text:
Can I submit the paper to arxiv and the conference at the same time?
I think the conference where the paper is submitted will have 10 days to start submitting the abstract. There are 23 days before the papers start to be handed in. But my thesis will be completed within a week. The review of the paper takes nearly two months. May I be worried that other people will publish papers with the same idea during the review period.
Can I upload the paper to arxiv now? Then submit it to the conference normally after 20 days?
There is a sentence in the conference request:

The only exceptions to the above rules are for the authors’ own papers
in (1) workshops without archived proceedings such as in the ACM/IEEE
digital library (or where the authors chose not to have their paper
appear in the archived proceed- ings), or (2) venues such as IEEE CAL
or arXiv where there is an explicit policy that such publication does
not preclude longer conference submissions. In all such cases, the
submit- ted manuscript may ignore the above work to preserve author
anonymity. This information must, however, be provided on the
submission form – the program chairs will make this information
available to reviewers if it becomes necessary to ensure a fair
review. As always, if you are in doubt, it is best to contact the
program chairs.

Worrying about other people publishing your paper isn't something you should do. One, it's not in your control, that'll happen if it has to happen. Two, even if it does, there are always other parameters which can differentiate the paper.
This conference says you can post it to Arxiv, so go ahead! But I don't really think it'll stop someone else from publishing their material else where. Especially when the pre-print upload date is so close to the conference many might not even realize that their is a paper with the same domain!

thank you! But uploading the paper to arxiv can make me feel more at ease, otherwise I will always be frightened. What I want to confirm is: Are there any disadvantages to doing this?

There aren't any "disadvantages" as such. You may even get cited if someone comes across and feels the need to do so. But I don't think it's a practice that is followed commonly. One thing to note is, if its a "blind" submission and your pre-print has names, that might cause some issues!

Thank you a lot!  But "if its a "blind" submission and your pre-print has names, that might cause some issues!"  I don't quite understand what this sentence means. Can you tell me more specifically?

Generally top conferences want you to submit the paper without any "names" or "affiliations" on the top. Like an Anonymous submission. If your pre-print has your name then that goes against the conference rule. Glad I could help and all the best :)

thank you. But I want to make sure: if the conference I submit is as described in the question (don't mind arxiv), then there is no adverse effect. However, some conferences do not have the above statement, and submitting to arxiv will destroy its anonymous review, so it will have a bad impact. Do you mean this?

It should not have any adverse affect if the conference mentions that you are allowed to put it up on a pre-print server. Yes I mean that exactly!


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Changing affiliation on publication
I am moving from one job to another (postdoc to tenure track) this summer and I have papers in several stages of being written, these go from handwritten notes with all the necessary arguments to under revision at a journal. All the papers will have my new contact information put on them but where is the line for changing affiliation? It seems obvious to me that the one that is still in the handwritten notes stage will get the new affiliation and that the ones under revision won't. So somewhere in between is a line.
Where is it?
There are some similar questions so far (see here and here but they do not seem to be quite the same situation since I am not changing fields and the appointments are not concurrent.

Now at: [insert institute here].

@gerrit yes, that's how to indicate a new mailing address but the question I am interested in is how much of the work has to be done at the first institution for it to to be listed as an affiliation?

When in doubt, just list both affiliations.

I would argue that it's a question of resources—if you have used resources (equipment, personnel, computers, financial) of both institutions in executing the paper before its initial submission, then you should list both institutes as supporting the work.
On the other hand, if the core of the work—both research and writing—were done at the old institution, then the new institution should only be listed as a "present affiliation," rather than as a "co-sponsor" of the work.

Suppose some significant piece of code was written at institution A, but the paper was entirely written later.  Should institution A be listed as an affiliation?  What if the code is in a library that will be reused indefinitely?  How long (or how many publications) is enough to stop listing A as an affiliation?

The affiliations list where the work was done. If you wrote the code at A and the paper at B, then both should be listed. You stop listing A when you're no longer directly talking about work done at institution A. (I'd argue just using a library written at A is not the same as writing a paper about the library; citing work at A doesn't mean you should list A as an affiliation.)

It is not necessarily clear cut. As a principle I would say that the affiliation should be where you have done most of your work. It is, however, also possible to use two affiliations and set your new location as "present address:" (or affilaition). After all, the affiliation serves two purposes. For a university (department) it means something becomes associated to them. For you, though, it means people can find you if they have, for example, questions. So, using the double affiliation, if it is possible, might be a good idea in the grey zone. Otherwise, I would stick with "where you did most of the work", however you wish to define it.

Your name and affiliation are listed on publications to identify you and to facilitate contact. Thus, I believe your new institution should be listed, rather than your old. Your old institution can be credited in the acknowledgements. Given that any affiliation listed might become outdated, you can also list your personal email address and your personal website URL. (A personal domain name and web hosting are very cheap.)

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Citing a paper under review in 2 different conferences
I am currently writing 2 conference papers. One is highly quantitative in nature and the other is absolutely qualitative in nature. I am submitting both papers to conferences having deadlines in the next couple of months.
The papers present results on 3 different research questions on the same topic and are highly related with each other. You could argue that paper A + paper B together present a holistic view of the answer to these research questions. Individually, paper A and paper B show a different side to the problem since you generally get alternate points of view from quantitative and qualitative works.
Since the papers and their results are highly interrelated, there exists a compelling reason for me to ensure that they cite each other. I have seen this question and this question which are also highly related to my question. However, my question is different enough, in my opinion to warrant a separate question.

How should I cite these papers? (one paper is going to be in APA style and the other will be in ACM style)
Does it make good sense to contact the Associate Chairs of these conferences for further clarification?
The most important question for me is, is this ethical? Does it not break the double blind review system? I am ready to not cite these papers if that is the case.

I am having conversations with my adviser about this but just want some broader perspective from different disciplines if I am somehow missing something.

The answer to this question seems to be field dependent. In what fields is it unadvisable to cite unpublished work? In math the peer review process takes forever, but it is extremely common to cite preprints, and I've never heard advice that one shouldn't do this.

Can you put both papers on the arXiv?

@JeffE I am pretty sure that I could put the quantitative paper on arXiv. I am not so sure about the qualitative paper - I was of the opinion that arXiv prefers quantitative papers. However, both are broadly, in the field of Human Computer Interaction and there exists a sub-repository for it (HC) on the server. Actually, I might just ask Dr. Ginsparg when I see him sometime soon about this. :) Thanks for the tip.

Not sure about your area and especially about conferences, but for journal papers, you can often submit supplementary material which could be used in the reviewing process.  Could you submit a draft of paper A as supplementary material for paper B and vice versa?  Or maybe just excerpts/graphs etc.?

Normally, unpublished materials are just that, unpublished, and should be treated as such. It is, however, always possible to reference your other work as "in prep." until it becomes published. You need to look carefully at any instruction for authors on how such references should be made and if they are acceptable.
If you add such a reference to a paper it is always possible to remove the reference if one of the works becomes rejected or if it is unlear if it will be published. What should be avoided is to have references to work as "in prep." remaining if the work is unlikely to ever getting published. After all, the purpose of referencing is to provide published sources that others can access.
Including an "in prep." reference will also provide problems for reviewers and adding or removing such a reference during the review process means that something that can not be checked is added or removed in the manuscript. So my suggestion is to avoid having to rely on such a reference for any key points in the manuscript.
You are, in other words, in a grey zone when it comes to referencing. The best solution would be one where you do not rely on unpublished references but if you think you must then use your discretion and make sure your inclusion is made in a way that it is not key to your conclusions or that it might not affect the reviews in a signficant way. You, furthermore, should be as confident as you can that they both will be accepted in the end.

Thanks. This is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for. In certain fields, it is quite common to see ~25% references "in prep". However, I have no idea what the standards are in HCI - just because the field itself is all over the place. :)

Just both papers on a preprint server when you submit them.  Then referees will have access to them.

Normally, you can update citations until the proofreading stage.  I've done that at more than one occasion.  When submitting the article, I cite Myself et al. (submitted 20xx).  Then the manuscript goes through peer review, revisions, subsequently typesetting, etc.  By the time the final proofs come out, I probably know whether Myself et al. is rejected or not, and can probably provide an updated citation.  In the worst case, I can replace it by a short text that this will be considered in a future publication.

Rather than removing the citation, cite as an unpublished manuscript, article in preparation, preprint, etc.

I think this boils down to the question

Should I cite a paper that has not (yet) been accepted?

In my opinion, citing an unaccepted paper is risky, since for a reason or another it might be rejected, and submitted somewhere else later on. Then, your paper would be citing the wrong proceedings or journal. Once a paper is accepted (achieves the in press status), I think citing is OK.
And hey, you can just write in the conclusions that your future work will be concentrating on the same problem from another point of view. Interested readers will go google your name.

