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Having just started a Master's in Economics degree I am feeling ambivalent, how do I change paths?
This question is from a young person who feels a bit lost and who would like some career advice—and possibly some encouragement, too. I will try to be as concise as possible and get straight to the point, but I still I may not be as brief as I would like to. After all, I am to sum up a few years of my life.
My story: I am a 22-year-old girl from Italy. I have recently graduated from an International Politics course at a university in my home-country and just started a Master's degree there, at one of the world's top 20 universities for Econ and Econometrics (this is an info I put here not to brag about anything--as I am quite ashamed about and dissatisfied with my path indeed--but it is something that will turn out useful in a minute).
The issue is that I have grown increasingly miserable and dissatisfied with my university path, and I have felt so in a long time. I had actually realized that I was in the wrong place in the very first months of my undergraduate degree (which lasts 3 years in Italy), but I could not drop out and enrol in another course because I had financial support tied to any course I enrolled in first. That is, once I changed my course, I could not have applied for  a scholarship in another course or university. And as money has been (still is) a problem, I had to bite the bullet and get through it. Fast-forward to 3 years, I got my degree in Politics with a decent grade and I have just started a Master’s degree in economics, so still in the social sciences, but a somewhat different field.
I will now go through the reasons for the choice of my bachelor’s degree, what was my experience during it, the reasons for my master’s choice, and future hope and need for advice.
Bachelor's degree choice: I had decided on doing a bachelor’s degree in politics because of quite a few reasons. You may find a lot of them rather stupid, but I was only 17 at the time. First, I was hooked (and still am) on languages and politics. I would read a lot of them in their native language. Then, the university I was interested in (from which I eventually got my bachelor, and I am now attending my master’s at) is quite famous in Italy, and somewhat in Europe too, and in that period I had a rather unstable situation at home (also financially wise), so I really felt like I needed some source stability and guarantee. Then—and this is something I realized only growing up and knowing myself a little better—I realized that I was, and again partially am, very insecure about myself and my skills. In reality nothing in my academic experience, and what not, could have objectively pointed out to a lack of ability or desire to challenge myself, but I really did not even think I could have pursued a degree in a scientific field. Little did matter the fact that I got a 97% final grade from a STEM-oriented high-school. That is how insecure I was! Finally, I am a first-generation college student in my family, so I really did not have anybody to turn to for advice or support. Again, all this may sound very naïve to you, but these were the explicit and more implicit reasons that led to me making that undergrad choice.
Undergrad experience: Alright, so I am in the first few months of my degree. And I am already so dissatisfied with it! I was feeling very out of place with the subjects—always waiting for that one that I could find intellectually stimulating...That moment never came up. Everything was somewhat interesting, but I was feeling like I was wasting my best years. Always struggling to study and procrastinating to the very last days before the exam; skipping classes very often. I was feeling very out of place with the students, too. I am a rather contemplative person, I like intellectual challenges, I am curious, and I like to read a lot. My classmates where more of business-like people who would unlikely read a book outside of class. Moving out from a poor region and to one of the best (or rather, more prestigious—at this point quite different concepts) universities of my country, I thought I would have finally found stimulating people around me. Not that case. Moreover, they were often quite well-off people who would not know what struggling to make hands meet meant. Overall, I felt a complete disconnection from both my course subject and environment. I have never reached for psychological help because I just could not afford it, but I think it is fair to say that I was at least somewhat depressed and, for sure, very anxious and sad. Yet somehow, I managed to graduate a few months ago with a good mark (96%), and here I am at the same university, this time a Master’s in Econ.
Current situation: Why then did I go on with the social sciences, again at my uni? Well, with a bachelor’s in Politics there is only so much you can do (i.e., nothing). So, my thought process was the following: I enrol in this somewhat prestigious master’s that is rather quantitative, and from here I might have more opportunities to steer things into the direction I want. So, the aim would be that to learn some more maths and at the same time exploiting the somewhat good name of my university.
Which finally begs for the question: what do I want? Well, 3 years into hell and I for sure know that I cannot bring any contribution whatsoever to the field of Political Science or even Economics (in general, the social sciences). First, I find it very little exciting, or fun, or intellectually stimulating or challenging. Secondly, I cannot bring myself to share the philosophical (meaning, gnoseological) tenets that underpin this field. My final thesis was basically about the limits of the social sciences versus the hard ones—a cry for help. I am now studying for my Mathematics exam, and I am half loving studying it (so fun! So challenging!) and half hating myself for not having studied something with (much) more Maths in it.
Future path and advice: I would love to do a PhD (the length of this text might show some aptitude for that hehe). I love studying, I love thinking deep about things, I love challenging myself. There’s a lot of romanticization involved, but I know I might be apt for it. My boyfriend is a grad student at Stanford, and I would so like to apply to grad school there; and many students who did my master’s ended up there. But what to do when I find my field of little interest?
I know a friend who did Engineering and Maths and is now getting into Cryptography and Artificial Intelligence. And while I am incredibly happy for her, I cannot but feel like I would have found that much more interesting. I have not studied it formally; I only happen to lurk around the net watching videos on the subject and read some wiki articles—which I know is far from being a solid basis for anything. But boy, this sounds so interesting. But let’s say I wanted to enter this field: how could I go on about this? What is the role of formal qualifications? How should I make my moves? Should I just study on my own and…? Or should I start from scratch a Bachelor's degree at 23 (when I will be done with my master's)? I really do not know what to do.
I am trying to better manage my feelings about my choice and try to forgive myself for having made this mistake. Although it is hard, as I have spent the best years of my life in a very negative place. Even if I realized quite early on it was quite the opposite of what I wanted, again, I could not revert it because of important financial constraints. Yet I feel so excited about things, so curious, so hard-working, that I cannot simply accept to do something that I hate, or dislike, or only mildly like. Life is too short for this! But again, I do not know who to ask for help, so I am turning to you.
I am terribly sorry for having been so verbose and having robbed you of time so insolently. Yet I think I had to be clear about my motivations, my constraints, and my overall experience—in order to get more tailored answers. Still, please keep in mind that many useful info may have been omitted.
Thank you so much if you have been patient enough to get till here!
TL;DR: I am very dissatisfied with my path in the social sciences. I would like to switch to something more quantitative, and with more of a problem-solving nature. In order to steer thing in this direction, I have started a master's in Econ at a good school. Still, I do not know how a path change could work: should I start it all from scratch? Collect some job experience and then apply for a PhD and hope for the best?

the length of this text might show some aptitude for that - perhaps, but I think during my (quantitative) PhD, one of the more valuable lessons was concision (and avoiding jargon like 'gnoseological' when not absolutely necessary). The number of people who will read and understand is inversely proportional to length and complexity.

It was a joke about the fact that most (bad) literature is long and boring to read, indeed. A failed attempt to lighten the tone of the text, at this point. Also, I learnt the word “gnoseological” in class in high school; did not think it was that complex.

I think you are too focused on what you want to study and not focused enough on what job or career you want to achieve. You talk quite a bit about the intellectual stimulation of various topics and feeling that nothing is “enough”. You get excited about what friends are studying and thing perhaps the grass is greener (it is probably not). In my experience, people who do this fail to understand that degrees are means to an end, rather than ends in and of themselves. Look outside of the university. Do informational interviews and talk with people in the field. Then finish your degree (economics and econometrics has plenty of math (and machine learning and computer science etc etc) if you look for it), get a PhD if it is useful for your goals (not because of a romantic idea about the life of the mind), and build a career.

Also it is pretty interesting that you think that economics is not particular quantitative and doesn’t have a problem solving nature: using data to solve problems is pretty much 100% of what applied microeconomists do. This means to me that you are getting taught theoretical underpinnings but are not into your “real skills” classes yet.

Dawns comment is likely true, as this was exactly the case for me. I hardly know any microeconomists (my current field is natural resource economics and bioeconomics) that don’t have more empirical projects on the go than theoretical. I long for the days that data was ‘nice’ and curves were always straight lines.

I am doing advanced Maths (e.g., linear algebra, optimization, Banach, dynamic programming) and Stats (e.g., point estimation, hypothesis testing, intro to Bayes), and will soon do advanced econometrics. Indeed, I am quite happy about these courses; I just do not want to continue in the social sciences, and I am unsure how to go on about this. Moreover, I am quite aware of the numerable cons of doing a PhD, and only an interest that is slightly bigger than the drawbacks can make me consider pursuing one (on the romantic idea about the life of the mind).

But my point remains: is there a job you want or company you want to work for that would lead to that career change? Or has someone just put it in your mind that these fields of study are “better”? I say this as someone who changed from engineering to economics because of some abstract idea that economists worked on more “important for society” problems. Really the issue was that the classes were not doing a good job connecting to the relevant jobs/careers.

As hard it is to say where I would like to be since I am in a different place, I would like to work in IT; again, cryptography would interest me. There are no outside influences in that regard, as the people around me are generally supportive of my path. Regarding the job placement, my uni generally successfully places people in top US grad schools (and indeed around 1/3 goes on to a PhD); then let’s say another third is consulting and the rest is investment banking.

