroll in another PhD program only happens when something goes wrong. Even if the student is blameless, it can be hard to find another prestigious PhD position, and one's graduation date is likely to be set back by a year or more. Similarly, leaving any academic job without a letter of recommendation from the advisor is usually seen as a red flag, regardless of the reason. Given how competitive the academic job market is, many early-career academics (quite rationally) try to "make it work" in situations where most employees would have left.

"Professors deserve a little more "benefit of the doubt" than a typical boss" This is wrong.

"professors have undergone a very rigorous selection process"  Do you have any evidence this is different from managers in large corporations? I don't believe you.

"students are just starting their academic careers. "  That's not relevant to faculty behavior.

"some have supervised many students successfully over a long career."  Yes, and some have never supervised a student before.  Past supervision is not evidence of competent supervision.

"it is perhaps natural"  It may be natural, but that does not excuse bad behavior.

"students have fewer options than typical employees."  This is not true.  You can go study somewhere else or you can seek employment.

"it can be hard to find another prestigious PhD position"  If your supervisor is not doing a good job, your position is not as prestigious as you think it is.

"how competitive the academic job market is"  Definitely not a valid reason to excuse or dismiss bad behavior.

Your objections are noted.

@AnonymousPhysicist while the fact that a student is just starting their academic career is not an excuse for bad behavior, it is a possible reason why they may not accurately recognize bad behavior.

@fyrepenguin Yes, but the answer, taken literally, says that the student's inexperience is a reason to give professors the benefit of the doubt.  That's a mistake - probably a grammatical mistake.

@AnonymousPhysicist Typically professors do undergo a more rigorous selection process than corporate managers.  Having said that little of that rigor actually matters.  It is like we are using the Navy Seal's 18 month BUDS training to weed out prospective dog groomers.  There is no good reason to believe that the selected applicants are better groomers than the weeded out applicants.  There is good reason to believe that the best dog groomers never applied.

@AnonymousPhysicist "it can be hard to find another prestigious PhD position" If your supervisor is not doing a good job, your position is not as prestigious as you think it is. These are only loosely correlated. I'm in a highly ranked department that will get my CV looked at, even if if my advisor wasn't a good advisor on a personal level.

I am also very skeptical about the assertion that bad behavior is more tolerated in academia than in industry.  Academia and industry each contain multitudes, but here are some relevant, broad differences between academia and industry.

There are different types of positions in academia: Master's student, PhD student, postdoc, junior professor, senior professor, administrative, etc.  The hierarchy structure varies a lot by culture, field, university, department and situation.  Much (a vast majority?) of the time, I believe there is more freedom in academia from superviors than in industry, and typically very little direct supervision beyond the grad student and postdoc level.  All of my time in academia, I never felt like I had a "boss" or "manager", and when I was a student, I always felt like my supervisor was giving me advice and teaching me, rather than giving me orders.  Though my impression might be very different if I were working in a lab science.  Consequently, certain types of bad behavior may affect one less if you only see your supervisor once a week or once a month or so than if you have to see and interact with them daily.

The nature of the positions where you may have significant direct supervision (grad students and some postdocs) is typically quite different than in industry.  PhD/postdoc roles inherently training positions, for you to learn and get qualifications for future careers, and you can think of them as vested positions, where you don't get "full benefits" until you complete a degree or project/paper.  Note also that getting good letters of recommendations from advisors/senior academics is very important for finding future positions in academia.

Academic positions are less fungible. As mentioned in a number of other answers, there are relatively few academic positions, and in general it seems more difficult to change positions in academia than in industry.

Note: I wrote more on the first point and put it first, not because I am saying it is the most important thing, but simply because it was the least addressed point in other answers.

I object to the characterisation of postdocs as training positions.  PhD students are training positions, but postdocs are project research positions performed by trained and experienced scientists and do not grant a degree (they grant experience — any job does).  Many researchers spend decades chaining such project research positions (=postdocs).  I am sensitive about this mischaraterisation because this has been used to deny postdocs employment rights (for example, last time I looked, NASA postdocs had zero holidays, zero sick days, zero pensions, no employer health insurance, and bad pay).

@gerrit How about: many postdocs are effectively training positions?  As I said, academia is broad, and I realize there are different kinds of postdocs.  In my department, postdocs have mentors and postdoc experience is essentially a required qualification for an assistant professor position, and this is what I had in mind.  Some countries have formal habilitation systems, which in some sense are "postdoc degrees."  Certainly I don't support denying employment rights to postdocs or grad students.

I didn't mean to suggest you support denying employment rights to postdocs, I'm sorry if my post implied that. I think any job can include training, and that junior faculty or pure teaching positions need mentoring too, but that "job comes with training" does not make it a training position. I agree that postdoc experience is a essentially required for faculty positions, but isn't one of the reasons for that (apart from research experience as such), that postdoc experience can show independence and self-motivation, precisely because they are not pure training positions?

