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Grades are too high for the department - what should I do?
I recently taught an undergraduate seminar course, in which each student has to read a research paper, summarize it and present it to the class. In the first lesson I explained to the students the components of the grade: attendance, summary writing, and presentation quality.
Most of the students did great jobs: attendance was near full, summaries were good, and presentations were great. Many of them did more than I expected - they contacted the paper's authors to get more information, presented movies and demos, engaged the class in discussions, etc. So, when I wrote the grades to myself, most of them were between 90 and 100.
But then, when I told this to the department vice-chair, he told me "what have you done? You will cause a grade-inflation! The department policy is that the average grade on seminar courses should be at most 85!"
I totally understand this policy - grades that are too high might show that the course was too easy, and they do not sufficiently distinguish between good and better students. Also, they might be unfair to students who took the course in previous years.
However, I am not sure what I should do now. I haven't published the grades to the students yet. Should I just re-scale the grades so that 90 becomes 70? I feel this is somewhat unfair to the students who worked hard for their presentations. Are there better options?

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Is this kind of assignment (and its relative weight in grading) typical for this kind of seminar in your department?

How detailed were the grading standards on the syllabus? Was there a rubric specified for the paper/presentation assignment? Was the grading schema (formula to convert numeric grades to letters, if any) publicized at the start?

Has your department vice-chair (or other heads of the department) specified what they expect you to do for this semester's students?

How did this end up?

@Aruralreader I did not rescale the grades; I promised the vice-president to make the course harder next year.

Nice! And thank you kindly, @ErelSegal-Halevi, for this update.

One really wants to say that the vice-chair is an idiot, but I will refrain. The policy is idiotic in any case. I've taught at places in which nearly every student excels on every measure I could devise. Why would I want to pit one student against another for the purpose of an artificial "average"? They weren't average.
If you have the twenty best people (students or employees for example) in the world and you measure them in any single way, then half of them will be below average. Just how fine can you make the graduations so that someone can be "called" worse than someone else.
On the other hand, if the average, as measured over several runnings of the class, is around 85 and if there are clear differences in behavior and outcome, then "rewarding" everyone equally is also idiotic.
You set a standard. People met it. The standard was not that you must do "better" than someone else. If you change it now you have an ethical failing.
I hope you have enough standing in the university and in the profession that you can stand up to such unfair and unethical suggestions. If your group of students was exceptional there is no reason not to mark them as exceptional.
If you want to lower the average in future, with a different group of students, make the course more demanding.
But if you change the grading structure after they have finished their work then you are doing evil, not teaching.

OP should ask whether the students were good compared to, say, OP's own expectation of themselves when they were a student? If so, they can try this argument to stand their ground. Or else, they need a mandate from the chief of vice to commit the sin of "p-" - cough, cough - "mark hacking". As a young lecturer I once refused to lower marks "because I would not punish students for working motivatedly and hard and thusly doing well"; I was told off for "being unfair to the fellow lecturers" (yes, indeed), but my marks stood. I do not recommend to do so without a good gauge of OP's standing.

+1 to the answer above. The academics in question should look into why corporations are abandoning (well....good corporations) this same process under a different name: stack ranking

@NKCampbell, yes, different context, of course, but it only makes sense to fire someone if you can replace them with someone better. But on any single (or aggregate) scale, someone is always "worst". So, you can get worse on average with stack ranking over time if the new hire isn't better than the old employee.

@Buffy It's actually much, MUCH worse than that.  Stack ranking means the best way to keep your job is to sabotage someone else's work.  You just changed everyone from working towards a measurable goal (which already has weaknesses, like gaming the metric), to everyone trying to work against each other (which is outright toxic).

+1 for"But if you change the grading structure after they have finished their work then you are doing evil, not teaching." At my institution this is grounds for a student grade grievance for arbitrary and capricious grading, and can be considered academic misconduct. Assign grades the way you told the students you were going to.

@BenNorris you, and I think also Buffy, are talking about something that sounds quite different from what OP is asking about. There is no indication in the question that OP is considering doing anything like “assigning grades in a different way than what he told the students he was going to”. He is considering recalibrating the grades, i.e., changing the function mapping quality of presentation/writing/etc to a numerical score. If that function was not explicitly told to the students, he has every right to change it up to the very last minute. In fact, such last minute decisions ...

... are extremely common, and I have never seen anyone argue that they are unethical, inappropriate, evil, or that a grade grievance based on such a decision has any chance whatsoever to succeed. What matters from the point of view of ethics is that: 1. the instructor follows to the letter their own grading policy that they explicitly communicated to the students, and 2. the instructor’s decisions are made in good faith and out of a sincere desire to have the grades most fairly and accurately represent their evaluation of the students’ abilities.