In the US, students usually apply for a doctoral program having just a bachelors degree. In Europe it is more common to require a masters, I think.
For a US student changing fields (within reason) is normally not a problem since the bachelors is a generalist degree with only a bit of specialization. So, someone in political science, for example, will also take some mathematics and statistics as well as history, writing, literature, a bit of science, etc. So everyone has at least an introduction to a lot of fields if they have a BS/BA.
But doctoral programs might also have specific requirements. Changing from political science to pure mathematics would be hard as the student is missing a lot of essentials. But even then, the beginning of a PhD in the US is normally coursework heavy and takes a while to finish.
Since your undergrad degree is from Italy and was "only" three years, you probably don't have many of the requirements for some programs. But you probably do have statistics and such. Changing to CS might be possible if you have a programming background, even though you are missing a lot of prerequisites.
So, for a US student, changing fields may be less of a challenge than for an international student, but you only find out if you apply.
But another issue will be that some of the "desirable" doctoral programs (Stanford, ...) are very competitive with many (many) more applicants than positions. That is an issue for everyone, of course.
So, no, I don't suggest applying in political science, but rather in something more quant based. But there may be programs that do both and it might be a good choice. You probably have some economics, for example, which can be quantitative or not.

No one should spend an entire career doing something they don't like.  And if you decide you've made a mistake, I find it's generally best to admit it right then and there and figure out to how to fix it, even if that means starting over on a new plan.
I want you to watch a video of Steve Job's commencement address at Stanford.  The part he really gets right is that to do great work, you must find something you love.  And if you haven't found it, you must keep looking.  Don't settle.  Every minute you spend on something you don't love is a minute you might have spent on something you do love.
I can tell you've struggled with self-doubt.  It's called imposter syndrome and causes smart people to doubt themselves, think they don't belong.  We all experience it but it's especially hard for women and minorities when they look around a room in a STEM class and don't see a face anywhere that looks like theirs.  I think it's helpful to realize that all smart people experience this from time-to-time and that there are some things you can do, starting with finding supportive friends, perhaps joining a women's student group if there is one, maybe finding a mentor.
I think it's quite possible you might enjoy a career in computer science.  But it's also possible you might not.  The only way to know is to explore it.  But given the lack of relevant undergraduate preparation, you may find that the only workable plan would be to start over on a new bachelor's degree.  (You'll likely be able to transfer and thus reuse some number of credits from your current degree to satisfy requirements for the new one, so it will go quicker.)  That probably sounds like, oh, my, what about the wasted years to start over?  Please don't think of it that way.  You can only waste the future, not the past.

"No one can spend an entire career doing something they don't like" unfortunately, many people (mostly lower educated) have to do this. And many do such jobs because of the money they get. Of course, this is not a recommendation, just a comment.

@user111388  There's nothing to indicate the OP is poorly educated or should be satisfied with a career they don't like.  If that's what you chose for yourself, you made a poor choice.


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I need an efficient way to catch up with all the work done in my field of interest
I have an academic problem that I'm very interested in and want to explore the related research fields. Of course no researcher knows everything going on in a field but I feel I know far too less to go for a PhD right now. I'm in the last year of my undergraduate program right now.
What I did so far is...

Read a lot of papers. They build on a large corpus of knowledge so before understanding the theoretical details I have to read all those somewhat related publications.
Read advances papers for better understanding. This works quite well.
Organize links to all interesting publications and other material in a document. Not sure if it's really useful though. I haven't had time to read things from there I didn't remember anyway yet.
Start implementing the ideas and algorithms as computer programs. Doing so is good to validate my understanding but also takes a lot of time and it would be good to get some help when I'm stuck.
Join mailing lists and groups and talk to researchers. It's more networking than information.
Take somewhat related classes at other universities since there is not much at mine. However, there are no whole courses on the problem I'm interested in since it's too specific.

This all is a lot of fun. It also obviously takes a considerable amount of time. Do you have any advice to more efficiently organize and catch up with the current state of my academic field of interest?

If it is a reasonably well established field, read books first. Doing so uses experts in the field to organize the foundation information for you.

You need to focus. Doing that for a wide area is impossible. You need to focus on a small area and then read everything about it. The "Start implementing the ideas and algorithms as computer programs." is impossible. For CS it will take you as much as six-months to implement one complex algorithm of a single paper.

Nice list.  When you talk or email with researchers in the area, ask them for their top ten, or top three, or whatever, favorite books/papers.

@aparente001 I like that idea!

the following points are based on my experience, on how to start learning about a research topic from scratch:

Common Knowledge: First thing you do is to learn the common knowledge. This is the basic that makes sense of the whole field and logically true. For this, you can read general available resources, such as books or Wikipedia. For example, if I want to start to do a research on operating systems in a distributed setting, I go and get a book about Linux, and a general book about distributed computing. Then moving on to computer cluster for example or something else, I see what my interests and curiosity takes me.
Note on 1: Don't think you are not reading research so you are not progressing. Common knowledge now was a research topic of the past, and you must learn them pretty well.
Earliest Resources(s) You Can Find: This might take a little time, but you need to find the first resources to the field. You should see how and for what this field is started.
Important Papers of the Last 20 Years: Find the 'top 20' papers of the last 20 years. See what they cited and what they contributed.
Note on 3: The last step will definitely take you for a ride for some time. And this is the whole point. You need to learn how to read and write research in a field during a Ph.D. and therefore this step is very important.
Day to Day Updates: You can join different mailing lists of different research topics, and also you can use online services, that let you know automatically via email, based on your specified keyword(s).

Conclusion: Learning the research topic and its history takes time; however it is essential to make you a good researcher who can contribute in the field. These things can be achieved by the following mentioned points.

Regarding keeping up to date: one thing I found useful is to have a google scholar account where I can get alerts whenever new paper in areas I specified are published or are uploaded to some kind of archive. This does not of course mean you have access to all new material as it is limited by how easily google scholar can find this material, But I found it the most effective for two reasons:

It scours everywhere for material, so I am not biased by few pre-determined sources (as opposed to for example only looking at articles from a specified journal homepage)
Google is the best search engine yet in terms of providing a complete list of citations (although the citations do not necessarily come from published articles only) so you can evaluate the impact of the paper in a way.

[Disclaimer] mentioning google here as 'the best' is based on just my experience, I once came across a published work regarding research impact and citation accounting/quantifying methods, will post here if I find the link again .

Note that Google Scholar alerts are based on "new to Google Scholar", rather than "newly published". I have a general alert set up for my institution's affiliation (it's a good way to catch obscure papers) and I do get a fair amount of notifications for recently included papers from as far back as the 1970s... plus a lot of odd material that gets indexed, including blogs, newsletters, and in one remarkable case a Spanish-language thriller novel.

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What statistics should I disclose when giving grades to students?
When giving grades to students, I often find it interesting to disclose some information about the grades distribution. I imagine that it helps to know where one is situated in comparison to others.
I usually don't want to disclose the maximum grade and the minimum grade, the latter obviously for keeping the students that didn't perform well motivated.
I usually end up giving the mean (or the median, should they be significantly different).
Can one do better? Information about quartiles maybe? What are your practices?
If relevant, I am teaching in France where the grades range from 0 to 20. I am interested in different situations: small class (~20) or whole group of students (~200), regular assignments or final exams.
--- EDIT ---
I am interested in keeping the students motivation high. Are there any (research backed-up) studies about that question?

Why is such a comparison useful for students? What benefit does it bring? I assume you don't use "competitive grading".

@Buffy Many students ask for it so I suppose it is useful to them in a way. Of course, a relevant answer would be "none". Feel free to elaborate in an answer if it is your experience.

General distribution seems resonable. Minimum not so much.

@Buffy Knowing rudimentary statistics about an exam can give a better idea of the difficulty level, which I think some students can take encouragement from.

How does learning that you didn't do as well as others (which should be obvious) motivating, rather than demotivating? The exam, or whatever, is past tense. What they need to know is how they did and what they need to do to meet their goals.

Numerous reasons: 1. you learn that you did do better than others, 2. you learn that you are in a better position than at the last evaluation, etc.

"How they did" only makes sense in comparison to the cohort grades distribution. It changes from one time to the other.

@bela83, you are suggesting competitive grading, which I reject utterly. Standards should be clear and independent of how any of the students actually performed. If you can't set a standard before the exam, you are doing something wrong.

I am not at all suggesting competitive grading.

But you are, actually, when you say "only makes sense in comparison to the cohort grades". If it doesn't make absolute sense it makes no sense at all.

@Buffy Let's say I get a 50% on a quiz. If everyone else did in the 80s-90s then I realize I need to study harder. If everyone got between 50-60 then I know it was a hard (or bad) quiz and maybe my effort is reasonable. People differ, and personally, I don't see how distributions are harmful.

The grade has both an absolute and a relative sense. If the evaluation is more difficult, the distribution changes. If the students collectively have a harder time with the current chapter, the distribution changes. If I am the one student for whom this chapter is no more difficult, isn't it good to know?

Can you actually articulate why it is "good to know"? Can you articulate how it is motivating rather than demotivating? I repeat, the student should know how they did in some absolute sense and what they need to do in future to meet their goals. It isn't that hard to do, actually.