Most of the answers here are focusing on how academia and other professional contexts are different - but OP's question also asks, at least in part, why the Academia Stack Exchange is different from the Workplace Stack Exchange. And - although I am inviting downvotes by saying this - I think it is in part due to the quality and nature of the questions posted on the two exchanges.
Many questions posted on Academia turn on very specific questions about ethics and protocol, and - unfortunately - it often seems like many question posters deliberately withhold critical details about their situations that are necessary to answer the questions adequately.  Sometimes it seems clear that the question posters are doing this to maintain their anonymity in the small communities of their disciplines, but many other times it seems pretty clear that they're doing it to define the question narrative in a way that makes them appear to be in the right.  In other words, they are seeking in their answers not guidance but justification.  The absence of needed detail and the palpable way that many questions are shaded leads people to probe for clarification. Are you sure it happened that way?  Can you tell us more about the email you received?  And so forth.
Workplace questions seem to be more simple and clear-cut. When they are complex, the question posters more often err on the side of providing too much detail than too little.  There is still a recurring problem of narrative framing being more common than being forthright, but it's much less pronounced.

The problem is that the power imbalance is much higher in academia compared to most jobs in industry. A PhD student is dependent on their advisor, and can't easily switch to somewhere else unlike an employee of some company. Academia also tends to be more specialized, which results in much smaller communities. This can mean that if you antagonize one well-known person in the field, you can seriously hurt your chances everywhere else.
This leads to people giving realistic advice, and not idealistic one for an ideal world. And realistic advice in these situations looks pretty close to simply accepting bad situations. In the workplace the most common advice for seriously bad situations is to change jobs, simply because as a single employee you generally can't fix a fundamentally broken workplace. In academia there are simply many more situations in which switching jobs has a very serious cost, which creates the power imbalance that allows bad behaviour without consequencese.

I can only speak about my personal experience with academia. I think it allows abuse because there is so little normalization and regulation within it. PIs don't get any instruction on how to mentor and universities have little to no incentive to teach them how, because everyone seems to be getting along well enough without funding such instruction. Programs are big enough, people are plenty enough that drop outs are well-tolerated.
Honestly, I think publicly reviewing labs, like Yelp/Glassdoor for industry positions, would solve a lot of this. People don't want to look bad, and this matters more to them than promoting good training. To get the desired outcome (good training) we need to penalize hostile or otherwise poor work environments. If the sun don't shine there, we need to make it shine there.

The problem with public reviews of academic groups/professors is that you have about ten people per group who stay for about four years. Even if everybody reviewed, it would take very long to have any reasonable statistics that is free of individual variations that have nothing to do with the professor/group, in particular given that academic positions are a highly individual experience and most people (in particular PhDs) lack a reasonable comparison. Moreover, it would be very difficult to keep reviews anonymous and the statistics would be very easy to manipulate.

This is always the feedback. "Lack a reasonable comparison" is fine because you don't need that for toxic behavior. Low n is tough: one solution might be to withhold reporting until n>5 reviews. Or, the qs don't have to be negative: a lot of UX is just joining a lab with a style that matches your work style prefs. Having prefs reported and made available would be HUGE for people not erroneously joining bad fits (and then leaving science). Eg, is it a 9-5 lab or a 12h lab or a progress lab? Can you present unpub data at confs? Survey folks and publish the lab prefs!

No. Researchers can access very little info about labs without contacting someone in the lab directly. To access info like Glassdoor provides for industry would be game changing. Additionally, grant mechanisms could evaluate mentorship or some other metric that reflects trainee success. If we don't put money on it (like you said) we don't really value it and it won't happen. But NIH grants, for ex, include a rating of the investigator, which is silly because they themselves won't be doing the proposed experiments. If this was changed to a mentoring score it would fit the reality better too.

Teachers are often better people
I am not in academia, nor have I ever been, so I can say it: people who have devoted themselves to either (A) teaching, or (B) discovering the secrets of the world, tend to possess specific virtues that are relevant in the kinds of scenario you describe. Namely:

a willingness to look for fault in themselves
a recognition that most behaviors are as complex as the systems in which they take place

As other posters have noted, there are bad apples in every bunch. None of the above is meant to suggest otherwise: you will find assholes and prigs and boors off-campus and on. But your question is about why the people around the bad apples act differently. Well, the people around a misbehaving academic are themselves academics.
Imagine a bad actor in the workplace:
Where I might see an incompetent jerk who it'd be better to remove from the team, a teacher may see a person who is merely suffering from ignorance or struggling to learn and not handling their frustration well, and a scientist may see someone so passionate about their work that they've become oblivious to the social context.
I will fire the jerk and forget about him. The teacher will at least look to see whether an ideal outcome can be had by some indirect but ingenious means. The scientist may tolerate a kindred spirit that is still learning how to balance intense focus with the mundane evils of human organization. And both the teacher and scientist probably do this over the deafening klaxon of their own internal Dunning-Kruger alarms, while I pat myself on the back for writing off the jerk as early as possible, do not grow, and (perversely) collect $200, thus reinforcing my devil-take-the-hindmost approach to the workplace.
As other posters have described, the path chosen by an academic is neither easy nor rewarding by common standards. Those unfortunate facts act as a filter, as sure as a math test or the blood-brain barrier. As a result, we can expect to find certain character qualities concentrated on the one or other side of that barrier. It's not black-and-white, but there is a gradient and its orientation is not accidental.

