text:
Effectiveness of grouping students to balance skills
In the past, when forming student groups in class I've always allowed the students to form their own groups, which has certainly made them happy as they tend to form around social circles. As a side note, students at my school go together as classes so they have years where they know all the other people in their class quite well.
However, I'm considering doing things differently this time. I'm thinking to actively form the groups in such a way that strong students are in groups with weak students and average students - that is, groups are balanced and there are no 'strong' or 'weak' groups. I believe I can simply randomly pick students for each group and as long as strong, normal, and weak exist in roughly equal numbers, I will naturally achieve my goals, at least for the most part.
What I'm really wondering is if anyone knows the effects of student groups being formed by teachers as opposed to being formed by students themselves when those students have a strong social connection because of traveling though university as a group.
Edit: The class size is 70 and the group size is five.
Edit(2): While the studying will be done in teams, individual members are assessed individually - social loafing will hurt the loafer the most.

What are the sizes of the groups we considering here?

I believe I can simply randomly pick students for each group and as long as strong, normal, and weak exist in roughly equal numbers, I will naturally achieve my goals, at least for the most part. — So, it's not a probability class, then.

@JeffE: It should work in the limit of an infinite class size!

@aiesmail: No, even in the limit, 1/9 of the groups would be all-weak and 1/9 would be all-strong.

@JeffE It's neither a math class nor is it critical to have a perfect distribution of skills. I just want to balance the strong with the weak. So far, the groups are balanced for the most part without a clear identification in class of who is strong and who is weak (and the associated stigma which goes along with that).

@Nicholas I've updated the class size / group size.

How are you going to determine who strong and weak students are? By GPA?

@Irwin I have experience with this group of students - I know the strong and weak ones.

There's an additional thing to think about here: the quality of the work handed in by a group vs. the benefit for each individual student. In theory, if you have one strong student in each group, and all the other students in the group slack off and let the strong one do most of the work (which has been my very frustrating experience as a strong student), then the quality of the average assignment will go up, but not the amount learned by each student.

@Ana That's a good point and caused me to edit my question - assessment is not done at the group level, it is done at the individual level.

In my experience, the motivation of the students is vital. Is it a mandatory course? If many don't care for the course, the good and motivated people in the groups will do the work while the rest sits back.

My armchair researching dug up a lot of articles about this. I'm not an education scholar but here's a brief slice of some results from some research in the business education literature.
From Randall S. Hansen (2006): Benefits and Problems With Student Teams: Suggestions for Improving Team Projects, Journal of Education for Business, 82:1, 11-19
In their related work section, their works surveyed suggest that professor-selected groups appear to have a more positive experience.

However, Muller (1989) stated that student preferences are not
  necessarily the most important criterion for successful group work,
  whereas Koppenhaver and Shrader (2003) suggested that
  instructor-assigned teams lead to more stability in membership, and
  that stability enhances each team’s ability to perform effectively.
  Contrary to earlier researchers, Hernandez (2002) stated that student
  teams should be formed by the instructor, and that students are more
  likely to have a positive learning experience when groups are selected
  by the professor.

In an empirical study by Praveen Aggarwal and Connie L. O'Brien (2008): Social Loafing on Group Projects: Structural Antecedents and Effect on Student Satisfaction, Journal of Marketing Education. 30:255, they hypothesize that self-selection of groups might reduce social loafing, based on some related work below:

[...] This prediction has some precedence in the pedagogical
  literature. Groups formed by the students instead of random assignment
  by the instructor are assumed to be more cohe- sive, more productive,
  and experience a lower incidence of social loafing (Strong & Anderson,
  1990). Mahenthiran and Rouse (2000) found that paired groups of
  friends had less incidence of social loafing than randomly assigned
  groups.

However, after their empirical study of 420 students in marketing and marketing-related fields, they conclude that there's no effect of student self-selected teams on social loafing.

In this study we proposed four such factors: reducing the scope of the
  project, reducing group size, allowing students to self-select group
  members, and including multiple peer evaluations. Three of the four
  factors were found to have an impact on social loafing.

The only one that didn't have an impact was self-selection.
So one paper says that self-selection is worse, another says it generally doesn't matter. This might suggest that there are other factors that you may want to consider first with respect to making teams perform.
However, as mentioned, I'm not a business education researcher, and these projects might not generalize to other domains either. For example, the fact that these two papers don't cite a similar body of work might suggest that there's a lot more stuff out there. If someone out there is able to expand on this that would be excellent.

Although I did not read those papers, I believe there are some values in them. My concern is that, were the studies conducted based on the eduction system similar to the one the OP is in? As far as I know, all the students in the OP's class know each other very closely in a number of years.

Nice list of references. much better than my speculations :)

@scaaahu: I cannot generalize these papers to the OP's situation, since I don't know enough about either the body of literature nor the OP's class and students. However, given the preliminary evidence it appears that combating the "good and bad" group perception might be better done through breaking the project up into smaller units, reducing group sizes (five is plenty small already), and by introducing multiple peer evaluations before worrying about group formation method. In absence of other evidence, those suggestions all sound reasonable.

I have a practical suggestion based on a course I used to attend.
It was a natural continuation of another course (which was a requirement), and the majority of the student body from the first course was proceeding to take the second course.
The only team leaders were picked by the professor, in a sense that the best students from the previous class were team leaders, and were free to form their group as they wanted.
This ensured several things:

no "elite" team with only the top students

the groups were formed mostly to students liking

some degree of balance was naturally present
(e.g. we grouped on purpose with 6:4 in favor of "stronger" students, because we were allowed to distribute the assignment grade on our own, and that way non-perfect score still meant everybody got approximately the grade they wanted which coincided mostly with their effort: non-perfect project was not a tragedy)

on the previous class, a small number of students were actually "pushed" to go the extra mile, do exceptionally, and provide a team leader for their social group

From the student perspective, at least, it worked pretty well. If you say the student body is not changing that much from class to class, maybe something similar could work.
The downside might be that an "elite" group is clearly identified, but if it is based on objective criteria, and not seemingly the random whiff of a professor, it does not seem so bad.

I am not sure this is a good idea in your case,
They go together as classes so they have years where they know all the other people in their class quite well.
So, there is a long story in their social circles. You really don't want to be part of that story.
For example, if student A and student B happen to be dating the same person, where do you put A and B?
In addition to balance skills, I can understand one of your purposes is to let them work together as professionals regardless their personal relationships. In the real world, it would work if there is a good group leader.
In your case, how do you find 14 good leaders from 70 students? (group size is 5)
Note that you mention strong, average and weak students. I would like to emphasize that it is not too hard to find 14 strong students from 70 students. However, it is not an easy task to find 14 good leaders from a 70 student class.

I'm hoping that the strong students will 'step up' and become good leaders. It might be wishful thinking.

@earthling You may have 14 strong students in a 70-student class. But, strong students may not be good leaders. I grew up from that kind of college system (in Taiwan). In my experience, there is a handful of good leaders in a 50-student class in 4 years. (we elect representatives for our class). You need luck to find 14 good leaders from 70 student class - not 14 strong students .

If you choose the groups, then in a sense you have taken responsibility for their success. A group that perceives themselves as "weak" will subconsciously or consciously blame you for their predicament, absolving them of the need to work hard.
You also open yourself up to charges of favoritism or worse. Again, your perception of strength and weakness might be quite different to the students' own perception, and this has little to do with what the "right" answer is.
It's not clear that the pedagogical benefits of explicit grouping (even assuming you're able to separate weak from strong, which I am dubious of) balance all the downsides of grouping in this manner. While your goal is honorable (balancing groups so that they're of roughly equal strength), it's a doomed goal.
You can never force equality in the classroom. What you can aim for is fairness. A group formed by students is fair in the sense that the students can't complain that you forced them into it.