Of course you wouldn't cite the paper as appearing in the journal or conference it's been submitted to before it has been accepted. That would simply be false. Instead, you cite it as being an unpublished manuscript, "in preparation", or "submitted" (and just "submitted", not "submitted to [specific venue]"). Or you upload a preprint, or turn it into a tech report. But, when the paper is clearly relevant, it needs to be cited somehow.

It's extremely common to cite work that has not been accepted in a peer-reviewed venue.  It is certainly not "risky".  There are plenty of things that can and should be cited even though they will never be submitted to a conference or journal.  You just need to provide an accurate citation, as @DavidRicherby says.

You could create Technical Reports for each paper and cite the Tech Reports in your conference submissions.
If you decide to do this (and especially if you put the TRs on your web page), you may want to be careful about self-plagiarism.

Editor A wrote to editor B, indicating that one of the reviewers of a paper submitted to Journal A contained material that had been submitted at about the same time to Journal B. Editor A requested a copy of the paper submitted to Journal B. Editor B responded, confirming that the paper in question had been submitted to Journal B (submission date two weeks earlier than the paper submitted to Journal A), but had been rejected eight weeks later after external peer review. Editor B sent a copy of the rejected paper to editor A. Editor A examined the two papers and confirmed that there was “some degree of overlap” between the two and also felt that there was a degree of “salami slicing.
What should the editors do now?

The answer can be found here.
In order to avoid such an unpleasant affair why not boil the question down to

[One] could argue that paper A + paper B together present a holistic view of the answer to these research questions.

and submit only one paper?
I don't want to accuse you of scientific misconduct but your statement is at least suspicious in this regard. Therefore, a single paper would provide the following two benefits:

No need to cite your second, unpublished paper.
Absolutely ethical scientific conduct (in contrast to a strategy of "salami slicing" or building on the "Least Publishable Unit").

You raise a good point. However, in the conferences that I submit to; the limit is 10 pages, ACM style. When you are exploring one question from 2 methodological angles, you need to provide enough detail about both methods otherwise reviewers will not accept it. This necessitates submission of 2 papers and is pretty common in my field.

In my case, contacting the Associate Chairs was enough. You can cite a paper in progress - whether it will be accepted is another matter - however, you can make pre-prints available on your website or on arxiv and these can be inspected by the reviewers. My field is interdisciplinary and at many times, messy and therefore, these clean distinctions do not always apply.

@Shion "the limit is 10 pages": this is of course a very good point of yours. On the one hand scientific ethics ban "salami slicing", on the other hand editors don't want researchers to submit long papers. As I wrote, I don't want to accuse you, I only wanted to provide a different view on your problem. As you asked your question in 2013, I did not expect it to be still relevant for you. But the different view might help others. Allow me a final remark: Given the page limitation a solution might be to combine the papers and submit the article to a journal without page limitations instead.

Which also depends on your field of research. I know that in some fields conference publications are regarded more important then journal publications.

Agreed very much. My collaborators, advisers and the general culture in my field is to do conferences as opposed to journals although I wish that weren't the case since journals usually have a 25 page limit. Therefore, the culture in our area is to aim for the top 2 conferences in our field every year which is why everyone tries to hit those deadlines all the time.

The question makes it clear that the author is not "salami slicing" but, rather, their work has multiple aspects that belong in different venues.

@DavidRicherby Sorry, but I do not agree. According to Šupak Smolčić "Salami publication can be roughly defined as a publication of two or more articles derived from a single study". Shion writes "The papers present results on 3 different research questions on the same topic". I guess both papers refer to all three of the research questions and thus they quite likely are based on the same study or studies.

@ToJo Not all fields even have the concept of "A study".

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text:
Do any statistics program provide funding for masters students?
I plan to be applying to graduate school next year in Statistics or Biostatistics and due to some financial constrictions, I will not be able to attend unless the tuition is waived at the the minimum. I am hesitant to commit to a 5 year PhD program for a funded education since I may run into some financial issues a few years in and may not be able to complete it. I know that most schools use their Masters program as a cash cow and thus are usually not funded. I was wondering if anyone here knew of any statistics programs that go against this and actually do fund their Master students?

Funding problems can come up in PhD programs regardless as to whether you expect them. For example, students who take more than 4-6 years often are given lower priority for department TA-ships, and lose their funding. The message here is that it is hard to predict your financial situation, and leaving a PhD for under extreme financial circumstances is always a morally acceptable thing to do (leaves of absences are very possible in this situation). You should do a PhD if you are truly passionate about pushing the envelope in statistics. In other words you think about statistics for fun. If this fits you, you should accept a funded PhD offer regardless as to future financial situations that may or may not manifest. Now if you are not passionate enough about the subject to pursue a PhD that is another story. In this case persuing one just because it is "free" and dropping out with a masters is generally looked upon as a major faux pas.
However, if you don't have interest in a PhD, another option would be to try online masters programs which are often cheaper and allow you to finish the degree while doing part time or in some cases even full time work. With an online degree program you can live with family members or move to a city with a low cost of living. The University of Washington has a program in data science, I believe. It certainly isn't free, but its about an order of magnitude less than a traditional "cash cow" masters degree.
If the above are too expensive take some free MOOCs (corsera etc) in your field of interest. Focus on skills as opposed to a degree. Apply for some jobs and if you don't get anything, go back to the drawing board.
The other option, and probably the best one if you are lucky enough to be successful down this road is to get a job in a field the combines your skill set with the tools you want to learn. So if you have some background in data science, stats, math or engineering, consider looking for jobs as opposed to degree programs. Often these jobs will fund your masters degree later on, if you choose go back to school. It generally comes with a constraint where you agree to stay with the company for at least a year or two after attaining the degree, but for most people this is worth it.

Apply to PhD programs that can or will award a master's degree after you pass your qualifiers.
This way you have funding and you may find that the funding is enough to continue even if other financial constrictions happen. You don't know for sure that they will happen or that other circumstances may mitigate the problem.
It might also be possible to ask the department for a leave of absence (for a year or two).
In a worst case scenario, hopefully you can finish with a master's.

I don't think that advising someone to take up a PhD program solely for the purpose of funding a MS degree is constructive advice.

I'm not. OP doesn't say that he/she knows for sure that he'll have funding problems later. I saying (badly I guess) go ahead and deal with later financial problems...later.

A leave of absence during a PhD is very possible, some places will allow leaves in the 2-4 year range. Sometimes you can still work on your PhD while taking a leave of absence and defend immediately after returning.

You should look for schools that don't offer PhD's in statistics, only master's.  Then they will hire their MS students as statistics TA's.


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Do universities typically cover publication fees associated with open access publications?
I am an undergraduate student in a private Indian university. Last semester I worked on a research project with another undergrad student and under the mentorship of a PhD scholar.
We have submitted a paper to an Elsevier journal which charges a mandatory open-access fee of $500 on acceptance of the paper. In such cases, does the university typically cover these costs or are they borne by the authors of the paper?
Which department of the university should I contact to ask for funding for the same?

Not an answer, but still important: This is something you should have found out before submitting the paper.

@TobiasKildetoft I will take care of it next time. We had glossed over the open source access charges until we found out when submitting the paper.

Talk to the library also, some UK  universities (at least) have allocated money for paying for open access in the library

Talk to your professor who will know better than us. It's possible your professor has a grant that also has an open access component, in which case that's where the money will come from. It's also possible your university's library has set aside some funds for open access. Here's an example page from the University of Hull. If your university has something similar, you might be able to get funding from there.
If you find you don't have funding, you can pay the OA fee out of your own pocket (probably not a good idea even if you are wealthy), decline OA (if it's a hybrid journal which publishes both OA and non-OA papers), ask for a waiver (Elsevier might grant this since you are from India, which is a developing country), and finally withdraw and submit elsewhere. If you take the last option, do so quickly so as not to waste the journal's time.

You're right, it is an individual problem and can't be answered in general. Most of the contracts between universities and publishers are secret, a centralized database isn't there and it is impossible to anticipate the behavior of the individuals under such conditions.

Even if they don't waive it entirely, they may be able to work with you on a reduced rate that your department could more easily afford.

Just want to point out that the money that university libraries in the UK have to pay for OA comes from a RCUK block grant to pay for the publication of RCUK funded research and is UK specific and publications must be associated with an RCUK grant code.
I guess there maybe major national funders in other countries that run similar schemes, but i've not heard of them.

@IanSudbery there's also funding for e.g. researchers affiliated with the Max Planck society (https://www.mpdl.mpg.de/en/?id=50:open-access-publishing&catid=21:mostly-hidden-category), and Kansas State (https://www.lib.k-state.edu/publishing-fund) - one has to look to know.