I don't agree that teachers (meaning, in this context, professors) are "better people," but I definitely agree with the overall spirit of the answer and think it's a nice insight.  As someone who has been jaded by academia, I would rephrase this sentence: "Where I might see an incompetent jerk who it'd be better to remove from the team, an academic may see a good researcher who can be a valuable ally and co-author and be willing to overlook the social context." (I'm not saying you should change your answer, just giving a different spin on it)

Professor  tend not to be teachers

@NeilMeyer ... what?

@Andrew In American English, a "teacher" is someone who teaches in a primary or secondary school. While many professors teach, they are not known as "teachers" and someone referring to them as such tends to mean they don't have much experience with academia (which on this site, is kind of the main point). Non-professors who teach in American universities are "lecturers."

@AzorAhai-him- It seems pretty clear to me from context that Tom is using the word "teacher" to refer to "professors" in this answer. I wouldn't refer to a professor as a teacher, but I understand why Tom would have this idea. Also I would say professors are teachers, in the sense that they do teach (usually), even though I wouldn't say the word professor can be replaced with the word teacher. Maybe we are saying the same thing...

I'm using "teacher" and "scientist" to describe roles a person may play, not to reflect specific titles in the ed biz. I had many "instructors" in college: full professors, associate profs, grad students working on advanced degrees. I would consider them all "teachers," as much as my 3rd-grade teacher or the five classroom adults I had in middle school. It's a broad gloss but I think it works given the context.

The problem I see is that many people expect the relationship between teacher and student to be based of equality when really it is not. You maybe equalls in terms of the law, but you are not equal in status in life and at the university. All teaching aims to adress an inequality in education and knowledge between people.
You study, you clean the lab equipment. You do all the work that the master does not want to do and for his effort the apprentice gets training. I don't know who exactly is perpetuating this myth of equality,  but we are all unequal of other people in certain ways. This is life.
Your teacher may undertake to help you achieve certain academic goals or achievements, but what he/she may not be willing to do is use any of his/her limited amount of patience on people of a lower standing in life, who go out of there way to make there lives harder than what it needs to be.
When the issue of your inequality is addressed and you get to a similar level in your field, then you will adress each others as contemporaries and equals, but until the apprentice becomes a master in his own right, then he really cannot expect anything in particular from the people who train him.
This is the biggest problem with people of today. They expect other people who are under no obligation to do so to conform to there ways.

As a non-programmer who hangs out on The Workplace, I'll say two things:

The criticisms of academia in terms of power dynamics and 'lock-in' are 100% correct.

IMHO, The Workplace does tend to give out 'just leave' advice more than I'd like.  It's like teaching a class on negotiation:  when you have an extremely strong position, the only advice is to recognize that and use that.  The real tricky part is how to leverage a weaker position, and The Workplace does not do that very well.


text:
Could StackExchange be used to "do" open science?
The Q&A sites on StackExchange are a great platform for gathering knowledge about a multitude of things.
In my eyes, the reputation system does an excellent job when it comes to rating questions as well as answers according to usefulness and objectivity of their content.
Thus, the question arises, whether this framework along with the rating system could not be used beyond Q&A? In fact, I have been playing with this idea for a while but to be honest, I still could not make up my mind about it:
Could StackExchange's Q&A framework be used for A&R, as in Article and Review?
When looking at the tools one has at hand for writing a Question: There is the possibility to write equations (see mathematics), images are supported, links, ... everything you need to write an entire article, and the same goes for an answer (a review in A&R).
Just as a question and its answers are rated now, an article and its reviews could be rated (maybe a bad rating without leaving a comment should not be allowed in A&R). The history function for the edits already serves as version control and would assure a complete history of an article and all of its reviews. The rating system would serve as measure for impact-factor with the additional advantage that reviewing articles could finally be rewarded. The only thing that would need some adaptation is the accept answer functionality, as rather than a review, the article would need to be accepted at some point.
In fact, some time ago I started a proposition about this on area51, just to see what other users think about it. It seems that some really like it and others think the idea is plain stupid. As I said, I'm not really decided yet, I think such a site bears a great potential to publish, review, judge and access scientific findings openly.
So the question at hand really is:
What are the arguments in favour or against using StackExchange's Q&A framework as a ScienceExchange A&R platform to publish scientific results openly?

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a question about the Stack Exchange network, not about academia.

In a recent discussion with a colle<gue, we developed the exact same idea. As it appears to me that the approach would provide a lot of benefits, I'm wondering why your proposition was rejected? Unfortunately, the discussion is no longer accessible due to inactivity.