Balancing skills is very different from balancing past performance. Strong students will, by definition, be strong at most things. Weak students on the other hand will have different strengths. For example, a group of weak students who are all bad at X, will form an extremely weak group. A group of weak students where student A is bad at X but excellent at Y, student B is bad at Y but excellent at Z, and student C is bad at Z but excellent at X could actually form an extremely strong group. Better than grouping on past performance might be for students to rank their strengths at X, Y, and Z and create groups based on this. This will alert students to the strengths required to do well and also allow them to see the strengths/weakness of their groups.
An alternative, which was used during my undergraduate education, is to use a personality test to create groups. This way the students are aware of the benefits/difficulties of personal interactions, which is of high importance to success.


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Choosing the title of a paper: are provocative titles better?
I am currently working on a paper that challenges some long-standing practices within my field, but am questioning how to title the paper. Basically, the old view in the research field is "we do Y instead of better method X, because X takes too long." We show that X is usually just as fast as Y, and often is actually faster.
Given the fact that we're taking what could be a "controversial" stance, does it make sense to put the controversial idea directly in the title, or should it be saved for the abstract.
Basically, the question is if a "traditional" title, such as:

Using New Method X to Improve Solving Problem Y

is preferable to directly mentioning the issue in the title:

Using New Method X Makes Assumption Z Obsolete.

Or is finding a title that suggests superiority without questioning relevance a satisfactory compromise?

Somewhat related, longer titles get more citations https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2859422/ and humorous titles get fewer http://jis.sagepub.com/content/34/5/680.abstract Also question marks get more downloads but less citations, and information on colons-in-titles here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/14/does-a-question-get-science-paper-cited

And one more link summarizing some of the above with graphs: http://www.researchtrends.com/issue24-september-2011/heading-for-success-or-how-not-to-title-your-paper/

Also, voting to close because this is subjective. If you define 'better' (more citations?), we could do a research study to find the answer...

@mankoff: The requirement of "subjectivity" on this board is definitely laxer than on most other Stack Exchange boards, just because of the nature of academia itself.

Some journals do not prefer non-traditional titles. For instance, have a look at
https://sites.google.com/site/acmtosn/information-for-authors
They specifically ask authors to "Avoid cute or clever titles".  -- does that answer your question ? I see most academics do not want to change the traditional way of writing paper. I agree with them.

what about "the topic name: Revisited" ?

@seteropere or "re-revisited" or "re-re-revisited" (although I don't think I have ever seen it get that far).

@mankoff Your list of citations should be part of an answer, in my opinion.

+1 for putting a colon in the question title. You're getting the hang of gaming the system!

Possibly related, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." (although papers are probably less likely to ask yes/no questions than newspapers).

If I correctly understand your description of what the paper shows, then a suitable title might be "X can be faster than Y."

It might be viewed as incivil to refer to someone else's work as "obsolete", whether or not one could defend such a claim. An editor or referee might object to the title, too, and, perhaps even be subliminally biased against your result because of a too-aggressive title.
That is, "provocative" in the sense of more-vividly-descriptive, without too-direct negativism about prior work, might be a very good thing. But I think if "provocative" too much means "antagonistic", the net would be counterproductive and regrettable.
Asserting that you've made progress is already a bit aggressive, suggesting, as is inevitable, that previous work is being superceded (even if still relevant as some sort of historical/dialectic record). My own taste is that winners can afford to be generous.
Edit: in light of edits to the question... I'd still encourage a sort of "innocent" -seeming, or almost-apologetic seeming, self-description. My point would be that people who understand the situation will see the implications of even a very-modest statement. Descriptiveness is good, yes, but perhaps not "judgemental" phrases.

I've edited the question to provide some more details about what's going on. We're basically saying "what's been done before is (mostly) OK, but you don't really have a good reason now not to do it the better way."

+1 for 'if "provocative" too much means "antagonistic", the net would be counterproductive'

A significant fraction of papers in theoretical computer science describe results of the form "we describe an algorithm for problem Y that is faster than every other algorithm known."  But it is very rare, and would be considered quite rude, for the title of such a paper to specifically call out a previous method as "obsolete", especially if that previous methods was strongly associated to a single person or group.  In fact, I know of ony one example: Volker Strassen's seminal paper "Gaussian elimination is not optimal", which was published centuries after Gauss was safely dead.
Provocative/evocative titles are fine.  Challenging conventional wisdom is great.  Insulting your colleagues, not so much.

Or is finding a title that suggests superiority without questioning relevance a satisfactory compromise?

Supplementing Paul's fine answer, I agree that if by "provocative" you are directly attacking someone else, then you should not do it. Be provocative in stating the benefits of your method. Ignore the inferior method in your title.
You should also include a descriptive subtitle so that we know what your paper is about.
For example, this paper has the title "Sequence Matters: Modulating Electronic and Optical Properties of Conjugated Oligomers via Tailored Sequence". The first two words are provocative, but not antagonistic. They suggest that those who might believe that sequence does not matter are incorrect, but it does not say so explicitly, nor does it specifically accuse any previous research/method of being deficient. It is followed by a descriptive title that then tells you what the paper is about.
So, in your case, you might go for something more like

"Simplifying the Solution to Problem Y: A New Metric-Based Analytical Methodology for Enumerating the Variance in Substandard Models."

The first part of the title gets at what you want (that previous solutions to Problem Y are not as good as yours) without specifically targeting any previous method. Save that for the body of your paper.

I agree with the other answers that "obsolete" is too confrontational.   You could still directly address the issue in the title, though.   How about something like:

Using New Method X challenges Assumption Z

or

Using New version of Method X challenges assumptions about problem Y

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Is index required for a PhD thesis?
Nowadays, since (almost) all of the submitted works are usually available in an electronic format (e.g. PDF or Word) besides the printed version, is it recommended to add an index to a PhD thesis in order to facilitate search within the printed version? Was it required in the past?

No.............................

You may if you want to, but it is not generally required. Of course, check your local regulations. It is recommended to plan on having an index or not when you start, rather than adding it later.
Indexes were not required in the past, though check historical local regulations.

+1 for "...plan on having an index or not when you start...". I put an index in my PhD thesis, and discovered that it takes a fair amount of human thought and interaction to create a good index. Identifying key words and concepts as you write can help you create a useful index, along with considering where your index should - not just could - point the reader based on a search keyword.

That is why I always use \define{keyword} when i introduce a new term in a LaTeX document. \define is usually defined as just making the text italicised, but can easily be converted to adding things in the index, if i ever want one.

I don't recall when I've ever used an index to search an electronic document, and I don't recall the last time I asked for a paper version of a Ph.D thesis to browse it for a certain term. In my opinion, if you have limited energy and want to include a list of something in your document, go for a glossary rather than an index.

+1 for local regulations. At my university the answer was "Yes, and if you try to submit one without an index in a particular format, you're doing to have a very bad day."

Whether its required is probably field/institution dependent. However, just for the sake of those who (we hope!) will be reading your thesis, include an index. Even in electronic versions, an index is a useful tool for the reader; it allows them to see what the author(s) thought important enough to index, if nothing else! And if your PhD thesis turns out to be good enough to be printed and bought by university libraries, you will definitely increase the ease of use for those who access the print version (and yes, some people, myself included, do still wander the physical stacks when researching!See this book for reasons why this is a good idea).