@Allure Wellcome trust also provide funds to publish open access, but I don't think they provide block grants to all university libraries...

does the university typically cover these costs or are they borne by the authors of the paper?

This seems to be a false dichotomy — usually it is not an "either-or" (unless you submitted to an open access journal with a mandatory Open Access fee).
It might be possible that your university does not cover the Open Access fees of this journal. However, that doesn't mean you as authors have to or should pay. Many universities subscribe to journals in order to make sure their researchers and students have access to papers which are not Open Access.
In other words, even if you don't pay the Open Access fee, many if not most researchers will still have access to your work. (Looking at the journal page on Elsevier you can look at the list of Open Access papers in that journal — often it's a minority.)
In fact, you are probably allowed to "self-archive", i.e. upload a preprint to the arxiv, for example. That way your article is available to everyone freely (open access). Again, you are probably even allowed to update the content of the preprint to match the content of the published version.
Check with your journal for their policy on self-archiving — the database http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php is also a useful resource.

@ASimpleAlgorithm I had already slightly edited my answer just before you posted your comment. "We have submitted a paper to an Elsevier journal which charges USD 500 for Open Access Fees on acceptance of the paper." doesn't say anything about whether the fee is required or not, so I left a comment on the question.

No the university is not generally expected to cover publication fees just automatically. There are, commonly, a couple different mechanisms that are used to cover OA fees:

Lab resources. Many labs, including my own, budget for some OA publication fees in grants, startup packages, intentions for unallocated funding, etc. This would be my first stop in your case - ask your professor.
University resources. Sometimes the university has a pool of money set aside to pay OA fees where lab support is unavailable - usually for student projects and the like. This is often but not always done through the library, and is typically something you have to apply for (though the application might be fairly easy) and is not guaranteed
University-Publisher partnerships. There are some journals that allow universities to pay a chunk of money and then have their researchers get either free or much reduced publication in a journal or bundle of journals.
Waivers. If you genuinely don't have any other funding sources, you can ask the journal to waive the publication fees for an unfunded project. But generally, this needs to be genuinely unfunded, and not just "I forgot to budget for this".

Which one of these - or others - that are available to you will vary based on your particular institution.

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What does "author title" mean in a manuscript submission system?
What does the author title mean in a manuscript application form? Does it mean {professor- assistant professor- lecturer} and if he/she isn't a university's staff what would the title be? Presuming he/she is master degree student in a medical specialty?

I don't know what a manuscript application form is specifically, but I would assume that if you don't hold a professional title, your title is simply Mr/Mrs/Ms etc.

the author's title when writing a research, medical paper or an article

Then I think you've answered your own question. As I said, if you don't hold a particular title (Professor, Doctor, Lord, Reverend, Captain, or whatever it may be) then your title is Mr/Mrs/Ms etc. As far as I know, a Masters degree doesn't confer any pre-nominal titles.

If the author does not hold any of the usual academic tiles such as Dr/Prof./Asst. Prof. the status quo defaults to Mr/Ms/Mrs.


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Should an undergraduate applying for academic internships switch to a multi-page CV from a one-page resume?
I am an undergraduate student applying for internships that are frequently in academia.
Currently, I've been providing all my experience in a one-page resume format, and find myself having to continue to make the text font size smaller and smaller.
Would it be best for me to switch to a CV?

Don't make the fonts smaller... :)

Good answer from Michael.  Ask yourself how you would make a one-minute pitch in an elevator, to convince someone you should be considered for your dream job.  Make sure the things you selected for the elevator are clearly visible in your CV, and do a little pruning.  There are people you can ask for help with this.

CV's are used more for people who have more experience in academia - as it includes publications, awards, grants, etc. As someone who is still an undergraduate student, I can't imagine that your resume should be more than 1 page - usually it is 1 page per 10 years of experience. I would suggest going through your resume and take out bullet points that could be considered "fluff". Stuff like "demonstrated leadership" and "increase efficiency within the department" do not show any actual accomplishments. However, it would not be a bad idea to have a CV on hand. As you probably know, resumes should be tailored specifically to each job, so I would highly recommend that you keep a master resume that details all your accomplishments at each job, and maybe have the "fluff" in there, but when you apply for a job, make a copy of that resume and tailor it specifically to the job.

I disagree that the "one page for ten years" rule is applicable to academic CVs.  My impression is that an academic CV should contain a complete list of relevant experience and accomplishments, and be as many pages as necessary.


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How to Present Two Authors on the cover page of an APA Research Paper?
So I've done plenty of APA papers, but I have never done one with two authors, so I came here since it's the fastest source for information, in my opinion. I would like to know or see an example of how to present both authors on the cover page.

I think things vary based on whether affiliations are the same or different for the two authors. I.e., if they share an affiliation, then you'd put them on the same line, but if they have different affiliations, then you put them on different lines with their affiliation below each.
It's also worth noting that I've seen quite a bit of variation in exactly how the title page is presented (e.g., numbered footnote for affiliations versus text at bottom of page). Journals seem to be able to work it out as long as what you provide is unambiguous.
Here's an example of an APA cover page with two authors from my own work:

According to the APA 6th Edition, you list all the authors in order of contribution, or in alphabetical order if their contribution is equal. They should be on the same line unless it does not fit.
Example: Jane Smith and John Doe


text:
Why did I receive a negative response from a professor when emailing about course content and prerequisites of a course I am considering taking?
I wrote the following email to a professor (I've removed any personal or specific details):

Dear Prof. Last name,
Hope this email finds you well.
I am Name, an undergraduate in the mathematics department.
I write to enquire about Course code - Course name being offered in fall semester. What can I expect from the course content and what are the prerequisites? Would it be along the lines of Name of a Book?
One sentence describing previous courses I've taken
Looking forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks for your time!
Best,
Name
Department
Institution

The subject line was:

About Course Name next Fall Semester

I thought this email is perfectly fine, and it's how I generally write to professors. To my shock and surprise, I got the following response:

I am sure very soon you will be writing many more official emails, so you must know how to address them appropriately. You may see course content on the department webpage.Initials

Could someone help me figure out (i) how to respond to this, and (ii) what went wrong so I can avoid it in future emails (to any professor in general)? Thus far, no professor has pointed out so explicitly that something is wrong with the language of my email - so I'm in a state of great confusion right now.

Additional details:

I haven't interacted with this professor before, so this was my first email to them.
It seems I was at fault for not checking the course content on the department webpage before writing this email. However, that page has not been updated in years and I just wanted to make sure the content is still the same. Lastly, I think this wouldn't have made them feel that I addressed them inappropriately - since that has more to do with email etiquette than the content of the email.

Follow-up question:
I'm thinking of apologizing and explicitly asking how I can improve my email's language: "Thank you for your reply, and sorry for the seemingly inappropriate language of my email. I would be grateful if you could kindly pinpoint what part of the email was inappropriately written, so I can be more careful in all future communication."
Would this be a good idea? I read somewhere on this very site that it's never impolite to ask how to be polite.

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There is nothing inappropriate (that anyone can see here) in the way that you've written your email. The response from the professor suggests that they're some combination of (a) incredibly time-constrained, (b) sloppy and unclear in how they communicate, and (c) a jerk.

It's possible (as user2768 suggests) that the essential "offense" in their eyes was to ask about things available in the online site. If so, then their first sentence was a sloppy and mostly mindless piece of aggression that doesn't really mean what it says.

The curtness, snarkiness, and level of aggression communicates that they don't like interacting with students by email, do not want to spend time on it, and want such querents to go away and not bother them.

Given the above, writing them again and asking for more time to be spent on even smaller minutiae -- like revisiting what they meant in a hastily-written throwaway email, and to spend even more time parsing the grammar of the original student email that they've already expressed contempt for handling -- is only likely to make things worse.

I suggest that you accept this line of inquiry as not useful and likely to produce only further confusion and frustration on both sides. Do not email them again on this matter. If you must email them again in the future, on some different matter, make it as brief as you possibly can (shorter than your original email), and try to pose a question that can be given a very short, clear-cut answer.
I'll say that the only thing the professor really got right there was in accurately predicting your next instinct would be that, "very soon you will be writing many more official emails", and to be aggravated-in-advance by that prognostication. Resist the temptation to fully prove them right!
Also, consider asking around if this professor is good to interact with (maybe people you know or a ratings website). If their course is not required, then you may be getting a signal that they're just not a good professor.

Honestly, this deserves the +1 I gave it just for reminding me that the words "querent" and "prognostication" exist :) Separately, it's also a good answer.

B is the real problem. All professors have more stuff than time, and anyone can be a bit grumpy by the five millionth question on how to find basic course information, but they really need to figure out how to manage their own time (e.g. use pre-written replies for basic questions) and be able to separate some of their emotions from their dealings with students. Which is two more points in the "sloppy" column. Combine with unclear and I would just avoid if at all possible.