This is a good idea and in fact we are already doing this for physics papers in our reviews section on PhysicsOverflow. Compared to normal Q&A pairs, our A&R pairs are slighly modified, such that on a submission one can vote seperately on originality and accuracy. See here for an example of an article that got positive reviews from our community.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


text:
What is known about the evaluation behavior of students?
Much information can be found about what influences student evaluations of teaching. The evaluation results of an instructor depend on gender, race, attractiveness, personality traits, bringing cookies to class, grades expected, and other such variables.
What is known the evaluation behavior of students? Is there any research about which variables influence whether a student is full of praise or critical towards their instructor?

Seems pretty close to a "shopping question" actually.

@Buffy I don’t think so. They’re asking about the state of academic research in a particular topic.

@Buffy It's not a shopping question, but it does "need more focus."
There are way too many answers to this question, so I'd say it can't be fixed.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=teaching+evaluations&btnG=

@AnonymousPhysicist: most of the research in that link studies the instructor but not the students.

I guess this is much harder to answer because students usually evaluate anonymously. It is however an interesting question.

@Ambicion, sure, but there's a big difference between "most" and "all."

@wimi You know what class the student is in, so you can manipulate variables relating to the class.  Those are the variables which matter.

Just to clarify: When you say "evaluation behavior of students", you are asking about students evaluating faculty? Not faculty evaluating students?

@WolfgangBangerth: right.

@Ambicion -- then I don't quite understand the question. In the first paragraph, you are asking for the (unconscious) biases of students. Are you asking for the motivations in the second paragraph, i.e., the conscious factors that affect their evaluations?

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


text:
Student requests to know their "grades so far"
I periodically get requests from students to know their "grade so far". From what I can tell, this is becoming more prevalent, and more encouraged by administrators. And there is a box for "Total Grade" in our LMS, turned on by default, which I have to manually disable.
I feel that telling them a number might mislead. For example, this fall, the final exam is split into sections corresponding to the midterms, and students can replace each of their midterm scores by doing better on the corresponding section of the final. Also, there will be an extra credit final homework. So, even if a student is failing "so far", that doesn't necessarily mean that they're likely to fail the course.
What is the best way to address such questions? Be evasive? ("It's complicated...") Give them a number, even if misleading, along with some caveats that they might not read? Or design simpler grading schemes in the future, even if the "complicated" features were intended to be helpful?
A few remarks following the comments:

I have provided them with their grades on every assignment so far, and I have also told them exactly how their final grades will be computed. The issue is—the students who ask, say they're a bit confused about how well they're doing (even though I did my best to explain it clearly), and seem to want an answer like "Your average is 73% so far".
The students should be perfectly capable of assessing their performance so far. But they are overwhelmed, they are struggling, and they are anxious—especially this fall, with the ongoing pandemic, and where I'm teaching online and not face-to-face. And they might be afraid of hidden gotchas—some rule buried in the fine print of the syllabus, which I'm going to call them out on later (I'm not). I can sympathize with my students' desire for a simple answer.

Academic, I've edited the additional info you provided in the comments into the question. Please, feel free to make amendments if I got anything wrong. The rest of this extended conversation has been moved to chat.

Are there any subjective judgements in how final grades are assigned? For example: Grading to a curve chosen at the end? Setting the passing threshold by fiat at the end? I find that most instructors who obscure mid-term grades do so because they have some subjective adjustment at the end that they want to keep hidden, and can't really predict in advance (and hence neither can students).

I find it helpful to describe the algorithm by which I will calculate the grades in the syllabus.  Then, when I get this sort of question, I refer them to the syllabus (Yay! Maybe this means someone will actually read it someday).
By algorithm, I mean something like:

You will get 12 homework grades, the two lowest of which will be dropped.
Homework grades are all scored out of 64 points (yeah,
I'm teaching digital logic, so a power of two).
Your homework average will be weighted as 40% of your grade
...
The average of your exams will be weighted as 25% of your grade.
If your weighted average is above 90%, you will get an A
...

It is sufficiently detailed that students can do the same math I will do.  They always know exactly where they stand and exactly how well they need to do to get the outcome they desire.
This process has worked well for me for decades of teaching.  I rarely get the "grades so far" question.

Thanks. I'm already doing this; some students seem to still be confused. It might just be that the pandemic and the move to online teaching have heightened everyone's anxiety.

It may even be cool to provide an Excel or Google Sheets document that lets them plug in their current grades and potential future grades so can see what happens.

Students who are able and willing to do this calculation will get A's, they're not the ones asking these questions.

@academic If you are already doing this, why do you consider (in your question) the option of "being evasive"? Point them to the grading scheme and you're done. Unless you're teaching at an elementary school you really shouldn't be helping them to compute a weighted average.

All my professors at my university did this. It was very helpful to calculate how much you needed to make on upcoming assignments to get your desired final grade. If you are already giving this kind of thing to your students, then maybe you should talk to the ones still requesting their "grade so far" to learn why they are unable to figure it out themselves. Either you have left out some key information, or they are lacking in ability. In either case, the solution should be either update your provided information to include what is missing, or add instructions to walk them through the process.

It sounds like the course isn't in the maths department.