Ideally, I recommend having an index with hyperlinks (both from keywords on the text to the index, and the other way round). The difference with in-text search is that you select the most relevant occurrences of the selected words; this is especially useful with terms that you use at all pages, e.g. to point out where they are defined.
If you think it ahead, it is not that much work to do (at least with LaTeX and the right packages). Otherwise... I remember a few hours spend with two other people on this question for a PhD thesis in biology, where the index contained both abbreviations and complete names of a lot of molecules.

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text:
Article that shows the complete publication history of acceptances and rejections of a successful academic
I remember reading a journal article  where a researcher in psychology analysed their entire manuscript submission and publication history. The way I remember it, the researcher had around 40 publications, many in top-tier journals. A large number of the publications were rejected 2,3,4 or more times before they found a home. As an early career researcher, I found it to be a really interesting read for highlighting just how much rejection is a normal part of the publication process.

Does anyone know the reference to this article?
Equally, are there other equivalent documents written by other academics?

Update: I found the article. See answer below.

No, I hadn't even heard of such an article until now.  And now I very much want to read it.

Oh I really wish we had more data on this. I almost feel like I should compile this for my own work (or at least for the ones I can remember).

@Suresh you should, I highly recommend it. Then you should make it public and link to it from your academia.SE user page, so the rest of us can read it and be inspired :)

It would be horribly depressing :). but might be a good exercise.

I finally found the article.
The ArXiV link and PDF version: Scientific Utopia: I. Opening scientific communication.
It reports the publication history of "all 62 unsolicited articles co-authored by Brian Nosek" at the time. Brian Nosek is a well-published researcher in social psychology and more recently has been a leading figure in the reproducibility and open science movement.
The mean time to publication for published articles was 1.7 years and longer for  not yet published manuscripts. That said, I could not see the distinction between published online and published with page numbers in an issue. Presumably, for some purposes published online is sufficient (e.g., for appearing in database searches, and for showing research productivity).
The table is shown below, or otherwise, go to this pdf where the tables are listed at the end of the document.
A few comments on the table:

This is the track record of a very successful scientist.
It's interesting to consider the relationship between this long publication lag and annual performance reviews. The submission is often the hard work (although revisions can be time consuming also), yet the recognition may come quite some time later.

I don't know if this is the article you're referring to, because the researcher is in biology, not psychology; and the journal article doesn't include the list of manuscripts, only the recommendation to keep one:

Stefan, Melanie. "A CV of Failures." Nature 468.7322 (2010): 467. Doi:10.1038/nj7322-467a. Web. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7322/full/nj7322-467a.html.

I can't seem to find the link to the author's actual CV of Failures (though I feel like I've seen it before), I can only find the article explaining it. However, if you search "CV of Failures" you will find some publicly available examples from other researchers.
P.S. I keep an ongoing CV of failures as described in the Nature article and  I highly recommend the exercise.

With a quick Google search, I found these two CVs, http://everydayscientist.com/CV/sjl_CV-failures.pdf and http://everydayscientist.com/CV/sjl_CV.pdf. The CV of failures refers to Stefan's article.

Thanks, its not the one I've previously read, but its a good read.

@LPlatts I'd post your comment as an answer.

Leslie Lamport details his history of publishing, including the Paxos paper, on his website. It took eight or so years to publish the Paxos paper.
Lamport received the Turing Award in 2013; and Paxos and its derivatives are now at the core of almost all large-scale web-sites (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, ... ).
From the comments: Lamport's paper on Buridan's Principle took 28 years to get published!  He explains the long road to eventual publication, ibid.

When I first read OP's question, I too immediately thought of Lamport.  Lamport's paper on Buridan's Principle took 28 years to get published!

@ESultanik That's a great example. I think you should promote it to an answer, or perhaps edit this one.

+1 On Lamport's website. I was about to answer this. It is such a fun read that I've read it a few times over the years.

After popular request, I'm posting this as an answer. Hopefully it's interesting to see a different example (or inspiration) of a successful researcher sharing how much rejection is part of academic life.
The economist Nattavudh Powdthavee keeps an online paper diary that displays the warts and all rejection trail for many of his (very interesting) papers. He also wrote some musings about his most rejected paper, now in the OTEFA Newsletter
from p.7 - 14 times - but I'm sure many can beat this.

I think you are talking about this article;

Overcoming Fear of Rejection, by Marty Nemko

Even if it is not what you are looking for, the following article might definitely brighten up your day if you are just interested in knowing that rejection is not the end!

Nature rejects Krebs's paper, 1937, By Brendan Borrell

That's an article from a career coach about rejection. It's not even about rejection in academia, specifically.


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Benefit of publishing large articles/papers instead of books
After reading this question, and specifically this answer, I find myself wondering why someone would publish an extremely long paper, for example 200 pages, instead of publishing as a book.
I was always under the impression that publishing a book was more prestigious than publishing articles so why would someone write something with the quantity to be a book and prefer to publish it as a journal article? Are there hidden benefits of publishing as an article over publishing as a book?

As always, it depends. First of all,

publishing a book was more prestigious than publishing articles

depends on the area. In parts of the humanities, writing a book is an almost-necessary condition for tenure, but in my area of CS, a book is viewed as best as a waste of time pre-tenure.
In terms of absolute prestige, books and articles serve different purposes. Even a 200 page article might be a technical exposition of a single result. Witness for example the ongoing series of articles on graph minors in mathematics. A book often tries to distill and put in perspective a body of work, and (sometimes) might have educational components like exercises/problems.
A well-written book gives you some cachet as an expert in an area, but a seminal journal article can do the same. It really depends on what purpose you expect the document to serve.
A final point. A book (even a technical one) may not be peer-reviewed in the same way as an article. Indeed, it's not common in my area to have brand new research appear first in a book (I'm excluding simple observations and recasting of results).

This depends on a number of factors (the field, the scope of the work, and the reputation of the publisher), but a book often summarizes the current state of a field, while an article adds something new to the state of the field.
So, one of these (the book) estabishes you as a subject matter expert, while the other (the article) establishes you as a subject matter pioneer. In institutions where research is highly valued, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find more prestige associated with article publication.
That said, there are exceptions, of course: A textbook that becomes recognized as a standard in the discipline might garner more prestige than an article in some lightweight publication. Unless the book happens to be based mostly on your own research, though, it's easy to see why a textbook might not gain you too much reputation in an environment striving to be known for their cutting-edge research. One is more forward-looking while the other is more backward-reaching.


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Do authors always have final approval over what gets published?
After reading this answer, and the subsequent comments, I found myself wondering if it is a rule for publishers to get author approval after edits before publishing a paper? I would assume so because of copyright issues but I would like to know if there are legal or ethical guidelines in the publishing industry about this.
In my experience, editors will make edits but they have always asked me for my approval before actually publishing the edited piece.

I know of no journal that doesn't give authors a chance to review the proof prior to publication. Not doing that would seem like a very bad idea anyway considering the subtlety of errors that may get introduced in the editing process. I don't know whether there is any legal basis for this but it seems like good practice.