Definitely point 3

Point 3 could be extended to "don't bother them again at all if you can avoid it; certainly not with questions you could answer from publicly available sources". I think independent of any details of form, subject matter and character: This was the message the professor's answer carried.

I wouldn't see he professor as a jerk. What he did write was a polite way a forum community would answer UTFG or STFW.

As a former college student and college professor I agree with this answer.

That’s not how I read the “very soon” line at all. I can’t tell if you’re implying a level of intended irony or if you’ve just read it differently from me. To me, he’s saying “I understand you’re new at this, but this isn’t appropriate. You’ll figure it out in time.”

Do you think that the professor simply meant that the email was addressed improperly, or, in other words, in the professor's opinion the addressee should have been different, someone who is not them? I agree with most of what you've said but this explanation seems simpler, so we could give Occam's razor a chance? May be it was not the professor who was addressed inappropriately, the email was, what do you think?

@AndrewSavinykh India generally follows the British system, so it may be that OP's "professor" is actually a lecturer, or reader and was incorrectly addressed as "Prof".  OP needs to clarify, we don't really know.

@user3067860 Every professional ever has more stuff than time, but that's no excuse to be this way.

I don't see why this was the accepted answer, you're jumping to way too many conclusions and I am not entirely sure how you've distilled a simple response down to this. I would refer to this answer as this guy clearly nails it on the head and should be the accepted answer. https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/166054/138309

Your language isn't the problem, your email is well-written, but you've seemingly wasted the professor's time. You could have looked up the information, as they have explained: You may see course content on the department webpage.
Comments suggest I'm ignoring the professor's words:

you must know how to address them appropriately

The word address can mean speak to, perhaps write, in this instance. I believe the professor is annoyed that you've written to them and you should have done your own research first. An appropriately written email would ask a specific question beyond what's online.
Given you've seemingly annoyed the professor, I suggest you don't respond.

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Your email is impeccably written. If I compare it to the emails I receive from my students, it would fall in the 99th percentile in terms of email etiquette, grammar, formatting, and including the information relevant to the question you are asking.
Your email also compares very favorably with the professor’s reply, which violates several standard rules of email etiquette. Seems to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black if you ask my opinion.

How would you suggest I reply though? I'm thinking of apologizing and explicitly asking how I can improve my email's language: "Thank you for your reply, and sorry for the seemingly inappropriate language of my email. I would be grateful if you could kindly pinpoint what part of the email was inappropriately written, so I can be more careful in all future communication."

Your suggested response seems, well, impeccably written. But given that this is a professor who seems to react badly even to well-written emails, perhaps it is better just to not reply. Honestly I don’t know, and don’t have a specific recommendation what to do, sorry.

My thoughts too, although for me it'd probably be in the 90th percentile (but this was 15+ years ago, when IM wording shortcuts and such were less common and before twitter), and I agree with @wimi (comment under the OP's question) that it's best not to reply at all, and most definitely do not ask the professor to "pinpoint what part of the email was inappropriately written". Someone who responds to the OP's first email as described is almost certainly going to give a much more angrily worded reply to such a follow-up email (if a reply by the professor is written at all).

@epsilon-emperor I really suggest you to not reply. This type of attitude from a professor was not uncommon when I was a student some thirty-odd years ago: many (not everyone, but many yes) professors considered students an annoyance and any inquiry/interaction would cause a harsh response. To give you an example, during the first year, I approached a professor in a corridor asking a question about signing-up for the final exam of his class; he literally answered: "What do you want  from me? ask the student's office!" And turned away without even saying good bye.

No, it isn't impeccably written. The two sentence fragments do not fit in at all.

@PeterMortensen I don’t know what you’re referring to, can you clarify?

Since no-one here is the teacher in question, it is difficult to know exactly what they meant. The only way to be sure is to ask them, but given your initial contact with this person, that is probably a bad idea. If the person really meant that you were wrong when addressing the mail (and were correct), I can see only one possibility:

The person is not a professor, but a lecturer/teaching assistant/PhD student/...

To berate a student over this is a bit nit-picky in my opinion, but it might be caused by an underlying annoyance, such as:

You can read about the content, including answers to the questions you asked, on the course web-page, where the teachers' correct title might also be displayed.

Honestly, it can be quite annoying to receive emails with questions which could have easily be answered if the person asking the question had bothered to look. I am not saying that is is definitely the case, as I have not seen the course web-site, but it might be.

Why is it a bad idea to ask them? If I was disgruntled for some reason, I would always interpret it favorably if the person made an effort to avoid that in the future. (But I wouldn't have written the professor's email like that to begin with.)

@lighthousekeeper From the response, it's clear that the professor is not someone who likes to engage with students—they may actually think that students are just an annoyance—and thus better let it go.

Exactly as @MassimoOrtolano says. The person has already indicated that they are not interested in lengthy mail exchanges by answering like that. You following up with more questions will most likely not be fruitful. Just let it go.

I think it's that the student can research and find course information on their own. Imagine if hundreds of students are emailing professors to ask about several courses that professor teaches. A lot of professors wouldn't mind advising current students on courses they might take, but it is not their job to act as advisors to every undergrad student.

Suggestions have been made that the Professor's problem might be grammatical (some nit with your opening?) or formal (he prefers to be referred some other way, a different title or something?)
But what if he is giving technical advice? That is, perhaps he is referring to emails in particular, since he mentions them.
Note that emails in email software are often displayed in some form like:
Fred Bloggs <john.smith@university.example.com>
Emails must also have a subject line, which should be relevant.

What was the subject line of the email, if any?

Was the display-name that you used, if any, correct for him? While the "display name" part is how it's saved in your address-book, is purely cosmetic and does not help the email reach he correct destination, if it exists, it is visible to the recipient, and should typically represent the same person as the email address itself. We would probably expect a professor to be put out by: Asshole Prof <bloggs@university.example.com>

Was the email address you used his correct, direct email address? Not a group email or some department, but direct to him personally? We probably wouldn't expect that admissions@university.example.com would reach the correct professor unless someone in the admissions dept was kind enough to look up his email for you and forward the email.

Does the subject line of his reply contain "Fw:" or "Fwd:"? If so, this too suggests it had to be forwarded to him from wherever you incorrectly addressed it.

If he included your original mail and/or headers, do they show signs of being forwarded, perhaps even with commentary from the forwarder?

Check for further comment or instruction written inline in the included text if he did include a version of your original email.

Is your own email address appropriate? I've even received emails about job vacancies from some very salaciously-named hotmail email addresses. It's not always a good look.

For example, if the email you have looks like this:

From: Bill Bloggs <bbloggs@university.example.com>
To: Inquiring Student <titty-emperor@titty-boom-boom.example.com>
Subject: Re: Fwd: [No Subject]
I am sure very soon you will be writing many more official emails, so you must know how to address them appropriately. You may see course content on the department webpage.
= B.B.

From: Trevor Smith <admissions@university.example.com>
To: Bill Bloggs <bbloggs@university.example.com>
Subject: Fwd: [No Subject]
I think this is probably meant for you, Bill? Either it's for you, about Math 102, you, or Jane Bloggs, teaching Math 103. They seem confused - maybe just point them to the web page? Thanks!
T. Smith, Admissions Secretary,
Example University.

To: That One Math Guy <admissions@university.example.com>
From: Mr BoobMan <titty-emperor@titty-boom-boom.example.com>
Subject: [No Subject]
Dear Prof. Bloggs, [Actually, it's Dr Bloggs]
Hope this email finds you well.
I am Epsilon, an undergraduate in the mathematics department.
I write to enquire about MATH 102 - More Math, [You probably mean Math 103 - Yet More Math? I see you've already taken my Math 102 course] being offered in fall semester. What can I expect from the course content and what are the prerequisites? Would it be along the lines of "Math 103 by Prof J Bloggs"?
I've previously taken Math 101 and Math 102.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks for your time!
Best,
Epsilon Q Emperor, Esq.
Math Dept
Example U.

... then there's a whole LOT going wrong!

The names cracked me up, +1 for that.

Thanks for edit suggestion, @DanHenderson - I learned a thing! :D

Another thing that is slightly unusual (and possibly may considered inappropriate by someone) is the signature. In my experience, usually you don't sign your e-mails "Name - Department - Institution" unless you work there. Being a student does not earn you that right.
That said, I agree with the others that the mail is not particularly inappropriate or noteworthy.

Got it, thanks! Also, is the "Hope this email finds you well" part inappropriate, given that I haven't interacted with this professor before? I think it's pretty common to write similar opening greetings, but at this point, I'm not sure.

@theonlygusti IMO It is 100% inappropriate. It is simply a waste of words. You don't mean it literally, and  it is irrelevant to the question (which was also a waste of words, since the answer was easy to find without wasting the prof's time).