@ahorn I teach in a mathematics department, and we get the exact same questions from our students (though to be fair, we teach plenty of students from other majors). Noah Snyder said it best, the students who are resourceful enough to read and understand the grading scheme aren’t the ones who are worried about failing in the first place.

As an engineer we would always calculate this ourselves - we'd always know how much weight each assessment (projects / midterm and final exam) contributed to our final result and how much we'd need in the final to pass or get an distinction or whatever

One solution to this, if you are willing to change the grading scheme, is Cumulative Grading, which I used for many years and explain in an answer to an older post.
The student is always aware of where they are and what they need to do to achieve their goals. I found it very satisfactory and it also reduces complaints about grading.

A search on this site for Cumulative Grading will turn up some more comments on the practice.

I completed a Bachelor's last year and my school's entire grading scheme was this. It was very easy for me to quickly look at my current points, and compare it to the 1100 possible points to find out where I was. I even put a paper on the wall with my minimum acceptable grade (850) and once I hit that I could shift focus to more difficult classes if I needed.

I'm thoroughly surprised to learn that this grading scheme is not used everywhere; I honestly cannot imagine justifying grading in any other way!

Thats what a syllabus is for. Point them to the grading scheme and they can figure it out for themselves.
Halfway through the semester you could send out emails with their current grade.

The students wants to view their grade. You don't want to provide an incomplete view.
I would recommend giving the student a spreadsheet filled with the data they have so far. This would require preparing a template with the needed formulas, then when a student, copy and paste the results of the evaluations so far in the proper cells.
This is similar to user111388 proposal of giving them a table, but better for the students as they don't need to fill anything or take the effort to calculate their grade. It's already embedded in the sheet, in the way you want.
For example, rather than showing them their "current" grade as if they received a zero on the final exam, the document may show "The student did not take the final exam", forcing them to change the cells with guesses on how well they would do on the final exam, or the different parts. You can even lead them, with questions like "Did the student retake the first midterm on final exam ?" Yes/No ("oh, so I can retake the midterm in the final exam? Interesting" -don't expect 99% to have looked it up on the syllabus-). Or, quite the opposite, make some warnings appear if the filled values seem overly optimistic.

Very nice idea! And for those with the programming know-how, a web form that performs the same calculations in a web browser would make things even easier. I plan to try setting up such a page the next time I teach a lower division class.

What I try to do in Calculus 1, is that halfway I will provide an "estimated grade" using my own ad-hoc model which I only explain vaguely and not in complete detail.  I then give this grade and explain that it's very common for people to increase/decrease one partial grade (B to B+), somewhat common to increase/decrease by two, but it is rare in practice for people who continue to attend and hand in work to increase/decrease by more than that.
The reason for an ad hoc model is two-fold: if I'm dropping the lowest two quiz grades for the semester I should only be dropping the lowest one quiz grade halfway, and exam scores are a better predictor of final exam scores and the final is overweighted so I need to overweight the midterm exams in the model.  By contrast, if I just turn on Canvas's option to show final grades based on the syllabus calculation it will not make these adjustments and so will systematically give grade estimates that are too high.
I think this process gives the students what they want: an estimate of what their current grade is and a reasonable idea of what their final grade is likely to be.

Gotta say this is the first time I've ever gotten 2 downvotes for an answer that I thought was pretty uncontroversial.  Makes me wonder if I miscommunicated somehow?

Thanks for your answer, which I find quite thoughtful. The question seems to have attracted a lot of attention from people who aren't frequent users of the site. And judging from the other answers, and from now deleted comments -- some people seem to have misunderstood my question, or think that either I or my students are being very unreasonable (which I don't belive is true).

One other weirder ad hoc thing, my experience is that in Calc 1 more people do well on Midterm 1 than on later midterms or the final.  (I'm not sure if this is me making Midterm 1 too easy, or whether this is students trying extra hard during their first month of college.)  So I overweight Midterm 2 relative to Midterm 1.

What is the best way to address such questions? Be evasive? ("It's
complicated...") Give them a number, even if misleading, along with
some caveats that they might not read? Or design simpler grading
schemes in the future -- even if the "complicated" features were
intended to be helpful?

As a general principle, I'm in favor of maximizing transparency in course procedures, and not minimizing it or being evasive. Sometimes I wrestle with colleagues over this, many of whom argue explicitly for the opposite. Students deserve clear signals about their performance level, and when they need to change direction to achieve success.
For me, I keep very simple grading procedures, and keep the weighted total visible to students in the LMS at all times. Benefits of the simplicity:

Makes the grading procedure easy to communicate and understand.
Allows students to verify/check grades if desired.
Makes the weighted total meaningful throughout the term (no "resurrection" finals as someone put it).
Makes it easy to support with a formula in the LMS (e.g., no need to delete or overwrite data for any reason at the end).