I agree with Buffy concerning competitive grading, also known as normative grading. You must be very clear with yourself about what your goals are for student outcomes. Normative has benefits from a teacher’s perspective who may be trying to gauge the difficulty of an exam or what material must be revisited or supported moving forward, but over time an instructor’s experience reduces this need.  Having clear objectives for students is the superior option with little to no attention paid to peer performance (by the students).

As long as your standards don’t lower the achievement ceiling, clearly defined outcomes are desirable.  Consider the following extreme example: a freshman achieves given scores on exams, homework, and whatever else the instructor assesses and earns an A in the course filled with freshmen peers. If the exact same course resulted in the exact same body of work for a freshman student but in a course of professors in the field then the overall grade earned shouldn’t change. The scores of peers does not change the student’s body of work. The same thought experiment applies in the other direction.

On my diploma, all grades had a graph next to them showing the distribution. They argue it's to show how hard the school is when comparing grades. https://innsida.ntnu.no/wiki/-/wiki/Norsk/Karakterutskrift+-+n%C3%A5%20med+karakterfordeling

I can't speak to whether disclosing the minimum or maximum grade motivates or demotivates anyone, but Canvas, a learning management system (LMS) common in the US, displays a boxplot with mean, IQR and upper/lower bounds.

(Image credit to St. Mark's School)

Thank you. Precisely, the question is about motivating the students. Should I rephrase?

I wish I could claim my students can all read box plots...

@bela83 You asked what statistics to disclose, I gave a common practice that my peers and I had no issue with. If you want to ask about whether giving mean/maximum scores is good/bad for motivating your students, you should ask a new question, now that you've received answers for the question as asked.

First, as to the overall question about posting information about grade distributions on assignments: I do not do it. More below.

Can one do better? Information about quartiles maybe?

One problem that you may be trying to solve to give better information to students on how to map a score to a true course grade. In other words, you may be trying to avoid the anxiety of a "hidden" curve grading system from the perspective of the students. Taken to an extreme, you are wanting to avoid the case where your students don't really know where they stand against your grading metrics until you post their final course grades.
Is this is where you are trying to do better? If so, perhaps you should just post the equation that says directly:
Assignment Score --> Assignment Grade
When this is still unknown for some reason, then at least post a statement to the effect:
Assignment Score --> AT LEAST this Grade
This is NOT the grade distribution of the students in the class at that point on that assignment/exam. This is how you will map any given score to a likely future grade going forward.
Perhaps better still, fix the curve on the assignment grades before you report/return the score on the assignment. Add offsets or rescale. For example, rather than returning an exam with a 50% "hidden curve" grade and having to report that 50% --> B, rescale the exam scores so that 50% becomes 85% up front on the exam.
In short, when you are trying to avoid causing undue anxiety in students because the truth in your curve grading system is "hidden" to them, then stop using an after-the-fact curve grading and start reporting a "truth in grading" score.
Another improvement that you hint that you are trying to make is in your approach to motivate individual students to do better. Let's presume that you are solving this problem separately from the above problem. In other words, let's presume that, when a student gets a score of 85% on you exam, that student knows unambiguously that they have a B on the assignment. Correspondingly, a student who gets a score of 67% on your exam knows unambiguously that they have a C- on that exam. Let's presume that both students know that these grades are not subject to any future "hidden" curve grading (leaving aside case-by-case benefit of the doubt situations for borderline scores).
In this case, I must say that, I have never heard nor believed in a philosophy that a posting a grade distribution does any good or even more good than harm to motivate an individual student to do better compared with other options. In some cases, e.g. small class sizes, I even fear that posting a grade distribution, even in part, gives enough information for students to reverse-engineer grades for other students in the course. Being in the US under the guidelines of FERPA, I tend then to just avoid any possible downside risks, in this case that Student Joe will be able to figure out the grade for Student Sally. I do not post the grade distribution at all. You asked about practices as a function of class sizes. Perhaps this counter thought will give you also some insights to the potential harm.

What are your practices?

My first practice is to follow a "truth in grading" philosophy. I post the grade metrics before the course. I state where the cutoffs are for the various grade levels. Finally, I state that all problems on exams will be graded for completeness using the given grading scale.
What happens in practice is interesting. At times, I give somewhat easy exams looking back. I leave the scores fall as they do. On the next assignment or exam, I may push the boundary a bit higher for performance. At times, I give rather difficult exams, in some cases perhaps to a degree beyond what was appropriate. At that point, before I return the exam, I rescale all exam scores for that exam. In class, I state that I rescaled the exam because, taken on a wider perspective, it was more difficult than appropriate. I do this also on individual problems on exams, dropping or adding points back because I realized that the specific problem was (in hindsight) too difficult.
The net result (after many years of practice) is an ability to grade assignments and exams with final scores that are not subject to a need for a "hidden" curve to be applied later. This practice still allows for benefit of the doubt considerations for borderline cases. However, again by truth in grading, I am adamant to tell students that they will never get a lower score than what they have directly calculated, although they may (in borderline cases) have shown initiatives to obtain a higher score.
My second practice is a message to students that they are not in competition with each other or anyone else but themselves in my course. By specific example, I state that an 85% is a mid-B grade and, should this score be the highest returned grade on a course exam, then that is what the highest grade on that exam will be. I also purposely turn off the ability for students to see the overall course grade distributions in our learning management system (Canvas).
My final practice is a message to students that individual initiatives matter. Along this line, I am apt in junior or lower level classes to give bonus points for office visits.

I am interested in keeping the students motivation high. Are there any (research backed-up) studies about that question?

I too would be curious to hear whether giving out grade distributions motivates students or not. I would especially be curious to hear in the case that "hidden" curve grading is removed as a factor in such studies.

"If so, perhaps you should just post the equation that says directly: Assignment Score --> Assignment Grade" That applies if you know this equation in advance. Rather unlikely when you're teaching a class for the first time, or the material has changed significantly, or the audience has changed significantly. A more realistic option is to post an inequality saying Grade >= some function of Score and then only modify the grade upwards. Even that can be tricky when you are new to the line of work.

@darijgrinberg  Yes, inexperience is a factor. I account for your remedy with a "truth in grading" statement that you (a student) will never be awarded a final course grade that is lower than what I report. I would also invert this ... When inexperienced, be clear about the lower bounds, learn well what you need about your ability to grade fairly, and never post publicly what you don't know for certain. Finally, one disagreement: When a faculty is well-experienced, the preparation level of the audience is not a factor for/against making a change a course grading distribution after the fact.

I strongly agree with this viewpoint... In any situation I've ever seen where students anticipate (rightly or wrongly) a "curve", they get into the frame of mind (like outrunning a bear when camping: you only need to be faster than at least one of your fellow campers?) that their goal is just to do no worse than some fraction of the other students. Then the material takes a back seat to grade-gaming. This approach appears to be so pervasive that I've had people (amazingly!) think their 35% is maybe ok, despite my explanation of "absolute" grade ranges where 65% or worse is a big problem...

Old question, but here's my $0.02:
The distribution and other stats are useful for the instructor but counterproductive for students because it sends the message that their classmates are competitors. It doesn't matter that they ask for it.
As for providing feedback about performance, it's better to give a scale for what score ranges in absolute terms correspond to excellent, good, etc. as Jeffrey Weimer suggests. I cannot think of a single pedagogically valid reason to inform students of their relative ranking within a class.

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Is that a good idea to send an errata list to a professor whose class I'm currently enrolled in?
There is a professor at our school whose textbook I was using in class A (not taught by the professor). I've studied the textbook from cover to cover and have spotted about twenty typos (many of which are quite serious, e.g. make an exercise unsolvable). I wanted to TeX them into a list and send it to the professor yet the following two aspects concern me:

I'm currently enrolled in his class B (not the book's subject). It's a rather small class and he knows me by name. Wouldn't it look as if I'm trying to improve my standing in his class by submitting the list?
It's known to me that the professor is aware about some typos (since he commented on a couple of them while teaching from the book two years ago). Yet for some puzzling reason there is no errata list on his website. It gives me an impression that he might be somewhat unhappy to see the extended list of typos.

The professor is working in the field I'm interested in, so I'd definitely like to make a good impression (and more importantly not to make a bad one). So is there a way that sending the list could harm me?

Yet for some puzzling reason there is no errata list on his website. - The "puzzling reason" is almost certainly that he hasn't been able to make time to do this.

If your expectation and desire is that your errata should end up on a web site, maybe TeX isn't an ideal format for submitting them.

@tripleee: it's kind of funny that you post that on an SE site, where we use TeX in every single math.SE post. Besides the fact that an errata list would likely be posted as a pdf, making TeX very appropriate.

It once happened to me. The teacher gave to us, the students, a draft on a book he was writing on the subject. It was very useful to follow the lessons and he even asked us to show him the typos we would find.

If your professor is Donald Knuth, you should definitely report errata to him.

@tripleee: I was about to agree, but if it's for a (printed) book, a reasonable assumption is that readers may want to print the errata, making a PDF file in a print-ready layout the format of choice, even when distributing the errata via a website.