@alephzero It is not “100% inappropriate”. Such email openings are standard. You may think they’re an unnecessary convention, but that’s a far cry from “100% inappropriate”.

@user76284: Where are such openings standard?  Unless the person sending the email is a personal friend, I would suspect (as a recipient in US academia & industry) that was written from someone from a very different culture.  Indeed,  to me it conveys a distinct flavor of a certain type of scam email.

@jamesqf I also work in US academia/industry, and it’s not uncommon at all. Not sure where you can find more specific information, but see e.g. here.

@jamesqf: there is nothing wrong about being "from a very different culture".  If anything, it should be the professor that should be more accomodating to such things.

@Martin Argerami: Perhaps I should have added the phrase "and didn't bother to learn the norms of the culture of the person they were writing to", but I thought it was obvious.  At least, that's how I interpreted the professor's "so you must know how to address them appropriately" comment.

Having studied in the US, the UK, and the EU, I think it is perfectly normal to sign as "Name - Department - Institution" for a PhD student. For a Master's student, perhaps not as much, and for an undergraduate student it would just look a bit weird and slightly pretentious. But this is just my personal opinion.

Can confirm that it is perfectly normal, and even considered good etiquette, to sign with department and institution, this was the case in my Bachelor's and Master's degree in Europe.

I have been noticing this (department) in student email signatures more and more as well (in the US).  I think it is strongly correlated to the number of LinkedIn requests I receive, and might even be encouraged by career services professionals nowadays.  It seems fine to me.

In my Uni time it was not even aproperiate to call yourself student as an undergrad (but cand,)

First, no reply is needed and will probably result in another push back.
But the only problem I see, other than possible insensitivity by the professor, is that, while one letter might be fine, if it is short, it takes time to read (with your personal details) and more time to answer. Imagine being on the other end and getting 30 of these (300?). What if yours was the 15th such mail? This why course websites exist. They are supposed to provide the information you ask for and depend on students reading and interpreting them in their own situation. Had you targeted some missing piece of information there, and asked about that, then the professor owes you some explanation.
The book(s) listed and syllabus, even if only in outline, should be enough to answer your questions. A personal reply shouldn't be needed.
But, it would probably be a mistake to reply to the professor's email. At least nothing more than "Sorry. I'll re-read the website".
If there is no course website at all, then a query, or maybe complaint, to the department might be in order. But that doesn't seem to be the case here, given the reply.
It would be wise to "step gingerly" around this prof for a while, however, in case they are just a jerk.

The one thing other good answers here have not touched on is this :

What can I expect from the course content

This is an awfully open-ended question.  The professor can probably summarize the course in ten different ways for ten different audiences - which type of answer are you looking for, exactly?
This forces them to guess what you're interested in knowing, or otherwise to cover everything you might have meant, which is a tall order of a person as exceptionally busy as a university professor, perhaps only to find that you'll email back with even more questions because they didn't correctly guess what you failed to communicate in the first place.
So, while the window-dressing of your letter was superficially exceptionally polite, the content of your ask was really quite lazy and thoughtless. This professor likely found that the request, in and of itself, was offensive - not because of how it was stated, but because of its content.
Asking your professor to summarize rudimentary syllabus information is a bit like treating them like a phone book.  It's an enormous waste of their time.  You wouldn't call the CEO of a mobile phone company to ask about rate plans - same thing here.

+1 You as a student don't ask the professor to write you an essay,  assigning essays is their job.

You didn't break any rule but you may find the professor not well. I suppose the professor's work consists of:

Teaching undergrads (preparing the course, preparing and avaluating test)
Supervising PhDs
Being active researcher (filling up grant proposals, filling up reports, filling up bugets, organizing lab work, writing articles, reviewing articles)
Being member of some in-university or in-other-university comittee
Being an opponent to theses (reading, questioning, assessing)

Their schedule is quite full of many things and reading long email has a huge PIA (pain in the ass) score.
Let's go to your email then.

Dear Prof. Last name,

This is perfect, unless they are not a professor.

Hope this email finds you well.

Too personal and does not address the issue. Waste of time

I am Name, an undergraduate in the mathematics department.

I would not recommend introducing yourself in the very beginning of the e-mail, it is distracting from the main topic.

I write to enquire about Course code - Course name being offered in fall semester. What can I expect from the course content and what are the prerequisites? Would it be along the lines of Name of a Book?

This should be the first sentence. There is all you want to ask for and it is polite and quite information dense.

One sentence describing previous courses I've taken

This is not relevant to the question. You are asking for list of the prerequisities, not evaluating them.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks for your time!

Too long and pushy. "Looking forward to hearing from you" is sufficient.

Best,

Too informal. "Yours sincerely; With kind regards", these are the proper phrases.

Name

Department

Institution

Just Name. You are not working in the department. Maybe you can add that you are a student of the programme at your faculty.

I think the key problem was that the professor needed to get to fourth paragraph of your e-mail to get what you are asking for. The other was that the answer is already available on the oficial webpages.
The answer was poignant and sarcastic. But the professor gave some time to answer you. If you asked such question on some forum, the answer would be quite rude and even lacking basic advice. The professor

Pointed you where to look for the answer.
Pointed you to look for more effective approaches to written communcation
Gave you a hint that you should polish your witing style (address the e-mail) and change your way how to get information (address the issue). not only from them.

I can see the hidden message to be "Look, kid, I am not your mom to answer all your questions 'Mommy, where is my [something]?'".

+1, although I am not sure why you might assume that the professor would be thinking negatively (refer to your final statement).

I didn't mean it negatively. More like sarcastic. Or "tough love"

General rule: be concise.

Show you did some efforts, next time mention in the email "I have seen that the course page has not been updated in years and I was wondering if it still actual" but only if you feel the course is outdated;
You will be following his/her course, why should he/she care about the previous courses you attended?

I have a general question: why did you write the professor, what is your goal?
I have the feeling you would like to build a connection with this professor. There is nothing wrong, but don't be impatient, wait until the course started.

About 2 - So they have some idea of what courses I've taken before and if I satisfy the prerequisites for taking their course.

I wrote to the professor, not with the aim of building a connection, I really just wanted to know about this particular course they are offering next semester. "Wait until the course has started" - that doesn't make sense, because I need to decide right now whether or not I want to take the particular course (it's an elective).

@epsilon-emperor it's your duty to know if you satisfied the prerequisites of the course. If you did not, then you cannot take the exam of the professor, but usually it is NOT a professor's choice: it is a decision taken when the course plan was started/defined, the current professor is simply "putting in practice" that course plan.

If you literally have questions to the OP, they should be in comments to the original question, not in an answer.

“I was wondering if it still actual” I think you meant to say “up-to-date”. Are you German by chance? Many German speakers are not aware that „aktuell“ and “actual” don’t mean the same thing.

yes, thanks to both

I think the email is fine, however if I need to critisise the mail, there are two formulations which would trigger me

Hope this email finds you well

This is not only a cliche phrase used in many Nigerian scam mails which people tend to get nearly weekly (at least in the past). It can also be seen as a greeting between peers. I mean, it’s probably different in different cultures/regions, and I would probably not use it with people who are sensitive. Having said that, it is a very nice thing to start an email with a pleasantry.

What can I expect from the course content

Here is a similar issue. „Expect“ is a perfectly fine word, but it does have the connotation of „prove to me it’s worth my time“.
So if the professor is stressed out, triggered by the greeting and they feel students should stick to reading the course syllabus (especially for lower years in some universities it’s unusual to have any contact with professors before a course) this might have triggered them to their response.
The „address appropriately“ may not refer to salutation or title, but refers to routing - the fact that it should be sent to student help or a tutor instead of the professor (again, just guessing this might be different for other universities).
Having said that, I would understand the „sure very soon“ meansm: He understands and does not feel offended, and I would not follow up on this matter.
You need to find out how distant/approachable the teachers in your organisation are, as this can vary widely. Rude answers like this one will set the tone.

The email is very well written. Do verify that the name is not misspelt; some take great offence to this. Additionally, please check if the website offers any details on communication, I.e. TAs to contact etc.
If there are any guidelines there, do follow them.
A lot of professors (especially at the type of institute I infer you are at) simply don't respond to these mails due to time constraints. This may or may not be justified, but it is the prevalent culture. The class strength could also be a consideration here.
Finally, I would strongly recommend that you don't respond with anything besides thanks. Close out this communication and don't worry about any adverse effects, most likely the person won't remember this after a few days. This is rather culture-specific advice, which wouldn't apply in other settings.

so you must know how to address them appropriately

Maybe they were upset that you didn't address them as "Doctor". Doesn't justify the impolite response, but some people are sticklers about that.

Yeah, there's a wealth of different titles in academia, and you should try your best to use the correct one when you're writing an email to someone.