In the answer you are referring to there is nothing to say that approval is not required. The issue is rather that an editor can request certain things can be removed from the paper so the author cannot demand everything written is finally printed. Editors have the right and obligation to weed out materials that are, for example, offensive just as we can flag posts that contain such phrasings on Stackexchange. Jokes, which was the point of the post you referred to, are not edited out by any means as a rule but can be misunderstood or considered offensive and might be more likely to be edited out than other material during the review and editorial process. In such a case, the author will certainly be part of the process and asked to revise or accept changes. the point here is that the editor has the final say through approval of the paper as well as a responsibility to make sure the publication is free from material that violates, for example, ethical of the publisher. As an example, in Sweden, where I reside, I as an editor am responsible by law for what is printed in "my" journal. This responsibility may lie with the publisher in other countries.
So, authors will definitely be part of the revision process and sign off on final proofs, it is just that some changes may not be subject to additional discussion and will have to be accepted. Does this happen often? Not at all. In my case, I have had to deal with this in heated "Letters to the Editor" where authors have been in a written, published, exchange over issues in a published paper.
Edit (to expand based on earthling's comment): Basically all changes except typos and changes to adhere to journal or publisher style are subject to an "OK" from the author (although it would not hurt to also get an OK on these). The publishing of a paper is a joint venture between an author and the journal, so with a functioning working relationship both parties should agree on changes. But, again, some changes are non-negotiable, which does not mean they can be imposed without the knowledge of the author who always has the option to go elsewhere to publish.
So changes can come in three forms, (1) those that can be changed without consent (e.g. typos), (2) those that must be made without discussion (subject to ethical considerations) and (3) those that can go either way after, say, clarification (most of the normal changes). In  cases 2 and 3 the author need to approve the changes it is just that for case 2 the option might be accept or withdraw the paper.

@earthling, see edit in reply above.

When I took over being the Graphics Editor / Typesetter of one journal, I realized that there used to be no proofreading stage for the articles! I of course insisted that the articels are proofread.
However, we give the authors only a limited amount of time to claim any corrections, but not less than 2 weeks. This is because the journal is quite small and we need to "schedule" the articles into the issues to make the issues reasonably equal in size.
Even after the approval, small changes appear; the Chief Editor goes quickly through the text just before publishing to catch last small typos and mistakes: missing full stops after figures' captions, corrupted text-flow on the page (widows/orphans standing out badly etc.), wrong capilatization, and stuff like this. However, we never modify the text itself in this phase, not even by adding or removing an article (since this can change the meaning of the text).
In general, by law, nobody is allowed to publish anything signed by your name without your approval. The reality is that this rule is violated quite often and it's difficult to do something about it. As well, remember that by submitting an article, you agree with the policy of the journal that can state for instance: "By submitting an article, you give your permission for it to be published, and you confirm that all authors have agreed to this. The Editor's Office is allowed to make modification to the text without the authors' agreement."

I've also met much tighter deadlines (like 48 or 72 h) for the print-proofs.

@cbeleites That's quite possible. These things vary. One has to be prepared for different things when publishing. Most journals have very complicated (and quite unique) workflow that usually does not really threat the authors as "publishing partners".

In my experience, even corrected typos, grammar mistakes and changes necessary for correct typesetting are usually approved (or rejected) by the authors. Thats what the print proof is for. In my opinion that is absolutely necessary, because even changing a few letters could change the meaning of a sentence, and as an author I have the full responsibility for the whole paper.
I've once made the weird experience that I found a paper listed in pubmed before we had received acceptance notification or print proofs. While nothing bad had happened to the paper's text, we decided never to go with that publisher again.

It's quite common with open-access journals that articles are electronically pre-published before the proofreadings. It's not a big deal IMHO, and one should be happy that they get shipped quickly. After final publication, the online version is of course updated.

Ah ok, that's a bit strange. However, it still would be quite common for it to be published when accepted in final form, however, not before the authors are notified. But I get your point now.


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How much time should I spend on reviewing a paper?
I never tried to avoid becoming a sub-reviewer, and still, this question made me wonder. How much time should I, as a PhD student, spend on a review of a paper that my advisor gave me to do? Does the answer depend on whether I'm getting credit for the review or not, that is whether I'm a sub-reviewer or not?

You should do slightly more reviewing work for the community than the community does for you.  So, as a rough estimate, assuming every paper you write and submit needs three reviews and your average paper has three authors, you should review slightly more papers than you submit.
There is no way to predict in the abstract how long a paper takes to review; that varies from field to field, subfield to subfield, and even paper to paper.  Answering a similar question in Theoretical Computer Science Stack Exchange, I wrote:

Expect to spend about an hour per page, mostly on internalizing the paper's results and techniques. Be pleasantly surprised when it doesn't actually take that long. (If it takes significantly less time than that, either the paper is either exceedingly elegant and well-written, you know the area extremely well, or the paper is technically shallow. Don't confuse these three possibilities.)

No, the answer does not depend on whether you get credit for the review.  If you're not going to write a thorough, professional review, just say no.

+1 for not accepting the review if you do not intend to invest the time needed.

Note that you must calculate based on papers submitted and reviewed not papers published.

I fully agree with this answer. @JeffE

A very nice answer, except that if your advisor gives you a subreview, most likely you can't "just say no". Your advisor expects a review.

As a person not familiar with TCS formatting, when you say an hour per page do you mean something like a narrow margin, single spaced, small font journal typeset page (maybe 750 words per page) or a wide margin, double spaced, big font student paper type format page (maybe 250 words per page) or something else?

@StrongBad Closer to the former. A quick glance at my own papers suggests that preprints, including conference and journal submissions, typically have about 600-750 words per page; this is probably the most common format that people actually read. Single-column mathy-journal papers have about 500 words per page; two-column proceedings papers can have over 1000 words per page.  Nobody double-spaces anything.

Read the entire paper in one go.  For a 12 page* paper, that should take you an hour at most.  This is the first pass.  From this you can now decide how to proceed, now that you have (quickly) covered all the sections.  (edit: The goal on this first pass is not to understand all the details, but rather get an overall feeling of the paper, quality and organization of ideas)
If a paper is terribly written and difficult to understand you should reject it outright for being so.  It should not take a reader 12 hours to read a 12 page paper - and indeed, many papers are badly written and do take this much time - and you are still left wondering because it was not clear.
If the basic claims seem sound and sufficiently interesting/important and the idea is clear enough to understand, then you need to dig in.  Depending on the type of paper this means looking at definitions, proofs, or experimental design, hypothesis testing and the analysis of the results.  Likewise for any related work you know of that should be cited (and not just your own - that is too cliche! - if you do recommend your work as a citation at least include some others!).
All along, help people out with typos and readability.  As a reviewer, you are the last chance to make this a good read before it is published.
And even if you reject it, don't just shoot people down.  Give them ideas about how to make the paper stronger, suggestions for different directions, etc.  Remember that it is most likely some other student who will receive your review back - so try and help them make the next paper better.
(* 12 single column pages.  A 6 page paper with two columns can often contain the same amount of text as a 12 page single column paper)

Your answer is somewhat field-oriented. Very few 12-pages papers in my field (fundamental mathematics) can be read in one hour (except if you mostly read the introduction), at least not by me.

I am also a mathematician, and I agree with Benoit.  One can easily (and profitably) spend more than one hour per page on a math paper.  On the other hand, there are other 12 page papers that I have spent only a few hours reviewing in total...and have recommended for acceptance.  This makes me think that it is not helpful to suggest figures on hours per page.

In my field, computer science, and especially papers with theoretical proofs and algorithms, it is the same.  I still think that a full first pass of the paper in an hour is a good approach for the following reason:  if the paper cannot compel you to dig deeper with a single pass at 1 hour, how do you expect any other reader to actually read this paper.  The first pass should entice you into going deeper - if it does not because it is badly written or makes a trivial claim, then it not worth going further.