My thinking is that the errata you found is probably not an exhaustive list, so trying to make it production quality doesn't make sense.  Just an email would be my suggestion, perhaps with an offer to submit it in a different format.

@tripleee depending on the content of the book, TeX might be a better format than plain text, e.g. if there are lots of formulas (and if the typos are in those formulas).

Unless the professor is a total jerk, I don't see any way this could hurt.  My experience has been that academics in general are quite happy to hear from people who are interested enough in their work to offer corrections.  (This has been the case even with authors who, for whatever reason, don't post errata.)
I wouldn't worry about being seen as kissing up.  But if you are concerned you could always wait to send it until after the end of the term.
Before sending it, you may want to casually mention: "I've been reading your book which I really like.  I did notice a few typos though.  Is there an errata list posted somewhere?  If not, I could make a list of the ones I found and send them to you."
If there is any chance that a given typo is not really an error, but something you have misunderstood, you can be more delicate by phrasing it as a question.  Instead of "On page 34 you forgot to require that X is compact" you could say "Are you sure the argument on page 34 works without assuming that X is compact?  Isn't the punctured plane a counterexample?"

Yes, if your professor is a decent human being and good at his/her job, you should definitely do so – though it's nicest to ask “Would you like me to send you any corrections I find?” first, rather than baldly pointing out the mistake. It's also much easier for the professor if you accumulate them yourself and give a detailed, consolidated list rather than mention them at random times during the class. Unless the typo might hinder the class's understanding at a particular point in the class, it's also probably best to mention it privately (and let the teacher mention it as he/she feels appropriate).
I had one professor in particular who would give a tiny amount of extra credit to those who spotted typos – enough to add up if one was quite helpful! Another professor gave me a printed copy of the new edition of lecture notes after I had gone through it and pointed out a substantial number of potential improvements.
Academicians, perhaps more so than others, have an interest in making sure that their printed materials are as good as they can be. As long as you are friendly and non-confrontational in pointing out typos, they should appreciate the opportunity of making these materials better while saving time.

... baldly pointing out a mistake? Is that a typo? Can I give you an errata list?

"Baldly" is an appropriate word choice here. It means "in a very direct and blunt manner"

@Dancrumb I think that's "boldly"?

They're close. "Boldly" speaks to the OP's courage. "Baldly" speaks to the OP's approach. It's like "the bald truth": unvarnished, not sugar coated, without preamble.

In my experience, most textbook authors are happy to receive errata reports.  I've sent many off over the years, and as a textbook author I'm happy to receive them.  However, many of the reports of errata that I receive as an author are actually cases where the reader has a fundamental misunderstanding of the material.
So, when you submit your corrections to the author, please be polite and friendly about it, and be prepared to find out in some cases that the book is right and that you've misunderstood something.

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


text:
How to organize repository of common research papers for lab members?
The Problem
I am a graduate student in a research lab with several other students, and as such we're all pursuing research and dissertation topics that are at least generally related in nature. We sometimes find papers relevant to others' topics during lit reviews, and right now we're just pushing them into a shared Google Drive folder.
That works fine, but the problem is that we don't really have a way to notify the relevant students when a paper is put into a specific folder (it's a fair-size lab with several students, and we're already drowning in noise emails ... we're not thrilled about adding more and basically CCing everyone the article touches).
The Question
We're looking for a service that essentially pushes a once-daily changelog of the filenames of added papers and the directories they've been committed to, sending them to the email addresses of all students in the lab (so that everyone can look over the daily list and skim it for anything interesting).
Does anyone know if such a thing exists? Or do you perhaps have an idea to help us out of our management woes?
Thanks!

Can't you use a collaborating tool like Trello? Every time you upload a new paper on your repository, you grab the link and add a post to the students' Trello project and all people (or the students you want) get notified by email.

Are you sure file update notifications are the way to go about this? In various institutes I am familiar with (and this includes institutes with more than 50 people), a regular internal colloquium where everyone takes turns at presenting their current research ensures that everyone has a rough idea of everyone else's research topics. Even if individual people do not get notified about individual publications like this, you usually know where to ask if you suspect previous publications on any topic to exist.

If you wish to stick with sharing files at the core, are you looking for an external or an internal solution? The reason I ask is that it strikes me as very unusual to rely on an external entity (Google in this case) as an intermediate node of communication within your own local lab, rather than using an own server for this purpose that you are guaranteed to control yourself (even if only the simplest form of file sharing is provided by making a sharing directory on one computer in the network accessible to everyone, without any form of version control, fine-grained access restrictions, etc.).

@O.R.Mapper hah! A few years ago, I'd have agreed, but now that all of my university's email resides on Microsoft's servers......

@SimonW: That strikes me as just as unusual (and would most probably be illegal at my place, but privacy laws differ from country to country).

@O.R.Mapper we do have something like a weekly lab meeting, but on most days different members add maybe half a dozen (total) papers that are relevant to them and may be useful to others; we found it tedious to wait until our weekly meeting to then recite all of the papers found and then identify which students to which it might pertain, so we were wondering about this "daily notification" idea. Also, we have "unlimited" Google Drive space--one of our students is at 45Gb and counting. I suppose we could create something like a NAS, but then we still have the notification problem.

@heliobacter: Ooh, seems I misunderstood your question as I thought you were only talking about papers you had created yourself (and found to possibly be relevant to others in your group). But even so, by all means, do not use the weekly meeting for reciting single papers; you could instead use it to present your currently focused research topics, so whoever is interested in something similar can ask you for any suggestions on related work. Concerning the storage space, I didn't see that as an issue.

@O.R.Mapper oh, so in light of that your comments make more sense ha. Perhaps I should have been more clear in my question. You're right, I'm talking about journal and conference papers we find performing lit reviews for papers we're writing and dissertation topics we're working on. We undoubtedly find those that are related to one or more people in the lab (certainly during systematic literature reviews), so as a courtesy we have been putting them into a shared directory sorted into subdirectories by topic. We're basically just crowdsourcing our searches to save everyone time. :)

How about version control tools like git/github? I believe it allows upload pdf files, and can notify project members about updates.

@Greg: If I am getting the OP right now, they want to store published papers by other people in there. As such, I think the individual files will rarely be updated, if at all (i.e. there is only ever one version of each file).

The simplest solution to this problem that I can think of is just to use Mendeley (or service with similar functionality) that allows people to form groups (public or private), based on their research interests. Then, all activity, such as adding relevant papers, etc., automatically appears on group members' news "wall", plus they can set up e-mail notifications and such. For more details, see corresponding Mendeley's pages: https://www.mendeley.com/features/collaborate and https://www.mendeley.com/groups.
Obviously, solutions for more complicated research workflows will require more specialized software tools: open source, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) or custom built.

Your problem is connected with creating of the Institutional_repository.

An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.

DSpace is a software which helps you to organize an institutional repository.

Maybe you should ask someone who knows how to use the Unix command line. It looks like it can be done in a fully automated way with a three-line script (ls with output redirected to a file + diff + mail + cron).

Papers has functionality similar to this with "Papers Livfe", which allows you to create an online collection of papers with their attendant PDFs etc. and publish it online. You can restrict access to it to "Anyone" or invited people, so presumably you'd simply invite all the members of your lab.

Livfe? Does it have something to do with covfefe? ;)

Another idea: create a yahoo group.  Make sure to allow attachments.  Each student in your group should subscribe to the yahoo group, with Daily Digest mode.  Each time you want to put an article in the shared repository, simply email it to the yahoo group, with a brief description in the body of the email.
I believe you can organize the attachments in a file structure.


text:
First time preparing and teaching a course
I am a PhD student and I have been given the opportunity to teach a course over a three weeks period (2h per day, 30h in total) at an institution overseas. I feel competent in the field of the course I will be teaching, but in practice it will be my first time preparing and delivering a course (which is not the same as doing tutoring, or being a TA).
What strategies can I put in place to be an efficient teacher? In particular, I am afraid not to have enough materials to cover 2 hours of time for each lecture (but then I realize that if I am thinking that, it means I'll probably be waaayyy too fast, so that's not good). I am also afraid of being unable to read the classroom, and of losing the students' interest too quickly.
Of course, I can prepare a lot of material to cover, then just go on my way, see where I end when the two hours are over, and start from there at the next lecture. But this might be too unstructured for the students, and I have very little time between two lectures to reorganize the material, since I am teaching every day for three weeks.
If you can share with me tips from your experience, I'd be very happy.

Re: "I am also afraid not to be able to read the classroom", see How do I 'read the room' and adjust my pace while lecturing?

It might help if you could train it, at least your first lecture. Prepare it, ask some friends/colleagues to listen to it and give you feedback on the content, the speed of presentation, your style of presentation, etc. There are many important things and we can't help you avoiding every possible issue. If said colleagues are already experienced at giving lectures (e.g. your advisor), that will of course help.

Rather than simply preparing material and plowing through it, I strongly recommend taking a "backward design" approach. You can Google that, but the basic idea is to start by thinking carefully about what it is you want students to have learned by the end of the course, and working backwards to what lectures, activities, and assessments contribute to this end. I've found this to be very useful, both for myself and for the students.
As a general idea, keep in mind that teaching and learning aren't equivalent; it's easy to deliver material, but that doesn't mean that it's absorbed or understood, and it's worth thinking about what classroom activities make learning more likely. Your (present) university probably has some sort of teaching consulting group, who are probably worth chatting with. Good luck, and have fun!