Isn't "Professor" a higher status than "Dr", and thus to be preferred when someone has earned both a doctorate and been granted a professorship? Either way, yeah, this would be a complete overreaction.

@CodyGray some people insist on all titles (I.e Prf. Dr. Dr. x) and also depending on the professor it might be more or less prestigious than the Dr.

A Professor is not a demi-god (or full one). He is human, fallible, and as with humans you get all kinds of cases on the "Am I an Asshole Or Not?"
In your case, he hit the mark "Yes, you are - a flamboyant one". With flying colors.
To answer your question:

your email was perfect, much better than the "hello, pls snd info on crse for Fri 4. Thx J" you sometimes get. Keep that level of communication, it will be really useful in the future.
his answer was the one of someone so full of himself that he forgot why he is in Academia in the first place. Just mentally flip your middle finger and move along.

It really should not bother you.
EDIT: who would have thought that there is actually a site for that? Ah, Internet...

I would not reply to the answer of the professor, which I find dismissive; I agree with the other answers until this moment. It seems to me that the professor shows zero interest in making that subject interesting for students. Maybe they don't care about the number of the students enrolled on it. Maybe the course content isn't worth signing up for.
A better answer would be "I've checked the course webpage and it reflects the current requirements. It's similar to that book. You're welcome to join."
Regarding your email, I think you can make it shorter and you can specifically cite the course expectations/content on their webpage that you wonder about.
If you write in an email "thank you for your time", you are implying that they are doing you a favor by using their time resources to answer your question or helping you with something. Maybe they don't consider this as an opportunity that would benefit them in the long-run, but just as a waste of time.
Maybe in your email you have used an excess of polite clichés.
If you want you could ask one of your colleagues or one of us to ask the question to the professor in a new email to get a better answer. Or send the question to another responsible for the course.

Re "excess of polite clichés.": It might or might not be just the exact right way in the (cultural) context (the Swinging Sixties wasn't global (for instance, in China, they had the cultural revolution - quite different)).


text:
As a teaching assistant, how important are student evaluations?
I have seen a number of résumés of doctoral students, but only a few of them listed their evaluation scores when presenting their teaching experience.

How important are these scores in evaluating the teaching capabilities of a student?
How does one ensure that the students are sincere in their evaluations?

In case a professor does a slipshod work of a course, not teaching in depth or cramming a lot of syllabus in a short time, there is only so much a TA could do to salvage the course for the students.

How does the TA make the best of a bad job in such a situation?
Apart from holding weekly office hours and lenient grading(!), what is the maximum a TA can do, after all?

By "grade points", do you mean scores from student evaluations?

Yes... is there a different, more popular name for that?

I think the most common term is "student evaluations".  See Wikipedia or Inside Higher Ed or The Onion.

In my experience (associate chair for graduate studies for a few years, long ago, and therefore checking TAs' teaching evaluations), the TA evaluations tend to be better when the professor is doing a lousy job. I"ve seen student comments like "without the TA, I wouldn't have learned anything."

This is an excellent question, for faculty as well as students!

How important are these points in evaluating the teaching capabilities of a student?

Obviously this varies significantly in different departments and institutions, but in my experience, the scores themselves are not that important.
My department does pay attention to these numbers when allocating future TAships, but definitely not in isolation.  Narrative reviews from the instructors carry significant weight.  The people doing the assignments also know which courses are unpopular, and which instructors are irresponsible, and adjust the evaluation accordingly, at least in principle.  In practice, there are only three evaluations: (1) truly outstanding TAs, who are considered for teaching awards; (2) truly abysmal TAs, who are not rehired, at least without retraining (and since we have a TAship requirement, this has teeth); and (3) everyone else.
When we evaluate tenure-track faculty candidates, teaching ability is usually a second-order concern, but it is a concern.  Poor evaluations on an applicant's CV are a red flag—why didn't they just omit them?  Good evaluations are mostly a signal to look further.  Teaching awards carry more weight.  Recommendation letters that directly praise the applicant's teaching ability — with concrete and credible details — are even better.  Similar issues arise when evaluating faculty for tenure, with one big difference: omitting the teaching scores is not an option.

How does one ensure that the students are sincere in their evaluation?

You can't.  Sorry.
However, I believe you can increase the fraction of sincere (and positive) responses by consistently treating your students with respect.  Make your expectations clear from day one, and enforce them consistently.  Invite feedback throughout the semester, and respond to it quickly and appropriately.  Apologize quickly for mistakes, thank students publicly for useful suggestions, but do not buckle on high standards.  Give timely, consistent, and useful feedback on coursework.  Above all, do not waste your students' time; the correlation between hard work and low evaluations is much higher if the students don't see any benefit to doing the work.
<Insert standard confirmation bias warning here.>

How does the TA make the best of a bad job [if the instructor is irresponsible]?

First, do your own job as best as you can.
Second, raise your concerns with the instructor; be respectful but brutally honest.  If the instructor is unresponsive, raise your concerns with your instructor's boss; be respectful but brutally honest.  (Note: Disagreement is not the same as being unresponsive.)  If your instructor's boss is also unresponsive, your department doesn't really care about poor teaching; they're likely to ignore your evaluations, even if they are low.

Apart from holding weekly office hours and lenient grading(!), what is the maximum a TA can do, after all?

There are many more things that TAs can do.  At a minimum, hold office hours that the students actually find useful; don't just show up.  Distribute practice problems, and offer feedback on the students' solutions.  Hold weekly review/discussion/problem-solving sessions.  As aeismail suggests, write review notes.  If the instructor covered too much, distill down their main points; if the instructor didn't cover enough, expand on the key ideas they missed.  Offer to give a few guest lectures, and then give fantastic guest lectures.
More self-servingly: Make sure the students see you working to overcome your instructor's shortcomings.  If the students don't see you fighting on their behalf (even if you are), they'll write you off as yet another useless academic, like your instructor.  But if you can make them believe you're on their side, they'll reward you.  I think this is why students often reward "lenient grading"; if the students think the coursework is a waste of time, they'll see lenient graders as their allies.
Obviously this all takes time.  As aeismail says, TAs usually have many other responsibilities, especially to their own classes, projects, research, families, and sanity.  It is frighteningly easy for committed and caring TAs to find themselves being abused by less committed instructors (or even departments).  Set limits.

Did you intend to say "the correlation between easy courses and high evaluations is much higher when the students don't think the course is actually valuable."? I would have thought the opposite (although you would know better than me) ...

Revised to clarify.  "Everyone knows" that evaluations are inversely correlated with difficulty.  I claim the correlation is stronger for courses that students don't find valuable:  "The instructor didn't make me work hard to pass this stupid hurdle; he must be cool."  I prefer to aim for "Wow, this course was a ton of work, but I really learned a lot of cool stuff."

Ask the department what the average historical TA evaluation score is for your class. Then on a CV you can write something like "mean student evaluation 3.8/5 [department average 3.1/5]" A 3.8 might sound rather poor to some, but the later piece of info indicates that it is an unpopular course and that a 3.8 is quite good.

For what it is worth, my best student evaluations came from courses where the instructor was poor. In those classes (1) my teaching looked great compared to the instructor (2) I got to act as a savior (3) I calmed down their anxiety. Students are reasonable. They know who's fault it is when a course isn't going well. They tend not to take it out on you unless you are exacerbating the problem. At least this is my experience.

I disagree that you can't assure students are sincere in their evaluation.  If you as a teacher are honest about the role and effectiveness of course evaluations as feedback you will indeed get sincere answers.

From my experience, student evaluations are simply a measure of how well the students think you are doing in teaching them. Keeping in mind the phrase attributed to Henry Ford,

If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse".

note that the students can often give feedback on your current teaching methods, but they rarely suggest better teaching methods. From my experience, the evaluations are not viewed as important, but are meant more for the TA to improve their teaching skills. You can ensuring sincerity by being sincere in your teaching. If you're appropriately enthusiastic about teaching the material, the students will notice and appreciate it. Beyond that, some students will be cynical and apathetic to the process, and there's really not much you an do about it.
The best way to make use of the situation is to use it as a learning experience, as it's intended! Chances are, you'll be asked to teach in the future, may as well use this opportunity to try out different teaching methods to see what works for you.

Frankly, I don't place much weight on an isolated number; it doesn't tell me much in practice about a student's teaching abilities. That would have to be judged via direct interaction—watching them teach or otherwise interact with students. It's really impossible to expect students to be honest in their evaluation, unless they've provided comments; then you can at least see how much they've written; the more extensive the comment, the more likely it is to be sincere.
As for what to do when a professor does a bad job, I don't think that it really makes that much of a difference in the nature of the TA's responsibilities; the main change is in the intensity of the work required. The TA, along with the professor, is responsible for helping students learn the material. If the professor isn't doing an adequate job, then that means the TA will probably need to work a bit harder and dedicate more time to achieve that goal. However, the TA should make sure she is taking care of her other requirements and needs at the same time. The TA position shouldn't consume someone's entire life (unless they are paid accordingly!).
One possibility for how to do things, though, might be to prepare review sheets and guides based on the lecture material (or what the lecture material should have been). This will be good review, both for the TA and for the students!