@DanRomik You call it recalibrating, but this certainly seems like grading on a curve: Because everyone did well, we're recalibrating the average to fit what we think it should be. "Many of them did more than I expected - they contacted the paper's authors to get more information, presented movies and demos, engaged the class in discussions, etc." Your grade: C, Although you did exceptional work and exceeded expectations, others did more/better than you did at exceeding expectations. Tough luck. Talk about moving the goalposts.

@TemporalWolf call it what you like. I have expressed my position to the best of my ability within the limited space of this discussion, and don’t have anything to add.

@DanRomik: I will argue that (while extremely common), the practice you describe is indeed unethical, inappropriate, and evil. E.g., my letter to the editor of Thought & Action in 2006. Most best-practices I've seen recommend documenting the number-to-letter formula up front on the syllabus (e.g., Yale). The "recalibrating" argument is simply word-play. The standards for a particular letter grade should be, and in many cases are, made known beforehand.

@DanielR.Collins that’s very interesting, and there’s a lot I can agree with in your critique of grading on a curve. However, I believe this thread is not an appropriate venue to discuss the topic. For one thing, everyone seems to have their own idea of what “the practice I describe” even refers to, which in many cases is quite different from what I actually meant, and I don’t have the space to describe things in sufficient detail so that we can all be sure we are talking about the same thing. Anyway, maybe some day we can debate it in some other thread. Thanks for your comment.

@DanielR.Collins PS your letter to the editor link was broken, here is a corrected one.

Excellent answer. "half of them will be below average" is wrong, though.

@Dan Romik I'm not sure I follow. I thought a grading policy is a calibration, but for you these seem to be different things. Is that what you mean? And how so?

@DanRomik I think we agree more than disagree, in that the instructor is ultimately responsible for deciding the scale against which everyone is evaluated, and that scale is usually not (completely) set in stone. I just object to factoring in a department "expected average" or class average into that function... that seems to me to violate "2. the instructor’s decisions are made in good faith and out of a sincere desire to have the grades most fairly and accurately represent their evaluation of the students’ abilities." I wanted to clarify I object to only that very narrow piece.

Practically speaking, your first sentence does not refrain.

@EricDuminil the median and the mean are each averages. Half will be below the median. ( Those that live by pedantry, fall by pedantry :)

@fectin 20 excellent students. 19 students get 100 points, 1 student gets 99. Only 1 student is below average. Either with median or mean.

From this non-academic's point of view, grading on curve seems antithethical to anything grades are supposed to serve. Given that a course doesn't always normally distribute across skill levels, you could have one course in one year where every student is really execellent and another where most students are poor. Now with grading on curve you have excellent students getting worse grades then their poorly performing peers? Madness.

@EricDuminil: Now you're cherry-picking examples! While much fewer than half of the students are below the median, none of them are above the median either. It’s just a terrible example to illustrate the issue for a practical grading scenario.

@DavidFoerster: That's the thing with mathematics. One counter-example is enough to disprove a proposition. My example wasn't even so far fetched. If you take the twenty best people in the world, it's probable that many will get the same note : the highest one.

@EricDuminil There is some noise in the grading process so by this token some of the best get some variation and thus get lumped in with failures. So grading can never guarantee the situation above.

@joojaa: Don't shoot the messenger ;) "half of them will be below average" is wrong, that's it.

I second: vice chair is an idiot.

From a mathematical point of view, the problem that they are trying to solve with a policy that attempts to enforce a maximum/minimum average class value is the wrong problem. Statistically, you will have plenty of variation from class to class as to good classes and bad classes. If the general guideline is that you want an "average" student to receive an 85, that is fine, but you will get classes where your students excel abnormally, and you will get classes that are a bit behind the grade, and fluctuate the other way. This is even more common, in fact, because when an entire class is doing badly, they have more trouble getting help from their peers, whereas when a class is excelling as a whole, friendly tutors are easy to come by and the performance of the under-performing students rises.
Forcing any individual class to conform to an exact standard like that flies in the face of statistics. I would take my department head and go talk to the head of the statistics department, and rework the policy so that it takes into account things like standard deviation within a class, the tendency toward positive or negative feedback cycles, and outliers.
This is an academic setting. It can be easily recognized that the existing policy does not meet scientific rigor, and there are experts a few rooms or halls away who can help.

That’s a very nice way of framing the issue. Indeed a blind insistence on a fixed average grade that ignores statistical variations in performance levels between different groups of students would be deeply misguided.