@Tom: sure, taking about an hour to flip through a 12 page paper sounds quite reasonable.  I was objecting to your sentence "It should not take a reader 12 hours to read a 12 page paper".  Why not??  Or are you still talking about skimming when you say this?

I agree with your previous comment - there is no magic number on the number of hours you can spend reading a paper, especially one that is several pages of proof.  That said, I still feel that it is an author's obligation to make the salient points clear enough for a reader to understand the big idea quickly!  As to the upper bound on time taken to digest the details of a paper, that could take a lifetime.  In the case of a review, I would only progress to this level(not a lifetime) of detail if the big idea was clear and significant.

There is no clearcut answer to how long a review takes. I would say that the amount of time spent on it is the time you need to understand the paper and provide good advice on wether or not it is a paper that can be accepted, with some changes or as is. In general, this should take you around a full working day. How long this exactly becomes depends on:

The level and clarity of the paper (very bad paper takes less time, mediocre paper takes more time, very good paper takes less time).
Your familiarity with the subject (less familiar more time).
The requirements of the journal/conference you are reviewing for, is it a full review, or just a go/no go.

It depends on how many reviews you've done and what your experience is.  If you're just starting out and have never reviewed a paper before, you should expect it to take a minimum of several hours to do a decent to good review.
Your mileage may vary depending on what discipline you're in, but a good review generally will consist of:

a summary of what the contribution of the paper was
a brief list of 1-3 strengths and 1-3 weaknesses that the paper had
several paragraphs explaining those strengths and weaknesses in greater detail along with constructive suggestions of what would be needed to improve the weaknesses
a brief listing of any related work that you feel is missing from the paper
a recommendation to the reviewing committee of whether or not you believe the paper should be accepted
usually there is a part for a numerical evaluation of your expertise and whether or not it should be accepted

The more reviews that you do, the less time that you should need to spend on doing the review.  It seems like many professors can knock out a review in an hour or less, but most of the graduate students I've seen will tend to spend at least 1-2 hours per review if they're doing a good job.

Same comment than to Tom Carchrae answer: your time indications must be somehow field oriented, because I cannot see how one would do even a barely decent review in one or two hours in my field (where typical reviews come back six months after submission, due to the time it needs from the referee).

Why would you limit the review to 1-3 weakness? Surely you want to point out all the weaknesses.

Again, your mileage may vary depending on what discipline you're in, but my understanding has always been that you want to try to group weaknesses into a few main points in a list, then to expand on all of the things that are wrong in the paragraphs under the headings of those topics so that it's easier for the authors to understand your criticisms and to address them.

I think it is on the border of irresponsible to suggest that a review of a paper can or should be done in an hour or less.

Take enough time to find most (~80%) of the important strengths and weaknesses of the paper and to describe and explain the weaknesses thoroughly and clearly but if you encounter one particular non-core aspect or section of the paper that would take excessively long to do this, just skip it and be frank: "I have not reviewed ((aspect X)) thoroughly, because my expertise in this area is too shallow."
If the editor is worth her salt, this will actually increase her confidence in the rest of your review.
All of your reviews should be careful but none of them need to be perfect.

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


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What should have capital cases in the title of works in the bibliography?
According to this answer it is a feature that BibTeX converts all characters to lower case for titles in the bibliography. This is confusing for me. What characters in the titles I cite should be upper case?
Here is a screenshot were I marked all characters that I would have written uppercase:

(The first 'r' in recognition was a mistake)
So I think I should write everything in capital that I would write in capital in a normal English sentence. Is that correct?

It depends on the citation style. Basically there are two possibilities: title case, or normal English sentence style.
If you are writing for a journal, it surely has a citation style that you should adhere to. In practice, however, the style of citations won't really matter until the time your paper is accepted, so you do not need to worry about it when writing.
If you are writing for yourself, you are free to decide as you prefer, as long as you are consistent. If you are writing a thesis, be sure to inquire  because some OCD university committee might have imposed requirements.
Bibtex is essentially a program to abstract out citation styles and apply them programmatically, separating content (in the .bib file) from formatting. Using a properly formatted .bib file, you just need the command \bibliographystyle{} to change from a style to the other.
So, how should the title field be formatted in a properly-written .bib file? Like this:
title = {Handwriting Recognition with Hidden {M}arkov models and Grammatical Constraints}
Basically you use title case and embed into a pair of braces the characters that should stay in capital even if the text is converted to sentence case. Bibtex can convert automatically title case to sentence case (but not vice versa). Commands for diacritics and special characters (such as \"a or \c{c}) and dollar-delimited formulas should also go inside an extra pair of braces.
Incidentally, another tricky aspect of Bibtex syntax is author name formatting. Authors should be in the format
author = {von Lastname1, Firstname1 Middle and Lastname2 jr., Firstname2}
or, if full given names are not available,
author = {von Lastname1, F. M. and Lastname2 jr., F.}
Note that 90% of the bibtex files that you will find on the internet, even the ones from the publishers' websites, are badly formatted. Bibtex's syntax is quirky and complicated to get right.

Some journals use capital letters for All The Words In The Title. Some others (thinking about legacy systems) may put it ALL IN UPPERCASE or all in lowercase.
Really, the case of the letters is completely irrelevant for the reference itself, so it is understandable that BibTeX wants to give it all a coherent format. All in all:

A. Einstein, The Foundations of General Relativity.
A. EINSTEIN, THE FOUNDATIONS OF GENERAL RELATIVITY.
A. Einstein, The foundations of General Relativity.

Are equally easy to find and unequivocally point to the same reference.
Note that in the comments to the linked question it is stated that the style may override this behaviour, using a different convention, or leaving it as written on the bib.
As always, general rules for English grammar apply:

Proper names should be capitalised, so Markov is capital.
Acronyms, like NPEN++, ought to be in all upercase.
Academic disciplines (like Physics or Biology) should be. It is debatable if "pattern recognition" should be or not.


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Should I add references to conference presentations?
I am preparing a CS conference presentation and wondering how can I handle the references. I am thinking about three different possibilities:

Ignore them!
Just list them at the end of the presentation
List them and cite them within the presentation.

I chose the first option since anyone interested can go and check the whole set of references in the actual paper.
Does this mean not crediting the others for their work? How this is usually handled in CS conferences?

If the slides you're using are going to have "independent life,"—in other words, if you're going to make them available separately from the conference paper (on your website, for instance), then the citations should be included as part of the presentation. I would follow posdef's example and place the citations on the same slide as where it's needed; this will save the reader from having to flip back and forth between different parts of the presentation or between the presentation and the paper.
Not including the citations is a bad idea, because it means you are potentially failing to give people the credit they deserve for ideas that were originally theirs. Even though it's "just" a conference presentation doesn't mean that the rules of crediting people for their work should be ignored. (Citing the work of others is also the right thing to do from the perspective of "playing nice with others." Taking credit for other people's work can make them leerier of working with you.)