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Do teaching evaluations lead to lower standards in class?
In the somehow recent past, teaching evaluations have become obligatory in many universities/departments in Germany. I've also heard that sometimes these evaluations are used in formal ways to decide about salary raises or even hiring. For me it is pretty clear that a purely formal use of teaching evaluations is not a good idea, but my questions goes in a different direction. From time to time I read in newspapers and other kind of media that a side effect of these teaching evaluations is that

"the solicitous professor who aims at good teaching evaluations usually lowers the level in class and gives good grades in general."

Myself I never did it like that and I have the feeling that giving an "easy" course where everyone is able to score good grades but does not learn very much will not be appreciated by the students.
My questions is:

Do you know of any evidence for the claim that teaching evaluations encourage professors to lower standards and give better grades?

Note that I am not trying to deduce that the use of teaching evaluations in a formal way to decide about hiring or salary is a good thing; I am just not sure that "lowering standards and pampering students" is a major side effect of teaching evaluations.

Very nice question. Not an answer, just an observation: students tend not to be sheep and value when they are challenged, while at the same time prefer to be treated in a tough, but fair way. At least at places I was fortunate to study, or work at.

Could you link to the source of that quote in your question?

@walkmanyi Good point! A recent German source is this Spiegel article http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/klaus-p-hansen-fuer-gelehrte-ist-uni-feindliches-gebiet-a-883389.html where one reads "Außerdem wird ein Nachweis der Lehrbefähigung verlangt, der durch das zweifelhafte Instrument der Studentenbefragung erfolgt. Der strategisch kluge Mittelbauer tendiert deshalb zu Infotainment und einer Senkung der Anforderungen." which translates (very roughly) as "Moreover, a certificate of teaching abilities is needed which shall be given by the dubious instrument of teaching evaluations. The ...

... keen and strategic non-tenure staff tends to infotainment and lowering standards." I think I have read similar claims in the "Forschung und Lehre"-Magazin of the DHV (www.forschung-und-lehre.de/) and will post them if I find anything.

+1 for asking for actual evidence. I only know personal examples of the described behaviour as well as counterexamples. However, it is difficult to link this to the teaching evaluations, because I've known university rankings trigger similar behaviour. However, also in my experience students have a very keen perception of who is in which category. So have colleagues.

@cbeleites Actually, I am also interested in concrete examples and first hand stories (of course without giving actual names or institutes where this has happened).

@BenCrowell Interesting to hear! However, where I am, all these web sites do not play any role. I have taught courses for about ten years now and I do not have any evaluations online anywhere.

I am in Germany. There are similar sites and some colleagues appear there (they seem to be more popular at some universities), but the sites are far from being any standard or "widely used".

It depends on what they are evaluating, and how.
I studied at a university in a mess of a country that was recovering from a period of war. The educational system was not just depressingly dated, it was also falling apart at the seams. Enthusiasts were trying to reform the system, and one of the bigger pushes in the right direction was achieved through course evaluations. This evaluation had questions such as these:

How often does the lecturer show up for class?
Does each lesson have a clear topic?
Is it clear which parts of the printed course materials are covered in which lecture?
Were all the exam questions linked to some printed course material?
Does the lecturer answer students' questions?
Is the lecturer available to students at any point outside the lectures?
Does the lecturer use e-mail to correspond with students?
Do you feel that the lecturer treated you unfairly at some point? How so?
Do you feel that the lecturer engages in any problematic behaviors during class? Please describe.
Did the lecturer ask you for any favors in return for a higher grade?
What are, in your opinion, the good aspects of this course?
What are the bad aspects?

...etc.
There were more questions - many were about lecturing style for example; these are just off the top of my head. Now, this evaluation made lecturers begin to come to class, made them finally pick textbooks, forced them to pick a topic for every lesson (rather than just rambling on), forced them to tell students which part of the book corresponds to which lecture so that students could read the materials in parallel. It also rapidly cut down on truly problematic behaviors such as smoking in class. Furthermore, it helped lecturers improve their performance through providing feedback on the strong and weak points of the course, at least as students saw them. Here, I think the evaluations very clearly helped improve standards in class, especially in truly problematic departments. The reason they helped was twofold: (1) there was a lot of room for improvement, and (2) the questions were well thought out, i.e. each question was linked to a particular goal in the educational reform.
I've also studied at a wonderful, well organized university where most of these questions would be completely ridiculous. There, the evaluations had questions such as:

How many hours per week did you study for this course?
How important would you say this course is for your overall academic development?
Would you say this course was easy, just right, or difficult in terms of content?
Do you think the lecturers evaluate students' knowledge fairly?

...etc.
I honestly have no clue what is gained by such an evaluation, and I hope nobody's salary depends on it. With the right (i.e. wrong) questions, I'm sure you could lower teaching standards by giving financial incentive to score well. The question, then, boils down to what the evaluation sheets look like. To the best of my knowledge, these are not standardized across universities, so the results may vary a lot.

I hope nobody's salary depends on it — Sigh.  Not only individual salaries, but entire department budgets.

Thanks for the interesting story and sharing insight. Although I was more interested in concrete examples in which somebody really lower standards our turned to infotainment to gain better evaluations...

@Dirk - I hope somebody will share that sort of data as well. I just wanted to defend the concept of evaluations, because I think it's a good idea gone bad. My impression is that it goes bad when the main goal is to measure some vague concept of student satisfaction instead of course quality. There, the student is seen as a customer, and the teaching process as an economic exchange. While this is partly true, it completely ignores other aspects of education (social, cultural, knowledge as a goal in itself, etc).

Grade inflation has been an issue in the US since mid 1970s, so welcome to the club. See endgradeinflation.org. None of the attempts to curb it have been successful so far; the practice of student evaluations is deep-rooted in US colleges, and cannot be easily modified.
The uphill battle against grade inflation has been spearheaded by University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, one of top 5 large public US universities. They put a rather extensive research effort into figuring out the patterns of grade inflation. The cause, as you observed, is what economists call market failure, when the self-motivated actions of the players lead to outcomes that are worse for everybody. The employers of the graduates, and the grad programs they apply for, suffer the most, as they cannot distinguish good students from bad students. Organizations and student societies that rely solely on GPA (grade point average) discover great differences between disciplines: the humanities end of the spectrum have been hit the hardest by grade inflation, while engineering and sciences that have more specific assessment and evaluation criteria tend to produce lower grades. The opening page of this 2000 report provides a specific figure to answer your question: about 15% increase in student evaluations associated with 1 standard deviation increase in the course average grade. This standard deviation was 0.4 on the American scale that goes from 0 to 4; at the time of writing the report, the average GPA at UNC was 3.18.
In mid 2000s, UNC came up with an idea of an effective grade, called achievement index. In very simplistic terms, it essentially normalizes each class to have the same GPA. Each student is mapped onto a percentile implied by his grade in a given class, relative to the distribution of grades in this class; percentiles across all classes that a student took would be aggregated; and the ultimate student's achievement GPA would be reported based on the normative judgement of what the university wants to see as the average GPA and the range of grades. This idea is based on item-response theory, or can alternatively be explained using Bayesian methods (a maximum a posteriori estimate of student ability). As you can imagine, this literally caused a student unrest that UNC has not seen since the civil rights movement of the 1960s (o tempora o mores... how petty motives are these days), so the faculty chickened out and ruled against it.
Still, UNC has found a way to put the grades into the context by augmenting the transcript with the average GPA of other students who took this particular class, student's percentile in a given class, and the "schedule point average" = average GPA of all the students in the classes that a student took. The above link shows a clear picture of somebody who had a nominal GPA of 3.6, way up from the average GPA of classmates of 3.0, consistently performing above the median (7 grades above the median, 5 at the median, 0 below), vs. somebody who has only be able to achieve GPA of 2.5 in easier classes with average GPA of 3.2 (1 grade above the median, 3 at the median, 9 below).
The dramatic timeline (if you know how to read between the lines... I grew up in Soviet Union and have this unfortunate skill) of UNC attempts to deal with grade inflation is available here. Some other institutions are likely to use these or similar ideas, including another high-profile public school, Berkeley. (The administrator's claim that the university's computer system cannot handle the additional evaluation method is ridiculous; I could do these numbers on my laptop.)