Thanks! This is good advice. I think working "backwards" is very helpful indeed, as the structure of the class comes more naturally (if I want them to know this in the end, then I need to introduce this, then this, etc).

Because of the format of your class, you will need to prepare ahead of time. It really isn't possible to prepare two hours' worth of material every night if you're teaching a course for the first time. There's just too much effort involved.
That said, you're also going to need to be somewhat pragmatic in your lecturing. I prepare my material by writing out a "script" (Vorlesungskript) that reads more like a textbook. I find that I can cover about eight to nine pages of notes written in that style in a two-hour lecture. Anything more than that and I'll have "spillover." (Also, I schedule my two-hour lectures as two fifty-minute segments, with a ten-minute break, because I find holding students' interest for two hours is just too tough.)

Note that the number of pages depends on the field taught. In mathematics, for example (when talks include proofs on the blackboard), it is really rare for a professor to cover more than three pages in a 90min lecture.


text:
Where can I find hard data on students' reasons for being students?
Have any studies been done of students' motives for being students at universities?
At one extreme there are those who want to study at a university in disregard of the disapproval of their parents and friends and everyone else. At an opposite extreme are those who are there only because of the expectations of others. And there are those who regard study at a university only as a price of a job they hope to get later.
Do any hard data exist on the proportions in each of these groups or on whether some other motivations exist?

Among the motivations, I think you overlooked those who become students at universities because they want to learn more about something of interest ;-)

@MassimoOrtolano : I didn't overlook those; they're included in my first group.

@MichaelHardy What if their parents and friends approve of them studying at university? Are they still in the first group?

Anecdotal motivations that I can't post as an answer: I'm the first person in my family to go to university. I am here because I don't like the stagnancy of the "working American". I don't like the little bubbles people put themselves in, unaware of the world around their immediate self. I'm here because I want to learn in order to affect change in life beyond myself - other countries, cultures, bettering the world and future young people. My best friend from high school wants to major in computer science to get a high-paying job so he can enjoy his life. So, very different motivations.

Seems funny to ask for hard data about something so inherently subjective....  // In the U.S., I think the two primary reasons young people go to college are (a) they hope it will make them more employable, and (b) they want to get out of the house.

You would also be surprised at the number of (new college) students who don't even know the reason why they are in school. In such a survey, "I am here because I don't know what else to do" option should be available.

There's plenty of people that simply find it a convenient life style (and thus often takes many more years than necessary to end university). You get money from parents & some scholarship. You have your school routine, and you have to study a bit to do at least a few exams a year for the scholarships, but you have a lot of free time and not that much responsibility... In some countries  (e.g. Italy, :sigh:) parents are forced to pay for your education if you don't have a job (and you are not obliged to find one).

This is also country-dependant. In some countries, higher education/professional schools are a way to dodge a conscription / land yourself a marriage.

When I entered uni, that was only easily possible for pupils having passed a certain route through the school system. Most of the pupils were strongly influenced by that fact. The question was not so much "if" but "what" to study, it didn't really occur to most of us to not study. It would have wasted a lot of school years; and the people not likely to engage with "mind stuff" in the first place likely were not in that part of the school system anyway (the other way around is not true, obviously).

That said, I would find the question more interesting if it was limited to those students actually finishing with any kind of degree.

@FixedPoint : I once shared an apartment with a student who was an army veteran whose reason for joining the army was something like "I am here because I don't know what else to do". Where he came from, joining the army was simply what one normally did after high school.

@Daerdemandt : During the Vietnam war, many Americans dodged conscription by being university students. It has been said that that was a major cause of grade inflation: professors didn't want to send student to war.

This is an active area of inquiry in US academia, as market research for admissions departments and also as part of the larger investigation into student "success". Our dean likes to remind us that the main reason for going to college used to be "to get an education" but now it's "to get a job" (and thus we need to be more get-a-job focused). I don't actually know which study he's quoting, but an article out this month seems to support his contention.
Twenge and Donnelly have published a retrospective study of students entering college between 1971 and 2014 surveying the students' reasons for pursuing higher education. From the abstract:

Millennials (in college 2000s–2010s) and Generation X (1980s–1990s)
  valued extrinsic reasons for going to college (“to make more money”)
  more, and anti-extrinsic reasons (“to gain a general education and
  appreciation of ideas”) less than Boomers when they were the same age
  in the 1960s–1970s.

(Twenge, J. M., & Donnelly, K. (2016). Generational differences in American students’ reasons for going to college, 1971–2014: The rise of extrinsic motives. Journal Of Social Psychology, 156(6), 620-629. doi:10.1080/00224545.2016.1152214)
Other articles that may be of interest (by no means an exhaustive list):

Balloo, K., Pauli, R., & Worrell, M. (2015). Undergraduates’ personal
circumstances, expectations and reasons for attending university.
Studies in Higher Education. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/03075079.2015.1099623
Bui, K. V. T. (2002). First-generation college students at a four-year university: background characteristics, reasons for pursuing higher education, and first-year experiences. College Student Journal, 36(1). 3+.
Kennett, D. J., Reed, M. J., & Lam, D. (2011). The
Importance of Directly Asking Students Their Reasons for Attending
Higher Education. Issues in Educational Research, 21(1) 65-74.
Kennett, D. J., Reed, M. J., & Stuart A. S. (2013). The impact of
reasons for attending university on academic resourcefulness and
adjustment. Active Learning in Higher Education, 14(2). First
published on June 10, 2015. doi:10.1177/1469787415589626
Phinney, J. S.; Dennis, J.; Osorio, S. (2006). Reasons to attend
college among ethnically diverse college students. Cultural
Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 12(2).347-366. doi:
10.1037/1099-9809.12.2.347
Schultz, J., & Higbee, J. (2007). Reasons for Attending College: The
Student Point of View. Research and Teaching in Developmental
Education, 23(2), 69-76.

It's quite likely that students entertain a collection of motivations (and de-motivators) rather than just one, so if such data exist they would probably be highly specific (to particular regions, economic conditions, personal circumstances and so on...) and difficult to extrapolate to other settings.
That said, in terms of general or potential categories, this study of students in HUNGARY AND SERBIAN VOJVODINA lists the following motives, with interest, employability and economic reward covering most of the sample.

I wanted to study in this field because I am interested in it. 45%
I believe it is easy to find a job in this field. 13%
I believe I can make good money in this field. 12%
I have professional connections in this field. 8%
My parents decided that I should study in this course. 8%
I had no other idea what to study. 4%
I had no particular reasons. 3%
This was the course I could afford financially. 3%
This was the only available course nearby. 2%
Other 2%

Confirmed. I still have that collection of demotivators from my student days on my hard drive. (SCNR)

Your study seems to be about why students chose a certain field, not why they chose to study at all, which seems to be what the question was asking.


text:
Identifying students' purposes and institutions' purposes
I don't necessarily consider it a hardship to teach calculus or the like to students whose preparation in prerequisites is weak, but but I am offended by the practice of making it a personal policy to treat learning the material ONLY as a price paid to get a grade to put on one's resume, rather than as the thing they're there for.

I'm wondering how to identify instances of such behavior quickly when they occur.
How can one identify institutions that tolerate or encourage my position as outlined in my first paragraph above, and those that are hostile toward it?  I think the latter---where that hostility may exist---often include respectable institutions in which lots of students want to get degrees in law or business or the like.

You are going to spend the rest of your life being offended, then.  Let it go.

@BenCrowell : So what?  You seem to miss the point.

@JeffE : Could not the problem that you identify be solved by abolishing all universities, after which we would live happily ever after?  You seem to have given up all hope that that can happen.

@MichaelHardy I identified a problem with you; I fail to see why abolishing all universities is a reasonable solution.

@JeffE : The obvious alternative is to make math an elective except for popularizations or skills for which the student has a pre-identified need. Honesty plainly requires abolition of a system that pressures students who have no desire to learn an intellectual subject to pretend they're doing so.

JeffE : Do you really think it is compatible with morality to say that one is contributing to students' education, and to charge them money for the service, to encourage them to take courses that you know they're not prepared to understand, and tell them that learning algorithms for computing derivatives without understanding what derivatives are about is constitutes learning mathematics?  No one can change that system except professors of mathematics. If they're content with the situation, I should let that go?

Your original question is about the attitudes of students.  Your followup question is about poor placement and course-design policies of mathematics departments. These issues are obviously related, but they are not the same; your followup is better posed as a separate question.  To clarify my earlier point: Even the best-designed classes with the best prepared students at the most prestigious universities contain students that are in class only for the grade.  Being offended by this fact merely burns energy better spent actually teaching.

@JeffE : The problem is not that a few students don't want to learn the subject; it's that the system encourages that on such a massive scale and does nothing to show students that there's an alternative.