@DanRomik Remind me to invite you to visit some UK universities if you have sabbatical leave coming up... ;-)

Good points here, I will add (as one who was assigned the lower performing classes & students) that classes below the average also end up covering less material or having to pick or choose which material to cover in depth (because you need to scaffold learning to cover gaps in their understanding). While, those performing above the average allow you to cover more in depth as there is both less scaffolding (less gaps) but you can go more in depth with the fewer students who need that. @DanRomik  I have definitely seen this in US universities.

Downvoted because what you are saying flies in the face of statistics. The bigger the 2 groups are more likely it is that they will have the same average on same problems. Not to mention that even if differences exist they are not of the magnitude that OP describes.

@NoSenseEtAl "The bigger the 2 groups are the more likely it is that they will have the same average" Yes, exactly. The original poster did not post their class size, but many graduate seminars have limits of 15 or less students. That is no where near a high enough sample size to expect any kind of real conformity. In a class that small, each student accounts for 7% of the class average, meaning that just 1 or 2 extraordinary students can completely throw the average. If this were a class of 300, then large numbers apply, but in a small class, there is just too much deviation.

Based on your description of what took place, it sounds like the reason most of the students will get a grade between 90 and 100 is because according to your best judgment they genuinely deserve it. If that is indeed your belief, you don’t need to do anything other than to publish the grades as they are. After all, the department charged you with teaching a class and grading it in the most fair and accurate way and to the best of your abilities, and that is what you have done. I would simply recommend, before publishing the grades, to make sure that you are not violating any formal policies the department may have that mandate a certain distribution of grades or range of average grades; and, since you are going against the vice chair’s opinion, it may also be advisable to either discuss the matter some more with the vice chair and try to reach a consensus as to the desired course of action, or to make sure you are comfortable with going against the suggestion of your senior and that you will not suffer any adverse career consequences as a result, before proceeding.
If on the other hand the premise that the students in fact deserved the good grades you were going to give them is not something that you strongly believe in or are sure you can defend if challenged, then I think it’s reasonable to follow the vice chair’s suggestion and curve down the students’ grades to reach an average grade that is in keeping with historical norms in the department. After all, if this year’s students are no more talented than, and worked no harder than, last year’s students, then having the average grade remain the same across successive years does sound like the most fair grading methodology.
To summarize, it all depends on your personal convictions regarding what the students deserve. Try to do what you thinks is the most fair for the students, while being attentive to the broader concerns of others in your department.

I think changing the grading structure after the course ends, to make it less generous, is completely inappropriate and can't be defended. It is breach of contract, in my view. The fact that the students don't yet know their grades is immaterial. If I work hard and believe I've done all that was required for a grade and you tell me, no, you get a lower grade, I don't think you can defend the decision.

@Buffy grades haven’t been published yet, so all that’s happening is that OP is making an internal decision between himself as to the calibration of the grades. Instructors do that all the time and it’s neither inappropriate nor requires defending, so I don’t understand what you’re talking about. It’s not “no, you get a lower grade”, it’s “here is the numerical score that I’ve decided, after considering all relevant factors, most faithfully represents my evaluation of your work”.

From the student's standpoint that sounds like a game with secret rules in which their work and effort is only one component of grading. The other being some hidden and mysterious process. I don't grade like that. My students knew exactly where they were at all times and had an opportunity to improve their grade if they didn't like what they saw. (Retired now, so past tense). I can play evaluation games at a lower level of granularity (this paper is worth 80...) but when the course ends, they get what they earned. No question.

@Buffy by the way, plenty of students “work hard and believe [they]’be done all that was required for a grade” but still don’t deserve that grade. What matters is not what the student believes, but what grade their instructor decides they deserve (assuming the decision is made in good faith), and whether the instructor misrepresented the way his/her grading decisions would be made. Even if OP revises the grades prior to posting them (again, assuming he is making good faith decisions to calibrate grades in pursuit of maximal fairness), there is no evidence to suggest students were misled.

Still (strongly) disagree. See the note about granularity above. You are dangerously close to making grading purely subjective. You earn what I say you earn. It is a bad practice. There should be no confusion in the student's mind about their standing and progress.

@Buffy thanks for your opinion. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.

@Buffy I like and have upvoted both this answer and yours. I take issue with your comment here that Romik is "dangerously close to making grading purely subjective". In the course of my 60 years of teaching I came to believe that grading really is mostly subjective. I know mine was, after staring at spreadsheets with spuriously precise numbers.