Note that I'm working at a community college which is part of CUNY, which implies some important facts about the situation in my courses. One: Despite what some comments assert, it's not a given that our students can take a grading formula and compute their own grades (even from a very simple formula with only three components). In fact, it's possible that no student of mine has ever independently done that. I routinely need to walk inquiring students through the process of taking the formula and substituting known values and coming up with a result.
Moreover, by keeping the formula very simple, and no overwriting of other data at the end, immediately prior to the final exam (which is when the bulk of the inquiries occur) there is exactly one unknown value: the final exam score itself. So when students ask, "What do I need on the final to pass?" they can actually get a concrete answer. As noted, I always need to walk them through the formula and guide them to algebraically solving for the desired final exam score. Generally they are amazed that this is possible, sometimes expostulating with delight, and take photos to document the event, etc. This may be the one and only time for them that algebra has actually solved a concrete problem that they initiated. So this itself becomes one of the capstone lessons in my courses, and I've structured the grading formula in an intentional way to support this lesson and moment of discovery.
Finally, I actually started using the LMS many years ago specifically in response to this issue. On my annual student evaluations my lowest score was in the category of, "Instructor keeps me informed of my progress". So I started using the LMS so as to have the information available to students automatically 24/7 -- and thereafter my evaluations on that item popped up to the top. Students deserve useful feedback like that, especially if they're too weak to make that determination themselves (whether through cripplingly weak math skills, Dunning-Kruger syndrome, or various other reasons).
By keeping the grading process very simple and totally transparent (via the syllabus and LMS), you'll be helping your students with clear information, assisting weaker students who can't even tell if they're in trouble, generally reducing student anxiety, reducing inquiries of this sort, and saving your personal time for more productive pursuits.

Use an online gradebook that that enables some level of student access.
My students were able to log in at any time and see their current grade based on all the scores that I'd entered.
There's a bunch of them out there
https://myelearningworld.com/top-10-online-gradebooks-to-make-teachers-life-easier/

This is how it is done in France (we have a small set of official school software across the country - all of them are horrible), a screenshot from the portal of my son's school:

I left the first marks because I am proud of him.
What the text pointed by the arrow says (with an exclamation mark at the end):

this information is provided purely as an indication and does not engage neither the teachers, nor the school!

It means that the students get some insight of how well they are doing and how the conversation with the parents will be complicated, but the final mark is something independent.
This final mark is often the actual average, but sometimes teachers will modify it to account for other elements (participation etc. - usually to up it). Whether this is good or not is controversial, but at least you have a case of

showing the marks as you go
having a clear warning that this is not the final mark

There is a lot of benefit for you going over with a student how they have done so far and what they can do to do better.  If, as you say, they can still pass you should be able to explain this to them.  Probably you can just have a standard document that you post that explains this. Figure for every student who asks there are 10 that are wondering but reluctant to ask.
Among other things, students need to know if they should withdraw from your class. Many institutions have deadlines by which his must occur. If a student is failing or close to failing, I think you should reach out to them before that deadline and let them know.  You may think they know this, but even before the pandemic there were students who were confused, overwhelmed, having other problems which may lead them not to really understand this.  (I can say this as a parent as well as a Professor -- it's shocking to me how little communication there is from some faculty and also how hard it is for undergraduates to figure out basic things like are you failing.) There is no point in fooling a student who is going to fail into staying in the class.  It's no benefit to you either.
In my experience sometimes the students who are most concerned are, conversely, the pre-meds and other high performers.  In their case they want to know what they have to do to get an A, and it's great if you can clarify that.

I think it is a reasonable request.  And that you should keep running grades for them, off of a point count, along with a calculation of what they need to do to get the next higher grade (or the like).*
This is actually standard at the service academies.  Now, granted, they emphasize teaching more than R1 schools do.  But still.  You might think about just emulating the practice.
*I.e. cumulative grading, not some if-then, option value complexity.

To give another perspective, I think by withholding their grades so far, you may actually be doing the students a favour.
I had a class where the lecturer didn't give any marks back at all during the semester. You could turn up to tutorials and consulting hours and get as much help as you wanted (within reason of course), but the actual number of your grade, or even the actual assignment was withheld - not by accident either, I distinctly remember getting an email the day after the exam saying we could collect all our coursework.
Of course we all whinged and moaned about, but in the end, it ended up being my best subject that year. I was terrified of failing so I put in a lot of effort to make sure I understood the material for the (heavily weighted) exam.
I don't know what the story behind that decision was - that particular lecturer was known for doing things like that, so he could have been making a point to the students and the university for all I know. Maybe it never happened again.
But over 10 years later, I still remember the lesson I learnt from that class: sometimes you will be in a position where there will be no feedback and you'll need to commit, so you better be damned sure you're confident in your answer.
As for how to deal with it, if you choose to go that way, just stick to your guns and bear the brunt of the questioning. I don't know how the lecturer handled it himself, but I can imagine him outright ignoring the emails, or simply saying "No."
I will add that this was a third year course, and was compulsory for the major I was taking, so the context may be different to your case.
Edit:
To address the top voted comment more visibly, I never said no feedback ever. Feedback is a very important tool for gauging your understanding. Feedback doesn't have to exclusively come from graded assessment either. I'd argue far and away the best form of feedback comes with engaging in the course: taking advantage of the resources given to you!
Further to that, the fear I had of failing came from (I'll be honest here) having a habit of not taking the best approach to learning, basically relying too much on graded assessment as my only practice and feedback. I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but I'll wager I'm not the only person who has ever fallen into that trap.