I don't know if there is a specific way within the CS community but the way most established seniors seem to do in my field is to note down the reference at the bottom of the slide where they refer to someone's results/figures.
I think this is a better approach than to list them all in the end, because the audience gets the reference together with the content, that way you don't have to puzzle the references and the content 6 months after you attended the presentation.
If the people you are referring to are people you have had collaborations or communication with, it would not hurt to have them listed in a "thanks to" or more formally "acknowledgements" slide.
Hope it helps

Applied mathematician here; my solution is putting them on the same slide as the material. I use formats such as [Someone '99], [Lin WW, '00] (initials are almost mandatory for some common surnames), [Doe et al, book '04], [P and SomeoneElse, preprint '12] (my name is always abbreviated to an initial, which is a common convention). I find it a good compromise between clarity and shortness: I don't need to include a full sentence, but only the names in brackets.
You can use a different color or font to differentiate them visually from the text --- preferably something light but readable, a color that does not attract much attention.
I use them sparingly nevertheless --- overall I have typically less than 10 such citations in a 15-20 slide talk.
This makes immediately clear whether I think that a theorem is new/mine or not. Its original authors could be in the audience, so I think it's important to acknowledge them properly.
If your slides are already so cramped that these citations won't fit, then you have a much bigger problem. :)

If you do this, it's also good practice to include a bibliography slide at the end listing these in a more extended standard format, just as in a paper.

@ComptonScattering I disagree. I don't see the advantage; I find that usually this information is sufficient to locate relevant papers.

Per, aeismail your slides have a life of their own, and your citations should be intelligible in your absence. Having said that, including a bibliography is good practice, and is not universally observed.

I'll first discuss the advantages and disadvantages for each of your options on how to handle citations:

Ignore them!

pro

This technique saves time and space.
Most often, the citations go unnoticed during talks (and I have been criticized once or twice for showing any citations on the slides in the first place).

contra

You make way for the criticism that you neglect to give credit to other authors.
If your slides are ever accessible outside of your talk, having the citations somewhere comes in handy.

Just list them at the end of the presentation

pro

The slide needs not be shown during your normal talk, but can be considered a part of your "backup slides" that you show only upon request. Thus, both people who do not like to see citations during a talk, as well as people who expect a certain citation information, will be happy.
Citations that are referred to several times during the talk have to be listed just once (hence the reader does not get confused and wonder whether they have already seen that citation).
The citations can be written using a readable (in a projection!) font size rather cramped into another slide with a tiny unreadable font.
It does not matter how many extra slides you fill with citations, so you can even include rather elaborate info (a full list of authors rather than just the first one and et al., the DOI, direct links, ...).

contra

Readers have to switch back and forth between pages/slides while reading slides with citations (though the same is valid for a paper and it doesn't seem to bother anyone there).

List them and cite them within the presentation.

pro

Citations are immediately available while reading the slide that refers to them.

contra

Space is scarce on slides, which means that the citations have to be written with a tiny font, probably too tiny to be legible during the talk.
As you need to save space, you will tend to using the shortest possible citation format, such as 1st author et al. rather than 1st author, 2nd author, 3rd author, 4th author, thereby arguably reducing the credit you give.
The citation clutters the slide (which should in general only contain the most important keywords/key statements rather than all details the presenter talks about) and thereby draws attention away from the contents of your slide (e.g. how a concept presented in related work works, understanding of which is required for the next slides).
The citations either disrupt the reading flow on the slide (when in between slide contents), or they gather at the very bottom as footnotes (where, depending on the room the talk is given in, they can only be seen by the first few rows of the audience, anyway).

To conclude, I vastly prefer technique 2, Just list them at the end of the presentation over all others.
That leaves the question whether or not to include citation references ([1], [2], ...) within your slides. This depends mainly on the purpose of your references:

If whatever information you are presenting is self-contained, such as a concept fully explained with a single concise graphic, the reference needs to be there mainly for the sake of giving credit. In that case, you can go the way of some books by not including a citation reference on the slide (thereby reducing unnecessary clutter) and instead only relying on a backreference on the citation slide (bottom-left image on slide 16).
If the information you are presenting is a summary of someone else's work (for example when presenting only a conclusion or statement without presenting the proof it is based upon), or even an explicit pointer to more information, do include a citation reference right next to the information, both to signify that there is more to be found about your statement and making finding the additional information convenient.


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What should I do if I've enrolled in a badly organized course?
I am nearly finished with my master's degree. Recently, I enrolled in a required course that is a terrible mess. I'd like to wait another year, and take it again with an instructor who has their stuff together and will actually answer student questions and prepare lessons that match the exams. Delaying graduation seems preferable to wasting more time on this course.

Some classmates gave the teacher what I believe are reasonable suggestions, but the instructor just gave excuses.
I looked all through the course catalog, but only see policies that assume students are the problem-makers. For instance, after one week into the term, students get no tuition refunds and a "W".
I'd rather not create problems for the instructor, who is new to this job.

Are there any steps I can take to clear myself of this mess?

Since it is required course, do your best to pass it this year with a reasonably good degree and move-on. It is not worth another year just for a single course.

I had a similar situation in grad school. I initially hated my last class, an elective intro course that had a 50-page paper requirement. You need to weigh the costs and benefits of such a decision as delaying graduation. When you say "another year" is not a big deal, I would like to counter that it is. That's a year's worth of potential salary you're throwing away. Compare that to the worst you'd get out of this class if you finish through with it, which is likely at most an inadequate learning experience you can supplement with your own studying time.

And to add to the other two comments, there is no guarantee that next year instructor is going to be better! At this level, you should be able to learn by yourself anything that is useful for you.

If it is unpassable, what should one do? Multiple-choice exams are 90% of the grade. No correspondence with lectures and homework content and exams. No study guide. Syllabus information about the exams is wrong. Small class size, but no homework feedback, just low marks. Instructor ignoring or setting aside important questions for later. Instructor has no clear plan of course. I spend much time waiting for information, then rushing to do work when it is finally available.

If it is consistently like that and everyone gets 40% Fs at the end of the semester, that is grounds to complain to the school. Classes should never be impossible, and a failure rate that high is both impractical for the student and the school.

Personally I would complain. You are paying money for this course and if there is no correspondence between what you are being taught and the exams, then there is no hope of any of the students doing well. Take it higher. The instructor needs to know what is and isn't acceptable - it shouldn't matter that they are new to the job. You wouldn't forgive a nurse or doctor for doing their job wrong just because they are new!

To piggyback on what @Davidmh said, there's not even a guarantee that it won't be the same instructor next year. Then what would you do?

some have suggested complaining or going to some authority, but offer no specific suggestions about how to do this

First, you need to understand how the authority chain is structured in academia. Your first course of action is to confront the instructor, which you've already done. The next step up would be the department head, and after that, the dean of the school – but I wouldn't recommend going past the department head with your complaints.
You need to do this very carefully. You need to be level-headed, respectful, factual, and specific. Be sure your case is compelling. In the event of a "he-said/she-said" debate, assume the department head will probably lean toward having the faculty member's back, rather than believing an offended student. Many students are too quick to complain when things don't go their way, making it easy for complaints to fall on deaf and jaded ears.
For example, in the scant details you've provided here:

Assignments are graded without rubric.
I won't dispute the value of rubrics, but this is hardly a grievous offense. Many instructors don't opt to use rubrics.
Homework is graded inconsistently with instructions.
This will be very hard to prove. A lot of assignments are by nature subjective, and it's hard to pinpoint why grades are given the way they are. Students often turn in work that is inconsistent. For example, say I assign some problem to be answered with an essay question. One student gets right to the heart of the matter, but the overall work is sloppy, and it reads like a draft that was hastily written 10 minutes before class. Another misses the point a little bit, but the essay is carefully crafted and has a lot of supporting detail. A third addresses the matter from an angle I hadn't considered before. How are my instructions supposed to cover all those cases, and more? (Moreover, assignment instructions are often very hard to get right the first time around, because you don't yet know how students might misinterpret stated requirements.)
Tests are very hard, but contain no relationship to the course assignments and lessons.
The first part of that is not a problem, although the second part is. If you start out by complaining about difficult tests, you may come across as a whiner and get very little sympathy or support. Be very careful about even mentioning that "tests are very hard."