I can offer only personal experience on this topic. However, I can say that I read the literature on course evaluations rather extensively in preparation for a  past application for promotion. What I found was that there are passionate people on both sides of this debate. Some think course evaluations are the best thing since ice cream, while others believe they are responsible for grade inflation and overall lowering of standards. Based on my own experience, I tend to side with the latter group. I have been at the same institution for almost thirty years, and early in my career enjoyed very good course evaluations. After about ten to fifteen years, I notice that my evaluation scores began to erode. So, I started making things a bit easier for the students to get good grades, but nothing I felt uncomfortable with. My evaluation scores shot up noticably.
In recent years, the quality of our incoming students has slipped, and so have my evaluation scores once again. But this time, I do not feel I can make any more concessions to the students, at least if I want to retain the integrity of my course (and myself). At least at this point I have a good deal of job security, so I can hold my ground, even though students and administrators probably wish I wouldn't. Someone in a less secure position could face a serious moral or ethical dilemna in this situation. It is easy to see how grade inflation can happen.
In the U.S., we face the same problem with standardized testing. So much is at stake with these tests for high school students and teachers, that the whole process has devolved into teaching to the test as opposed to teaching for understanding. In my opinion, it will take a vocal effort by major public institution, and even private ones, to make any headway against teacher evaluations at the college level. That is not to say that professors and teachers are not to be held accountable for the conduct of their courses. Evaluation is necessary. The devil is in the details of finding the best way to do the evaluation. I don't think the current way is the right way.
According to some writers, peer evaluations are an even worse tool than student evaluations. StasK has written a great answer. Pay particular attention to the remark that administrators don't believe the univeersity computing system could handle the load. Administrators are quick to cite some technical limitation as to why they cannot do something. They seem to forget that they are talking to an audience that contains experts who know that their arguments don't hold water.


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Are grad school acceptance rates skewed?
Take grad schools for instance. Their acceptance rate is 8%, or seems to be so. Basically, suppose you have 100 randomly selected across the USA grad school applicants. 50 don't know what to do with their lives, so really the acceptance rate goes up to 16%. Then the other 25 will be out for unusual circumstances, so roughly, there is a 33% chance, or 1 in 3 chance of getting in. (yes, even my numbers are a bit skewed, but reasonably better)
So is grad school really that hard to get into (If you are on top of your game)?

applied = entire pop. you're missing the mark.

It could be very hard to get into graduate school, even if you are on top of your game, if you have difficulty working with others or a narcissistic personality. Hypothetically speaking, I mean.

Where are you getting these numbers?  Are you asking about admission at one particular department (say, statistics at MIT), or admission to grad school in general? Is your sample population all undergraduates, all applicants to all graduate programs (in some field), or all applications to one particular graduate program?

@Jossie I don't understand your response. Perhaps you could give a little more detail to make it clearer what you really mean.

Acceptance rates are nearly meaningless as isolated numbers, for exactly the reason you describe.  They are averaged over the entire applicant pool, and therefore they imply very little about any particular applicant's chances.
If you are trying to estimate your own chances of admission, then you need more information.  If you attend a school that regularly sends students to a given university, then you can form a decent estimate based on feedback from faculty and comparisons with your peers.  Otherwise it's harder to predict.  At top grad schools, it really depends a lot on what your recommenders say, how seriously the admissions committee takes their letters, etc.  You may have a faculty mentor who can help you arrive at a good estimate, but you'll get at most a crude approximation from grades, GRE scores, counting REU publications, etc.

So is grad school really that hard to get into (If you are on top of your game)?

For people who are genuinely on top of their game and have made sensible decisions about where to apply (based on their accomplishments), getting into grad school is not that hard.  They might not be admitted to their dream schools, but they'll be admitted somewhere reasonable.  On the other hand, thinking you're on top of your game doesn't imply that you are.
This makes it difficult to give universally applicable advice.  Some applicants should stop stressing out and have faith that it will work out OK in the end, while others need to start worrying and rethinking their plans.  We end up back in the same situation as with admission rate statistics: it all depends on your personal circumstances.

You are missing a fundamental aspect of probability theory. The acceptance rate tells me what the chances are that if I randomly select an application, from all the applications to my program, that it will belong to a student that gets accepted. What you are interested in is more like the probability that an applicant applying to a randomly selected school gets accepted. The two probabilities are NOT the same. Going back to your question

So is grad school really that hard to get into (If you are on top of
  your game)?

If you are talking about getting into a top graduate program with funding, then the answer is still "yes". Top grad schools only accept students at the top of their games and they always have more applications than spots.

Your first paragraph is wrong; I am interested in your former assumption.


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how to find highly cited articles in journals with low impact factor?
Journals with high IF get more attention, so might get "better" articles.
However I am interested in finding papers published in minor journals that have a high number of citations, say >100.
I can't seem to do this search on web of science. How is this achieved?

http://scholar.google.com/

Scopus allows you to do this. Search for the journal name and then sort by number of citations.

but I would like to do a global search perhaps by doing a double sort IF and n of citations.

I think you can do this in Scopus (see the "compare journals" option). It uses a slightly different metric since impact factor is privately owned.


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Endowed Assistant Professor vs Assistant Professor
In US education system, the university academic positions start with Assistant Professor. But there are some occasions that positions for Endowed Assistant Professor are advertised. I could not find what exactly is "endowed Associated Prof". Is there any difference with assistant professor? Is it a type of position different from tenure track or the title endowed comes from the particular funding source? There is a similar discussion about endowed chair in US system here, but I think that is slightly different.
Please let me know, whas recruitment committee members are concerned about when hiring endowed assistant professor.

There really is very little difference between the answer Chris Gregg posted and the answer for this question. An "endowed" assistant professorship is a position which provides funds for the group of the faculty member appointed to the professorship. It can be either salary, or perhaps additional funds that can be used to support members of the group.
Usually, applicants are not hired directly into such positions; instead, they are hired to the department first, and then appointed into such positions after a few years. They often have names like "career development assistant professorship" which indicate that this is a transient award, not a permanent one. If the hiring advertisement actually specifies the position as an "endowed" assistant professorship, I don't think it really changes the hiring process, except that they're looking for the best candidate who satisfies the conditions of the endowment.

Usually, applicants are not hired directly into such positions, I guess this is an unusual case. I have seen it in a recent ad in a US-based computer department that plans to employ directly from outside the university for this position.

In mathematics, at least, some departments have multiple positions called "So-and-so Assistant Professor" (e.g. Szegö Assistant Professors at Stanford ), which are non-tenure track, 2–3 year visiting positions — basically, a postdoc who teaches (with teaching duties similar to, or somewhat lighter than, the senior faculty).  I don't know whether this practice exists in other fields.  For such positions, the hiring considerations are similar to other postdoc positions.

As far as I know, these named assistant professorships are usually not endowed.  They're funded by the university just like other faculty positions.

Actually, there ARE actual endowed tenure-track assistant professorships. Several of these are found at prominent liberal-arts colleges. And as with an endowed professorship at full professor rank, these too are funded by the endowment.


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IEEE Conference Paper: Different Author Blocks, Different Information?
I am currently preparing my very first paper. Since the conference to which I am going to submit my paper to requires the authors to use the IEEE conference paper template.
The template says that if the authors have no more than 3 affiliations, we should adopt this format:

If the affiliations are more than 3, this format should be adopted.

The 2nd format is quite clear about the order of the authors, but as for the 1st, the 3rd and 4th authors are grouped together. So is there any distinction between the authors who are grouped together? Do these two formats convey the same contribution information about the authors?


text:
How to properly format and write a department/office/lab/subsection of a university?
How would one properly format a department/office/lab/subsection of a university? If say I work in Lab X of University Y, should I format it like this?
Lab X, University Y
or
University Y, Lab X? Or something else?

I have mostly seen Lab, Dept, University.

What is this for?

The formatting for nearly any type of addressing is stated ordered from subset to the enclosing superset.
In your case,

Lab, [Department], Institition, [State/Country]

The State/Country part is seldom included.

In the context of describing affiliations of different authors on a paper "Department name, Faculty Name (optional), Institution name" is common. For example, see this paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.06958.pdf


text:
What to do when professor agrees to send a recommendation letter but does not send it and does not answer emails?
I asked my professor to give me recommendation letter and he agreed to that.
However, he has not sent it for my application yet. He is not even answering my emails since 3 months.(I am sure he is alive!)
I paid the application fee of the destination university and they always send me emails asking about completing my application.

what's going on?
What should I do ?

When is the most recent email that you sent him?

I remember this frustration from when I started in Academia. Many professors receive far too many emails daily, or have so many different things they need to remember that something like this easily slips. Depending on your relationship with your professor, I would just ask them in person as soon as possible - they agreed in first place, so chances are they just need a friendly reminder (and possibly aren't aware of your deadline).

I am sending email since January, the last one was last week (5 in total)