Your idea of good pedagogy is refusing to give any feedback and, in your words, terrifying them into performing well? Sounds like an email to the dean.

If a professor did this at my university the department head would be buried under emails from students complaining. There are two reasons for this 1. You are not motivating students to perform well, you are (as the comment above said) "terrifying them into performing well" and 2. At our university, if you fail a course twice, you are blocked for that course indefinitely. Which is why if you sign out of the course up until half of the semester passed, it does not count as a failed attempt. Students definitely need to know where they stand, even if it's just an approximation.

I like this idea. University was supposed to be about learning to study on your own, part of which is knowing how well you understand something. We've gone too far in the direction of complicated bargaining with students for meaningless points. They should learn to think independently and to be able to assess their own weaknesses. The professor in the story might have taken a bit too far, but I tend to think that the opposition started the fight, by going too far in the other direction.

Regarding motivation to perform well, the student needs to learn to be self-motivated. Pats on the head and gold stars were fine in primary school. Of course this tough approach is unpopular with students. However, the only scientific study into the correlation between student evaluations of their teachers and student learning that I'm aware of found a slight negative correlation, i.e. less popular teachers tended to be more effective teachers.

I'm also aware of the importance of giving students feedback on their work, and of taking care of their mental health, and of saying encouraging words to them. I'm not a monster. But there is also a point to the tough approach.

In my experience of many (but not all) students I've had, if they had spent half as much time and energy studying the course as they spent trying to predict their final grade from their grades so far, and trying to adjust their effort accordingly, then they would have learned a whole lot more, and they would also have been less stressed. A win-win situation !

@Simon: A student who takes a course the first time can most of the time not reliably judge if they have the knowlege a course absolvent has. That's why there are grades and a grade in between would exactly tell the students if they are doing well enough.

@Simon: Also, in my experience, I have never seen a grading system so complex that one needs so much time and energy for predicting final grades that learning in that time could make a difference. Also, people are likely to spend less time predicting if you clearly tell them how good they are at the moment.

In that case @user111388 I know some students you might be interested to meet...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has a section on this. Supposedly Reed college did it.

@user3932000 I never said no feedback in the entire course. Consulting hours and tutorials with different problems is where the feedback comes from. There is just no number quantifying a result on a particular problem

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


text:
In the context of a review of an academic paper, what does "technical accuracy" mean?
I have been asked to review an academic conference paper for a computer-science conference. One of the elements, the review must contain is a review of “technical accuracy.* What does this mean exactly? Is it the ability of the author to use the English language? Or is it supposed to be a review of their ability in the particular subject matter? Or something else?

Technical accuracy is that the approach taken in the paper and the results presented correct and are precisely and correctly presented.
It is only indirectly related to language, in that if the language is poor then communicating technical content is difficult.
I don't know how you can review the authors' ability from a paper. You can only review what is in the paper.

Well, not just correctly presented: also correct, I would think.  My interpretation of "technical accuracy" is that the technical stuff in the paper is actually correct.

@PeteL.Clark: That too. Now fixed.

Also check (especially for ESL authors) that there are no ambiguities in the text, and that poorly worded sentences mean what they should mean. I'm not sure that's part of the technical accuracy section per se, but language that affects the technical accuracy needs to be fixed.

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


text:
Should all voluntary self-identification forms for faculty positions be filled?
When applying for a faculty position, usually there will be an request to fill a self-identification form about things like race and disabilities. The request will mention that it is a “voluntary” form and will not affect the application. My question is whether applicants should spend some time and fill out all such requests or maybe just the ones for schools with which they have an interview?

Note that this is a duplicate of: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/16243/what-applicant-confidential-data-form-has-to-do-with-tenure-track-positions?rq=1

@RoboKaren related, yes, but I am not sure it is duplicate.

I think they are 2 related but somehow different questions. The first is checking if the form is being send to all applicants and if it has any positive sign, while my question is asking whether it should be returned or not. Actually my question, can be connected with whether not returning it would have a negative effects.

You can fill them in if you want, you don't have to if you don't want to. That's why they are voluntary.
They are supposed to be either anonymous or confidential and not used to affect  your file and/or hiring in any way. The reason they exist is so that if there is an allegation of bias in hiring at the school, they can have statistical data to prove that they were not biased at least in their solicitation for applications (e.g, "we had 300 applications: 48% were women and 12% were people of color"). This is a federal regulation for hiring, so they have to do it.
The school is obliged to send you the postcard. You aren't obliged to send it back. I usually did when I was on the job market, although I didn't if they didn't pre-stamp the postcard meaning I would have to pay for the stamp myself, which I wasn't about to do so for their benefit. Petty, yes, but the survey is for them, not for me.