You'll also have to figure out what you want the end goal of your complaints to be. Do you want action taken before the semester is over? Or are you only looking to give feedback so that next year's students don't find themselves in the same unfortunate circumstances? If you're hoping for intervention this term, probably the best you could hope for is for the department head to counsel the instructor, urging him to get his act together before the end of the term. But there are two sides to every story, and, unless your complaints are true on a large level, you're unlikely to get much sympathy. In other words, a bad question here and there on an exam is part of getting a new course underway, as are confusing assignments. If these are just normal "growing pains," you'll come off as a malcontent. On the other hand, if these are verifiable, wholesale shortcomings in the ability to conduct a course fairly and effectively, you might get a department head to step in, and urge the professor to get his act together. Even then, though, you'll probably have to make it to the end of the course, and you might see very little improvement. It's unlikely that the instructor will be reassigned midstream.
In short, you'll have to convince the department head that this faculty member is bordering on incompetence, and that it's not merely a case of an unpopular professor. This might be a tough sell.

I have seen cases where the instructor is given a module just two weeks before it starts, has no time to prepare, and might not have the proper background to teach it.
You might consider that the instructor is doing his/her best with what they have to work with. You might consider talking with the instructor to see what they believe you should be doing in order to succeed in the course. If they say "read the book" then you should read the book and study with little support.
Not all instructor are good and some are good but in a bad situation (that is, a situation not of their own making but rather one forced upon them). Either way, talk with them and find out what you can do to succeed.

+1 for "talking with the instructor to see what they believe you should be doing in order to succeed in the course"

I haven't seen this suggested...
How connected are you to the other students in the course?
Is it possible for you to meet as a group with the department chair?
You've got little power in the situation, but one thing you do have in your favor is that a new instructor is unlikely to fail a huge proportion of the class, particularly if those students have politely met with the department chair to express their concerns and provide samples of the lectures, homework and exams.
You can't get out of the class, but you can make it advantageous for the instructor to give everyone a good grade.

I think you mean "give everyone a fair grade," not "give everyone a good grade" (unless everyone has truly earned it). That aside, I like your "there's power in numbers" approach. One person alone may be regarded as a whiner and a dissenter, but a good percentage of the whole class might indicate could be more to this.

I would like to mean "fair grade." But if this poor instructor is unable to make tests that show some vague relationship to the material covered in lecture or the homework then I think "fair" has left the building. I meant that if the instructor knows they did a poor job, they may give everyone an A- just to avoid drama.

My thoughts:
First, you need to make sure that the problem is the instructor and not you.  Are a large number of other students having the same problems?  In my experience, it is also often the case that a class appears badly taught to a student who is missing something key about the material.  For example, when I was a grad student TAing for an artificial intelligence class, we often had people complain that we tested them on different material than we had taught them.  In fact, however, they were missing the point: the real material was the methodologies for decomposing problems, not the particular examples of problem decomposition that had been used to teach this methodology.  Their classmates who had grasped the key idea of the class, however, had no problems.
If, however, the problems are really a matter of the instructor giving a terribly badly organized course, then I think that your third premise (don't want to cause trouble because they are new) is fundamentally flawed.
If this instructor is expecting to have a career involving teaching, it's much better to have serious problems brought up early, where they can become part of a "plan for improvement" rather than several years down the line, where they are part of a pattern that will get them fired.  Most departments really do care about teaching (among other things, because it affects the number of students they get and thus their resources within the institution), but often don't have a lot of resources available to devote to managing teaching.
You have an academic advisor in the department, yes?  Go to that person with a report of the widespread problems, and ask their help.  It's unlikely that anything will actually be able to change this semester (schedules are set too far in advance), but:

It will help establish a record that can cause things to change in the future.
Your academic advisor will be able to help figure out how to deal with the matter of credits in your program, and whether it's better to drop or to grind through or to attempt some sort of petition (in many departments, you can do anything if the right three people are willing to sign the right piece of paper)

Warning: my answer might be out of focus for you because it takes into account only the information on your question, while some of your comments complement that information.
Unfortunately, some instructor do waste students' time by doing a very poor job; I'll assume this is the case here (but note that sometimes students feel that a course is done very badly but realize later that they learned more than they expected: student need not know better than instructors what they really need).
Here is basically  what I told to students complaining that their instructor made the course impossible to follow when I was responsible for a 500 students, 20 instructors course (they were not the first to complain about these instructors, and I had other evidence preventing me to blame them for the problem): I know your teacher is not the teacher you would have wanted, but I cannot do anything beside reporting the issue to him, which will certainly not solve the problem instantly. We have the same issue as teachers, having some students that often do not know the prerequisites for the course, are not willing to learn them as we tell, and/or do not believe us when we say that the course needs a fair amount of personal work. Both teachers and students should do their best in the situation they are given, which means that you can and should try to talk with your teacher to mitigate the issues you have, but at the same time be prepared for the issue not to be solved before the end of term, and find a way to learn what you have to learn. There are books, there are other students with whom to work, etc. If you think it is best, don't waste time with the instructor's course and learn by yourself while keeping in touch with the important information (homework, exam dates, etc.)
So to state this again in fewer words, it seems much more efficient for you to make your best to master the course content, judging this content from the syllabus and what related books discuss, rather than expecting next year's instructor to be better.
I would say that the expected outcomes of such an attitude should be:

you learn valuable things and pass the exam, because ultimately it tested what you learned,
you learn valuable things and pass the exam, because your institution realizes that there is an issue and makes it right somehow,
you learn valuable things and fail the exam, which turns out to be indeed impossible.

Even in the last case, you get more from this attitude than dropping the course altogether.
Edit: this answer was written under the assumption that the class is mandatory, as I (mis-?)understood the question. Of course, for a class that is not needed or that can be switched with another, then these would be options to consider seriously. If the course can be delayed without losing the benefit of the other courses, this would also be an option to consider. So my answer is really about what to do if dropping or failing the course implies one has to take the whole year again.

In the last case, you may have gained  in the sense of personal enrichment, but a failing grade on your transcript may hurt you in a practical sense.  I'd be a little more hesitant to recommend "stick with it regardless".

@NateEldredge: I find unexpected that the course of action I propose results in failing the class; I just do not promise that it will be sufficient to pass it. In other words, I find unlikely that mastering the class' content would be less effective in succeeding than any other strategies, even if it might not be sufficient.  Also, recall that the course is described as mandatory: if one has the opportunity to switch for another class the same year, then that is an option to consider.

Based on the asker's comments, the instructor is not making it sufficiently clear what material they are expected to master, and the asker doesn't seem to have any confidence that any efforts of their own would significantly improve their chances of passing.  "Mandatory" means they have to take the course eventually but not necessarily now, so their other option is to withdraw from the course (which will be duly noted on their transcript) and take it in a future term, accepting that their graduation could be delayed.  I think that merits serious consideration.

@NateEldredge: ok, I might have misunderstood the context. In French it is not very common to be able to continue the studies with a mandatory course lacking: one would have to either compensate by other grades if the rules permit it, or take again the whole year of study.