I understand that you are offended by students who do not take your subject as seriously as you do but that is just the way some students are.
There are students who are really interested and there are those who are not. In the case of calculus, if a student is required to take it for their non-math major then you will certainly have students who just want the grade. One way around this is to only teach elective classes but that will not work for everyone (I'm not sure it would work for any teacher).
Still, your questions are clear. How do you find the students who don't really care? I find that they usually bubble to the surface quite quickly. I tend to be quite interactive with my students, asking lots of questions. I also give them additional 'required' reading. Even the required reading doesn't get read by the students who just want to pass and be done with it. So, those students who actually read the material and can answer it meaningfully in class are the students you are looking for.
Now, as for identifying institutions I will say that I have read a lot and talked to a lot of teachers and one thing EVERY serious teacher wants is to teach a class of highly motivated students who care deeply for their studies. This is simply unrealistic and I have never heard of a teacher who actually achieves that.
I think the better question to ask is: How can I motivate a deep love of my subject in my students? By stimulating their desires, you will naturally end up with what you want. However, this is not easy and it takes a lot of time and effort. However, you seem like a serious teacher, so perhaps you can make the investment. Certainly the results, if you succeed, would likely be very rewarding for you.
My perspective is that a great teacher has no bad students. By this, I mean that a great teacher is able to motivate their students to want to learn the material. By this measure I am not a great teacher, but I keep trying.

My perspective is that a great teacher has no bad students — This is a little extreme, unless you believe that there are no great teachers.

@JeffE Yes, I agree that it is a bit extreme. However, extremity aside, my point is that it is the teacher's responsibility to do what he/she can to motivate the student(s). To the extent we are unsuccessful in our motivational efforts, I think we have failed (at least partially) to fulfill our maximum potential as educators.

"This is simply unrealistic and I have never heard of a teacher who actually achieves that." Not even in grad school courses?

@FaheemMitha So, are you saying we should stop trying? Should we say we are good enough and stop trying to motivate those students who seem unmotivated?

@earthling I think you misunderstood my question. I quoted the end of your para, which said it was unrealistic to teach a class of highly motivated students etc., and then asked whether even a grad class cannot satisfy those criteria. Good grad students in my experience are highly motivated.

@FaheemMitha I did misunderstand...should be asleep already. From the graduate level classes I've taught and the teachers I've spoken with....my answers are still the same - it is VERY hard to get all the students motivated, but I do believe it is worth while to continually try to accomplish just that.

My concern here was not mainly to inspire a deep love of the subject (that comes later) but rather to quickly inform those who regard learning the subject as merely a price paid to get a grade, that my obligation to them is to give them an opportunity to do something worthwhile instead.

@MichaelHardy: honestly that would come across as pompous, or threatening, or obsessive, or all of the above... seriously not likely to motivate. This is a great answer. Why not simply accept them as they are, and strive to nurture their curiosity, such as is - without burning out if they don't meet your high standards? What with student loans and grad un(der)employment these days, making sure they get the grade is a very unpleasant reality (much more so than in your time), and you have to accept that for your part, and work with that reality. What is a win scenario, under these conditions?

@smci : BECAUSE that is forbidden to instructors.  One is handed an obligatory list of topics and a textbook that was written not for students whose curiosity one should be trying to stimulate, but rather for students who already have a desire to understand the subject. Institutions forbid instructors to be good.

I don't think there's an easy eay to identify this behavior without students directly approaching you and making it clear through questions like the ever-popular: "Will this be on the exam?" and grade-grubbing for every possible point. Without obvious signals, it's not really clear who's in it for a grade and who's there to learn—and it would be imprudent to try to prognosticate. The results may surprise you!
As far as an institutional perspective, I again don't know if there's a way to really lay things at the feet of the institution for "encouraging" such behavior. It can vary a lot from department to department, and even faculty member to faculty member. However, one issue can be to see how seriously the department you're interested in takes teaching duties. Is it something people are doing their best to get out of, or are they trying to do the best job they can with it? Does the department encourage "out-of-the-box" thinking in how to teach classes, or is it just something to get over and done with each semester?
But a lot of it also relies on your attitude. If you make it clear to the students that you're serious about them learning, rather than just regurgitating for the purpose of an exam, the students who stick with you will probably be more motivated than if they don't think you are invested in their learning.


text:
strategy to divide the class of large number of students
Let us consider that one is supposed to teach a class of a large number of students (say 100 or more). I am thinking of this scenario corresponding to undergraduate students, but hoping for a general solution.

Is it a good idea to divide the class to a number of sub-classes and teach them at separate sessions(say, 5 groups of 20 students or 4 groups of 25 students)? What are the plus and minus of dividing the class?
What are the alternate ways of managing a large number of students?
Suppose, we decide to divide the class to n number of sub-classes? What are the best criteria to take into account to put students into different classes?
I can think of two ways of dividing the class based on grades. However, this looks a narrow judgement to me... Any way, first, each subclass is a Gaussian distribution of students based on grades. Second, each subclass has students within certain range of grades. Which one will be more helpful to students?

One obvious consideration for 1 is cost, at least the way things are done in U.S. universities. To a first approximation, all other things equal, offering 5 small classes costs the university roughly 5 times as much as one large class. I can try to explain some of the economics involved in an answer, when I have a chance.

The idea that 100 students is a lot is fascinating to me.  That would have been a very small class in my Australian undergrad; classes of ~300 were typical.

@NateEldredge, Thanks. I would like to know more about the economics involved. I have absolutely no idea about it.

@sapi,  Woow. I thought 100 would be a large  number for developed countries :) I'm not sure if you were the instructor or a student. But I'm sure I can take help from your experience. Would like to know more.

I've done this two different ways so far:

Divided the group (150 for example) into three different classes (50 each), each meeting twice per week (2 hours per session).

This allows for some interaction which my undergrads find very useful. This leaves me with 12 teaching hours for this subject in one week.

Keep the class together (all 150) for one lecture session (2 hours) which allows for very little, if any, interaction with them. Then, split the 150 into 5 classes of 30 each for one 2 hour workshop.

The workshop is much smaller allowing for much greater interaction due to the smaller group size. I can balance "lecturing at" them with holding their hand when they get stuck. I still have 12 (2+[5*2]) teaching hours for the same group of students and each student still has 4 contact hours per week.
My preference is option (2) although I find 2 hours of non-interaction (large lecture) is too much for my students. Next time I will likely trim the lecturing time down and add the extra time to workshops (perhaps more and even smaller workshops). The large lecture is more difficult to manage as my university has a mandatory attendance policy and many don't want to be there. So, large lectures can get loud but classroom management is part of the job (at least my job).
As far as choosing which student goes into which group, I simply sort by past GPA and divide into equal sized group. It's not perfect but it keeps the fast ones together and the less prepared ones together so I can provide one pace which is more suitable for the group (with the exception of the large lecture). The issue to be aware of with this kind of sorting is if the students feel there is a stigma attached to being in the "slow" group it can create problems between the students and teacher ("Hey! Why am I in THIS class!?!? You want to RUIN my life?!?!")

thanks for the wonderful response. Can I know (A) what kind of workshops are they? What are the aspects that you attend to in the workshops? (B) Does the university come in way of your plan in some way? What would you do in that case? (C) I was really worried about the stigma with sorting and a colleague also pointed out the same possibility. How can one handle that? Your comments will be really helpful.

a) Workshops focus on application of the theories we discussed during the previous lecture, sometimes requiring students to perform additional research between lecture and workshop (so each week covers a single topic). b) no (they mostly let me do what I want, as long as don't ask for more money), c) I do not publicize my basis for the sorting so some think it is random.

Typically, in the US, large classes are divided into sections and scheduled at different times throughout the day. Then the students pick which one best fits their overall schedule when they register. Registration times are typically done by class, nominally seniors, juniors, sophomores, and freshmen, with a later period nearer to the start of the semester to give students some time to rearrange. The enrollment in each section is capped, and students may fail to register for their preferred time, but that's just how it is.
Typically undergraduate students are not divided up into sections by grades, but there may be entirely separate classes organized for students that are on some sort of Honors track. Good grades and other things are required to get into the Honors track, but after that, there's little use of their grades to separate them from non-honors students.


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Removing paper conflicts after double-blind review process
I'm chairing a workshop where the review process is double-blind, using EasyChair to manage the reviews. I haven't been on the chairing end of  double-blind review before.
Is it reasonable to remove paper conflicts (in EasyChair or whatever system you are using) once the final decisions have been made? I assume this is harmless, but I wasn't sure whether it was common practice. As a PC member I would like to see the final rankings for all papers, including any I was conflicted with.
By "paper conflict", I mean when a PC member is identified as having a conflict of interest with a particular paper, e.g. because they are one of the authors, or one of the authors is a collaborator or student. In systems like EasyChair and HotCRP this hides most of the review information from the PC member and ensures they are not able to review it or add comments. Removing the conflict enables access.
(Perhaps this question isn't specific to double-blind review.)

Many, but not all, DBR conferences I am involved with do in fact remove blinding and conflicts at some point in the process, usually either shortly before or directly after final decisions have been made. The two downsides I see with this are as follows:

PC members get to see all review results, including the results of friends and students, a short time before they are sent to the authors. In practice this leads to the (small) advantage for well-connected authors that they know about the fate of their paper a few days ahead of others.
There may be cases where conflicts are declared not because two authors are friends or colleagues, but because of severe professional disagreements. In that case giving the conflicting PC member insight into the submitted paper, reviews, and review result at any point in time is a very large no-no.