Addendum: There seems to be three types of forms and I am unclear how and why some HR department select between them:

Completely anonymous: No indication on them whatsoever as to which position is being applied to or who you (as the applicant) are.
Position identified: The position (job opening) identifier is given, but not the job applicant identifier.
Position and applicant identified: There appear to be coding for both the position and the specific applicant.

In my own job market experience (which is now 7-8 years old), I only remember getting types #1 and #2. I would have personally never responded to type #3 because of my own politics, but that would be a personal decision and you can decide yourself what to do.

I received one of those forms from the department and not the HR, which it seems #3.

When the form is part of an electronic application it is hard to tell if it is 1, 2, or, 3.

That's weird and troublesome (in response to both Thomas Lee and StrongBad's comments). In my day, we only had paper applications -- and we had to walk uphill 5 miles each way in the snow, barefoot.

Regardless, if it says 'voluntary' then you should treat it as voluntary.

@RoboKaren yes, all 1, 2, and 3 forms would mention 'voluntary'. Actually, one of those forms I received asks about the applicant name also.

I don't fill in obnoxious "voluntary" forms and don't think other people should either. I would hope HR departments would get the message about that. Once their response rate drops sufficiently low, they make work on better practices.

The forms generally help HR departments comply with legal requirements and might be used to alert departments about bias in either the advertising or hiring process. There is no harm in filling out the forms since any university you want to work for keeps the responses confidential. The forms are generally pretty short, so filing them out is not a big deal. That said, a strategy where you only fill out forms when the application process is reasonable might be productive. If the HR department cannot be bothered to acknowledge your application or doesn't allow uploading a CV, then maybe you should make their job a little harder too.

I believe it is more than "confidential" - the responses should be "anonymous," only linked to the position # and not the candidate application #.

It seems my own experience in this regard is limited, so disregard my comment and I amended my own answer.


text:
Can invention of UI/UX or a programming syntax become a publication?
In my opinion, UI/UX (user interface / user experience) or programming syntax are just like a piece of art. Some people will like your work, some won’t  – it depends on a number of factors varying among people. I am doing research in designing UI/UX or programming syntax, and I have a few questions:

Can invention of UI/UX or programming syntax become a publication?
Which way of doing research can make those works look more academic?

Why do I ask these questions?
Because I think that when we talk about good or bad in scientific research, it should be universal, independent of human opinion. That’s why in the second question, I ask for research methods to approach scientific work, instead of creating artwork.

Possible duplicates: How does a software application idea become a research project?, What exactly is a research paper?, Is development research?, Should I write a paper on open-source software I've built?

(Yes, I know those are all about software development. But they all address the fundamental question of when a project becomes "research." The specific of research methodology in UI/UX design vs software engineering seem to be out of scope of this site.)

Hi, everyone thank you for your comments. My main point of this question is how to make a designing work can become a publication. The problem is "good" or "bad" in designing work it depends on individual opinion of people, but on scientific work "good" or "bad" it's independent of human opinion. Then I just ask for the way to do research in designing using scientific approach.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because questions about the content of your research (as opposed to the process of doing research) and questions that require knowledge of your specific research discipline are out of scope for this site.  See http://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic for what is on-topic here.

Yes!
Researchers in Human-Computer Interaction study the impacts of such things. While a syntax on its own isn't research worthy, it is publishable if you learn something generalizable. For example, some potential research questions might be: can programmers read/comprehend/edit code using your syntax faster or easier than some other syntax?
There have been such papers published at CHI. More recently I have been seeing a lot of papers on how we can annotate existing code with additional information to support programmers.

I think the OP is asking whether or not the bare documentation of a new approach to UX can be a publication. Not whether people have done comparative research on UX.

@APrioriRainbows The OP is being vague but I definitely interpretted it differently. Especially because of the sentence "to do research in designing UI/UX or programming syntax". Regardless, a new approach to UX is also publishable (it could fit nicely in the "methodology" sessions at CHI)!

Touche. I was thrown off by this one: Can invention of UI/UX or programming syntax become a publication?

@APrioriRainbows It definitely is odd wording from the OP and I like xLeitix's response about it not being a contribution on its own. I've edited my own answer to be a little more explicit, thanks!

In principle, everything that has a research contribution can become a publication. Especially in computer science, a research contribution is very roughly defined as knowledge that is useful independently of the concrete implementation technology.
That means that "look at my nice draft for an UI / syntax" isn't a research contribution, but showing (e.g., through a user study) that a given design is better than the currently prevalent design in one or more dimensions is. Of course this means that you will need to do more than just propose the new design: firstly you need to be quite intimately aware what the current state of the art is (and the reasoning behind the current design), and secondly you will need to conduct a useful study.
As a sidenote, as soon as you are asking yourself ...

Which way of doing research can make those works look more academics?

.. you are almost certainly doing it wrong. You should not conduct some work and afterwards think about how to make it "seem more academic". You should think from the beginning what the research question of your work is, and if you can't find any, question whether you should be conducting this work in the first place. Any attempt to make work "seem academic" after the fact is typically hard to publish, as reviewers are, at least usually, not stupid and able to look beyond simple deceptions.