I would not recommend going over your professor's head at this point. At least, it is not clear that you have done everything possible to turn the situation around. I'm hoping that your goal is to understand the content of the class so that you are not wasting the term.
I think that, instead of asking the professor to change, you should approach him under the premise that you want to adapt to do better in the course. To do this, I would propose the following strategy:

1) You want to understand the grading of the homework. So go to your professors office each week with your graded homework and tell him/her you want to find strategies for doing better on future assignments. Ask to go over the assignment to learn how/why you lost points.
DO NOT ASK FOR POINTS BACK. If the grading is fair, you will get a better sense for what is expected. If it is not fair, s/he will likely recognize this as you go through the assignment, and might offer to regrade it without prompting. Be polite and engaged with the material. You want your professor to take an active interest in your success in the class.
2) The midterm may or may not have anything to do with the content of the course. At the master's level you should be expected to go beyond regurgitation and apply your knowledge. Take your graded exam to your professor and tell him/her you want to learn the material better. If you do not understand how a particular problem is connected to the course, it is okay to say so. But, don't make it seem like it is the professor's problem. Remember, you are trying to learn. You might say something like "could you explain how you think about this problem? I didn't see how to solve it using the techniques from class."
Again, DO NOT ASK FOR POINTS BACK. Give your professor the opportunity to help you understand the test. If some aspect of the test is unfair, allow your professor to realize this on his/her own. As before, be positive and engaged. You do not want your professor to feel threatened.

In summary, I'd like to remind you that professors are people too. If you only give negative feedback, you are unlikely to get the outcome you want. If you are not receiving the support in class to succeed, it is okay to get more help outside of class. However, this is going to also require more work on your part.
It is going to create more work for your professor as well. If other students struggling in the class do the same thing, this will amount to a lot more work, and may be enough incentive for the professor to make the changes you are looking for. Just make sure you keep your interactions polite and respectful.
If, in the end, this strategy doesn't work, you will have taken concrete steps to improve the situation. This will be important if you ultimately feel you need to take the issue to the department chair.

I've discussed grading with the instructor. Each week, the instructor discovers new ways to give me a terrible mark. Features present in the first couple of assignments that weren't marked as a problem suddenly became a problem in the third assignment. Since there is no rubric, the teacher just grades as he likes and invents new reasons to give a poor grade, sometimes ignoring the assignment's instructions.

@Village Have you asked for a comparison of grading? What I am suggesting is that you spend a lot of time with the instructor outside of class. You need to make it so that being unhelpful is more work than being helpful. If you are not satisfied with an answer, keep pressing. "I'm sorry, I still don't understand. Can you explain again?"

RE: Features present in the first couple of assignments that weren't marked as a problem suddenly became a problem in the third assignment. This shouldn't surprise you. Early in a course, a professor might be more lenient, figuring, "Students shouldn't be expected to know this right now." Later, grading might become more strict, with the reasoning, "By now, students should know better than to keep making this mistake." You'd have to get much more specific before convincing me the problem is solely his and not partly yours.

If you are about to finishing your master degree I strongly suggest not to postpone this course another year. Study for it with the material the professor gave you and if you find that something is missing or not clear speak with the professors.
Doing a master degree is not only about having good professors and learning from them. You are also supposed to learn (a little) by yourself. Not like a PhD student, of course.
If you want to help your professor in getting the course better talk to him. Going through his superiors is not helping.

Yes, my goal of taking the masters degree and this course is to learn the material. But the instructor is not providing any support for learning the material.

I read all the questions and comment. As @J.R. pointed out: "You'd have to get much more specific before convincing me the problem is solely his and not partly yours"


text:
Are studies centered around one's own students regarded as publish-worthy scholarship within educational research?
I have read a number of papers within the field of educational research where researchers simply used their own classes for testing. For example, they test one of their classes with a certain type of instruction, but leave another class without this instruction, then: (1) test which group of students did better and (2) collect student opinions about the lesson.
While I can understand why a teacher might conduct an "informal" study on their classroom, I cannot understand why this would regarded as publish-worthy research. It is possible that I am simply misunderstanding the benefit and purpose of publishing such studies?

Within educational research, is it regarded as acceptable practice to publish research which is only conducted on such conveniently available groups?

Within educational research, is it regarded as acceptable practice to publish research which is only conducted on such conveniently available groups?

Sadly, yes. In fact, some of the most noted and most often quoted work on the psychology of learning was conducted by Jean Piaget on his own children.
However, there is a benefit to conducting such small studies of the type you describe. In the type of study you describe, where an instructor teaches two sections of the same course at the same institution to the same body of students that are otherwise identical except for whatever change in pedagogy the instructor desires, many confounding variables are inherently accounted for. Principal among these are the "instructor effect" and the "student-to-teacher ratio". Additionally, two sections at the same institution should be influenced similarly by demographic, socioeconomic, and academic effects on the student population.

I don't understand why you begun with "sadly" but then followed that by listing only the benefits?

Well, because some populations are indeed chosen only by convenience. This idea of confounding variables is relatively recent.


text:
Who holds intellectual property rights on a thesis?
I thought of an interesting idea for a thesis for my Masters program and I think I would eventually be able to sell a product that is built from the algorithms/code that I develop for this thesis.  I realize my thesis is my work and I have the copyright permissions, but I am wondering what rights I have and what rights my school has if I were to take my thesis and develop it into a product which I then sell to customers.
Would I have all rights for selling this product or since my professor is essentially guiding me and assisting me in my research, does he/she own a part of it as well?  I can only seem to find answers on the internet that pertain to the copyright permissions of the actual developed thesis, not products that might be derived from such efforts, or code that was developed in tandem with writing the thesis.
Any links to proof or legal precedence would be very helpful as well.

Almost every university (especially research universities) has policies on intellectual property rights. PDF to Duke University's, webpage from U Denver, and webpage from the University and College Union (a union organization representing students and employees of universities and colleges in the UK). Policies are generally largely the same in spirit while differing in detail. You should ask around for your local version.

Your institution almost certainly has a policy on this, and an office dedicated to administering it.  You should consult them.  If you really think this is serious, you should also consult an intellectual property attorney rather than relying on the babblings of some goofball from the Internet (e.g. me).
In the US, employees of a university are commonly required to sign an agreement that the university has an interest in any patent or other profitable invention that they develop in the course of their work.  The agreement usually specifies that the royalties and other profits are to be split between the university and the inventor.
I have not heard of this being required of students, and if you had signed one, you would presumably know.  However, if your advisor had a significant part in the project, he or she may have some rights in it as a matter of law (and the university in turn would get a share of your advisor's, per their agreement).
Note that it may be relevant where the funding for the project came from, and what if any financial support you received from the university.

In the case of PhD students, the line between employee and student is remarkably blurry. I'm not sure whether the situation is similar for Masters students.

As a PhD student at my institution, I was definitely considered an employee. I signed a great many things, and one of them was an intellectual property / patent agreement.

Would I have all rights for selling this product or since my professor is essentially guiding me and assisting me in my research, does he/she own a part of it as well?

This is a very difficult and touchy question. You need to talk to your supervisor as early as possible. Many students drastically underestimate the supervisor's contribution. Starting your graduate studies with the idea is very different from developing the idea in conjunction with your supervisor.

Regardless of how the legal situation is, discuss it with you supervisor in a friendly way to figure out

if he wants to put stones in your way, even for the things which you legally could sell. (Even if you may win a lawsuit, financing a lawsuit before you actually sell products could be a problem)
if he is plainly supportive of the idea and helps you without own interest
if he like to give you  recommendation for a company/group working on these topics
if he would like to create a company with you (in that case you would have continued access to the research)
if some technology is already patented for some applications or if parts of the materials you used were obtained under an NDA.
if there is a competitor (e.g. another student of his/people he knows in the field)