At the end of the day, it is your decision as a chair how you want to implement DBR - there isn't a fixed set of rules that are given from a higher entity. However, please be transparent with your rules, optimally ahead of time. If you have not announced that conflicts would be lifted at some point in the process, I would personally avoid changing your mind mid-process.


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Teaching Citation: Are there any Journals which Fully Apply APA, MLA or Chicago Citation Rules
I'm interested in doing a little casual survey.  As many of us have been through undergraduate training where citation rules are expected to be applied exactly, and sometimes even marked as if they were mathematical equations, I'm wondering if all that learning is even worth it.  Does anybody know of any major or middle-level journals which actually demand any of the major citation systems to be applied, or do all such journals have in-house systems?
If most journals do demand strict adherence to any of the style manuals then it follows that there is good reason to teach such systems, but if none or few do, then these systems should not be taught as they are but adapted to what is actually practiced.

At least in biology, people would usually use a software (such as endnote) to manage citations. The same software would link to the program used for writing the text (e.g.: word). The format of the citation can be changed at any time; Rather than going with some general rules and implementing them, one would use the rules as specified by the target journal (or select the corresponding journal within the citation software - which will most likely already have a template for your journal of interest)

And so what about the issue of discrepancies between endnote's particular style options, and the demands of different journals? Or do you mean that you can go in and make minor adjustments to suit the needed journal?

Most likely there won't be any discrepancy for any middle-level or major journal as you can select the style of thousands of journals from within Endnote; Moreover those journals usually provide a template file on their webpage (which you may only need, if a journal is brand new); However, manual adjustments are possible at any time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbq-naXl8r4

I believe all the journals published by the APA request strict adherence to the APA style manual. Similiary, PMLA, one of the two journals published by the MLA, asks for submissions in MLA style. University of Chicago Press publishes a lot of journals, but the first one I found asks for submissions in Chicago Style.
My experience with APA journals is that they allow for fair amount of flexibility in the submission format. I doubt any journal will reject submissions that use italics instead of bold or a comma instead of a period. They will likely fix these issues during copy editing,
As for the comments on the questions that just use Endnote or BibTeX/Biblatex to handle it, the problem is that most of these style guides are not designed to be programmatically implemented. It took a lot of work to get biblatex to fully implement APA 6 and there is no BibTeX version that is fully compatible.

CSL is a recent programmatic solution that can be used with lots of bibliographical software packages, even BibLaTeX if parsed through pandoc. http://citationstyles.org/

MLA 8 is simply impossible to do correctly with BibLaTeX as it stands with how it does container formats. It might be possible, but you'd have to have citations citing citations wherein the latter don't receive a separate cite and that'd be a lot of coding for a field that rarely uses that format ((La)TeX)


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What is the correct term to indicate the category "Race" on a chart showing demographic statistics?
I'm editing a quantitative paper in sociology based on a Statistics Canada survey. The survey uses the term "visible minority" in a yes/no question asking if participants identify as a member of a visible minority group. This term is used across many Statistics Canada publications, but "visible minority" is rejected by many scholars today and for that reason I don't want to use it in the paper.
In the statistical demographic chart in the paper I propose to use the word "Race" to designate the demographic category (along with other categories like age and gender) and "Racialized" and "Nonracialized" as the two possible subcategories. I would then add a footnote to explain that these terms diverge from the terms used by Statistics Canada, giving the reason for the changes. Does this seem like a good solution?

Race is probably impossible to define unless you want to post the genetic information of every subject. What does it mean to be "Black"? I show a tiny fraction of Northeast Asian heritage, impossible to track. Am I Asian? I also might have a tiny fraction of "Native American" (actually Canadian) heritage. What am I  anyway. All such questions are fraught and probably misleading unless you are tracking discrimination. And even then.

Start here: https://www.gocomics.com/boondocks/1999/04/28 and read a few comics forward. Look for pages featuring Jazmine. There are a few other intervening.

I mean, it’s undoubtedly true that race is a social construct and there’s no “objective” question you can ask here, but there’s also an issue of asking questions in a way that users of the survey will understand.  So this depends a lot on your audience.  The answer for a census of all citizens is going to be different from a survey of history grad students.  So what’s your audience?

Please do not post questions about the content of your research.

Anonymous Physicist, can you explain why you said this? It's not a question about my research. I'm an academic editor trying to find the right terminology.

@Buffy as a geneticist, I can say that the term "race" has no connection to genetics. Peoples genetics do vary from geographic location to location, but those variations don't generally correspond to what society regards as races. Race is defined by society and the individual in some combination that is not always agreed on by both (see your comic link). Self-defined race is a perfectly good word to use in a sociology study in general (although in this case I'd agree with Dan Romik below that since the participants havn't self-defined their race, its probably not good in this case.

""Racialized" and "Nonracialized" as the two possible subcategories" at least seems very wrong to me.

Bryan Krause, why exactly does this seem wrong to you?

Isn't ethnicity a more neutral term still full of sociological implications? I am a chemist, by the way...

I’m not a sociologist, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. But it seems to me that the correct term to use in the writeup is exactly the same term that was used when the data was collected. That is, if the question on the survey form people who participated in the study answered was about “race”, then that is how you need to report the data. If it was about “racialization”, that is how you should report it, etc.
If you don’t use the identical language to what was used in the data source, you risk causing confusion, distorting the meaning of the data, and opening yourself up to accusations of making the change in the reporting because of some personal or political agenda, and/or accusations of being a sloppy researcher.
Now, if you yourself disapprove of the terms that were used in the data source, or don’t want to be seen as endorsing them, you can use a device like “(sic)” to emphasize that the term originates in the data you are using.
Edit to address rephrased question: using a footnote instead of “(sic)” is also okay, but in my opinion the footnote should explain what the actual terms used in the survey are and not just say that your terms diverge from the original ones. The main point is to be transparent with your paper’s readers so they have the information they need to accurately interpret the data you are giving them, and aren’t led to suspect you of any weird shenanigans. If you cite data from a survey, you have a scholarly responsibility to describe it accurately even if you disapprove of some of the labels used.

It isn't clear to me that this decision about terminology is taken late in the process rather than in the design stage, nor that it was gathered by another. The same question arises during design.

@Buffy I answered the question that was asked, which was specifically about the writeup. Seems pretty clear to me.

Dan Romik, you made an excellent point and in fact you put your finger exactly on the problem. The study is based on data from Statistics Canada, which uses the term "visible minorities" across its publications. That term is rejected by many scholars for good reason and Statistics Canada has come under fire for it. The question in the Statistics Canada survey inquired about people's status as a member of a "visible minority" group. But I cannot use that term in the write-up as it would get flack from journal reviewers. Perhaps I should use "Race" as the category and "Racialized" and "Nonracial

I have reworded my question to clear up this confusion. Dan Romik did understand my intended meaning. The question is about the write-up, not the survey design.

@Eggy thanks for the clarification. I edited my answer to address your reworded question.

Dan Romik, thank you, I will include a thorough explanation of the original and modified terms and the controversy surrounding "visible minorities." In fact I believe Statistics Canada is in the process of revising its terminology, having recognized the multiple problems with this term.

If you don't mind wordiness, try "Racial/ethnic self-identification". If you want to be extremely cautious, you could also try "Cultural self-identification", though that risks creating a certain amount of confusion. The 'self-' qualifier isn't strictly necessary, but does help assuage any worries that people are being objectified as something other than how they see themselves.
In either case you can use standard racial and ethnic nomenclature: White (Caucasian descent), Black (African descent), Hispanic, various Asian labels, etc. I'd avoid using 'non-white' unless you are constrained by the data. 'Non-white' is a tone-deaf relic of colonialism, implying as it does that the only important or relevant distinction is whether one is white.
P.s. And yes, incidentally, there is no such thing as race from any objective scientific perspective. The human genome is extremely restricted: a typical species of bird has two to four times the genetic diversity of the human species, and we don't see any need to divide those up into races.

The question on the original survey reads something like "Are you a member of a visible minority group?" and the two response choices are "Yes" and "No." So it's not a question of labeling the individual groups, but of categorizing the entire demographic (e.g., "Race") and the two possible answers to the question. Whether race exists is unrelated to this question, but the dilemma is that governments have many reasons for needing to identify races, like distribution of federal funding, and thus language is needed to identify racial and ethnic groups.

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


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Will retracting a paper from biorxiv hurt our future publication chances
I am an undergraduate student. My friends and I  found interesting results while applying game theory to biology. However, we have used only one datset and being undergrads can't get access to do experiments to get our own data. should we preprint anyway .Will retracting a paper from biorxiv hurt our future publication chances?

It's really really helpful when you are new at research to have someone advising you. Academia.SE can't really substitute for an academic advisor, because when you are a novice you don't even know which questions to ask. I think this one is a good example, I don't know why you'd even ask about retraction in this circumstance. I'd suggest finding a professor (you could start with people you've taking courses with) to help or to refer you to another professor or one of their post docs or senior grad students.

Yes I ended up doing just this. And am grateful for it.

The other answers (and comments) raise some good points, let me put them all together "for the record."
First, your best bet is to get some faculty supervision. As written in the comments, "when you are a novice you don't even know which questions to ask." In this particular advice, it looks like you followed the advice to find a mentor "and are grateful for it," so that's great.
Second, bioRxiv technically doesn't allow you to retract you paper. As it says on this FAQ:

As disclosed in the preprint/open peer-review settings when authors submit their paper, preprints cannot be "unpublished". "Publication" means to "make public", and once something is public on the Internet, we cannot go back in time and undo the publication. Preprints (including submitted manuscripts) will remain on JMIR Preprints in perpetuity....
Because preprints do not "count" as formal publication, there is no formal "withdrawal" process.  In exceptional cases (e.g. clearly wrong information that constitute a public health concern) we can add a new cover page to a preprint PDF that contains an explanation from the authors explaining why the preprint was withdrawn (explaining substantial errors that would render the preprint unpublishable). The originally submitted preprint will still be part of the PDF, but the withdrawal explanation will be on the first page.

Finally, there is a huge difference between a preprint server and a peer-reviewed journal. Certainly, you do not want garbage associated with your name in either; however, technical problems -- such as results that do not generalize to other datasets -- are not really a problem in the former as they would be in the latter. It is expected that a fraction of promising early results (which might make it to arXiv/bioRxiv) die on the vine before the study is completed and published in a peer-reviewed journal.

No. I would not expect any backlash from having a manuscript retracted at Biorxiv as it is not peer-reviewed in principle, anyway, and given you're not exposed for blatant fraud or other glaring questionable behaviour in the platform. Which would be so foolish nobody has done this yet.
Furthermore, I do not think there are any mechanisms for retracting a paper from Biorxiv after publication. And this is important to bear in mind.

As to the lack of mechanism for retracting a paper, here is the relevant link https://support.jmir.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031369491-How-do-I-remove-my-preprint-

No, many submit and have to rewrite or withdraw for many reasons. Do you really need to withdraw - this may be an interesting result for people to see even if it was on limited data...

Thankyou so much. Actually we haven't submitted yet. This is our first time time. And frankly we are being over cautious, trying to find out what pre prints and publications are, and what happens if we missed something. Though we are pretty sure we are right, and will probably put it up within a few days.

Have you any information about a paper retracted from biorxiv? Their system says that once a paper is published, it cannot be unpublished


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Can professor terminate student's stipend at anytime?
A friend of mine who is a last year international PhD student in the US got his monthly stipend terminated by his advisor. He still has GTF and is working for as a RA for the last three years. During that time, he has published several papers and his research results also brought in money via grant for his advisor. However, he got stuck in a project recently and could not get it done properly, thus after a few bad individual meetings, his advisor threatened to cut his stipend due to bad performance and he actually did. Although he still have two other ongoing and working project and close to graduation, his advisor still admanat about not paying him. He still need to work in the lab in order to graduate.
Can professor has right to terminate stipend for student like that? What can PhD students do to protect themself in this situation?

What both the professor and the student can do will be specified in the contract / agreement or conditions.
If the professor is within those then yes he can cut the stipend: continued poor performance after a warning may well be relevant grounds...


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Would it be a good idea to ask professor about academic standing relative to other students?
I'd like to know my academic standing relative to other students. This information would help me with:

allocating my time and effort between classes
deciding whether to take a follow up course offered by this professor.

How should I proceed? Is this a routine question? Or should I explain why I need it? (The two reasons I cited above don't sound like something I'd like to mention to him.)
Edit:

Many professors at my university post detailed histograms of, say, midterm results, so I don't think my request would violate any laws.
The only reason I'd like to get this sort of information is because everyone's grade heavily depends on their standing relative to other students, see Grading on a curve.

You can ask, but you shouldn't.  You will be more successful if you concern yourself with learning rather than competition.

@AnonymousPhysicist: I'm simply somewhat concerned about my grades and it's the system who relates it to competition, not me. For example, I'd like to relocate some of my time to the class where my relative standing is worse. I think it's reasonable and natural.

@AnonymousPhysicist It depends how competitive the environment is, or if the student is in danger of failing. To concern oneself only with learning, one must feel confident in one's situation.

If you came to me with this request I wouldn't answer you. Mostly because I wouldn't have this data compiled already but given your additional specifics I simply would not honor such a cynical request.  If you're doing well in my class why would I support your working less?  If you're not then why don't you already know this? To put it another way, if I already agreed with you that this is a way to focus your studies I would have provided you with this data before you asked the question.

"How am I doing so far?" is perfectly reasonable and acceptable. "What can I do better?" is fine too. "Based on my performance so far, do you think you'd write me a good recommendation?" is okay; that's a legitimate concern. "What's your impression of me as a student?" is needy and annoying, but not outright wrong -- I've gotten this question before and answered it.
"How am I doing relative to everybody else?" is out-of-bounds. For one thing, in some legal jurisdictions the prof can't say much without risking breakage of student-privacy-related law. (Revealing another student's grade, for example, is a no-no in FERPAland.) For another, law or no law, you are the only student whose progress is your business. For a third, "tell me I'm the bestest ever!" is needy to the point of creepiness.
Sometimes this is unfortunate, e.g. the situation of someone in an intro CS course who is from an underrepresented group in technology, is catching flak from other students, and doesn't have an accomplishment-meter calibrated enough to ignore their nonsense. Still. Look to your own work; leave that of others alone.

"FERPAland" makes me think of a whimsical fantasy world filled with not-so-whimsical lawyers and higher ed. administrators.

Thanks, that's what I was looking for. And how about this phrasing: "If the term would end today, what grade would I get?"

"An incomplete."

I'll go in a different direction from the other answers, based on this comment from the poster (which I feared to be the case even prior to the comment):

I'm simply somewhat concerned about my grades and it's the system who
  relates it to competition, not me.

Instructors should have an obligation to keep students informed about their progress in the class (e.g., it's one of the ten questions on our student evaluation form at my institution). If grades are based on relative standing in the class, and that relative standing is not otherwise communicated, then I think that inquiring about that is fair-game, and the instructor should be able to provide that information. In short: Instructors should be transparent about grading protocols.
Now, to come around to the other answers, I think that this highlights the fact that grading on a curve and relative standing is a disastrous idea, because it leads to exactly these kinds of extraneous concerns and interactions. Or worse: students being incited to actively sabotage other students to inflate their grade. Or my friend who was embarrassed when all his students made a pact to skip the final exam (and hence all get 100%'s by default).
To my ear, this sounds very old-school, because my father went to an Ivy professional school in the 60's, and class ranking was an important consideration to proceed -- but the faculty adviser would have a weekly session with each student, telling them their relative class standing, and threatening them to work harder or someone else would overtake their position. And sabotage did occur: students hiding key articles in the library in unexpected places so no one else could benefit from them, etc. Surely a grading system that reports on an objective scale, whether the student has mastered the necessary skills and knowledge in each course, serves better to focus students on the actual content of the discipline (as this example shows).

Asking about relative standing is a bad idea unless your grade in the class is derived to some extent from the relative standing. You don't have any business knowing how the other students are doing unless it affects you in some way.
Asking how you are doing in the class is acceptable if the instructor has not provided you with enough information to figure it out for yourself.

I, as one, would think very bad of a student who is "trying to optimize time allocated to each class" (presumably just to get a passing grade?) instead of concentrating on what is relevant, getting to master the contents of the course. You don't take classes to "get a grade" and move on to the next (often seen with "class passed, material forgotten"), you take them to learn.

Please take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility

authors: אוריאל קימלמן

authors: عبدالله حموي


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List supervised students on website?
As a phd student I am wondering whether or not to list supervised students on personal website (I am tending to a "yes"). Would you only list masters/bachelor student or also other student projects?
I am also not sure, how much information is reasonable. Just the name/title? Abstract? Current position?
Are there any legal issues I should keep in mind?

When reading your question, I thought of a projects list that also might include the students' names, but "Current position?" made me wonder: Are you thinking about a projects list, as well, or are you rather referring to a list of supervised students with a remark about what they did? i.e. what is the intended focus and target audience of the list?

Also, you may want to specify whether your website would be the only way to obtain the respective information. I always listed Bachelor and Master theses I supervised with the name of the student, but only because I knew these would be publicly listed by the library, anyway. Otherwise, privacy concerns might be relevant.

@O.R.Mapper I was thinking of a list like: marc smith, The influence of x to y (master's thesis), currently working at companyX; Target audience would be other potential students (and possibly future collaborators/other phd students)

@O.R.Mapper the information is publicity available during the students stay, but removed after the students finish their project

I cannot comment on the legal issues: I'm not a lawyer and you don't specify which country you are in.
In any case, I'd ask them a written consent before listing any information. In particular:

In the consent form, report clearly which items are going to be listed.
In the consent form, specify the time frame along which you plan to show that information.
In the consent form, specify that they can withdraw the consent any time and you will oblige.
I'd list only name, title and possibly abstract.
I wouldn't list the current position because it is typically subject to change without notice.