@DanRomik, it seems you're essentially saying, 'do what you've done unless you think you should do something different.' I must be missing your point because that doesn't seem helpful.  Maybe I just can't think straight tonight.

@CramerTV I’m saying “do what you believe is right”, but I can’t recommend a specific course of action since OP did not exactly specify how strongly he believes the students deserve the precise grade he was going to assign them. I suspect he may not even have thought about this question while writing the question. So what my answer tries to do is to clarify what are the parameters on which the correct action to take depends, and asks the OP to figure out those parameters for himself (only he can do that part unfortunately).

@DanRomik, fair enough.

Academia is more the perspective of teachers and then it's easy to say this - but not if you see it from the other perspective. I know if I would go back to being a student, I would 100% prefer @Buffy's approach. I'm sure you also had some students tell you they like your lectures, but that's certainly not because of this practice here. I assume you stand by your methods enough to put it in your course description - your students should know they can solidify their grade by sabotaging other students!

@R.Schmitz you are reading things in my answer that aren’t there. Sabotaging other students? What nonsense. And what do you mean by “your methods”? You know nothing about what “my methods” are. I simply gave some suggestions to a fellow teacher about possible ways to deal with a tricky situation. Many people here also seem to have a profound misunderstanding about what OP is asking about (see my comment below Buffy’s answer), perhaps due to a lack of clarity in the question. By the way, since you accuse me of lacking the perspective of a student, I’d respond by pointing out that students ...

... lack the perspective of a teacher, and in particular one common misconception students have is to think that grades are some scientific, objectively-determined quantity, so that if at one point I contemplated giving someone a 90 for a presentation and then before publishing the grade privately changed my mind and decided an 85 was a more accurate numerical representation of the quality of their performance, then I am committing some evil, mortal sin. Not so.

@DanRomik It's very simple: In the given situation, if OP would go with lowering the grades, a student could have prevented getting a lower grade by sabotaging their peers to the point that the average was already 85. What I mean by "your methods" is what you're admitting to do here, but if you lied, I indeed know nothing about them. Concerning "profound misunderstanding about what OP is asking", that might be an explanation: The question is about a teacher who already decided on certain grades for some exceptionally good students. Now the department vice-chair advised them...

...to get the average closer to or below 85. Take note: 85 is not the historical statistic for this course, it's an arbitrary number for all seminars. The OP is unsure whether to disregard their professional evaluation in favor of achieving that average - but you seem to assume that OP is asking themselves if they graded too highly. On a sidenote, that your grading is not relying on solid criteria which knowledge a student has to display and is more an educated guess, which you won't be able to protect from your biases (gender, race, "teacher's pets" etc) just makes me sad.

@R.Schmitz Your final comment suggests that you have in fact never had to grade any significant amount of work, seeing as you are under the impressions that what you describe is in any way feasible.

@TobiasKildetoft That really sounds like somebody who has given up, but the upvotes seem to agree with you. I'm tired of fighting this pessimistic view, so I'll just accept that I severely overestimated the connection between academic achievements and skill. My partner currently has to work with a Phd from the USA and she's dumb as bread - they lost one of six data points because she didn't read the instructions and was somehow unaware that fresh, undried plant samples in a plastic bag will get moldy if they're not preserved. But somehow, I still believe...

"In the first lesson I explained to the students the components of the grade: attendance, summary writing, and presentation quality." If I were a student that had criteria detailed by my professor for what constituted a high grade, met those criteria, then received a lower grade, I would feel seriously betrayed by the institution and my professor. It's honestly baffling to me that people can suggest lowering grades based on "historical norms"

@DanRomik: given OP’s description of the situation, the statement you suggested in the second comment would be a lie.  The truth would be, “This is the grade my boss said you should have instead of my evaluation of your work.”

Dan, I think@ Buffy's complaint (or, at least, mine) is that by grading this way, you stop taking objective measurements of the quality of a student's work. If I score a 95 on an assignment, that should be the grade I get. But by adjusting the grading scale (with or without me knowing), then if another student also scores a 95, you'd have to go back and change our grades to ~90s to fix the curve. It's no longer an objective measurement of my understanding or ability to perform the work on the syllabus; it's a subjective measurement of my understanding compared to my peers, which isn't the deal

This is the answer. Setting any number as a target is bonkers. There should be no standard on how difficult the class should be. You have a subject to teach. If you have taught it effectively then your students should be able to reflect that through adequate testing. If adequate testing demonstrates your students as a whole did a great job learning the material then you are a great teacher and should be proud of yourself.

You are in a less than ideal situation.
This happened to one of my undergraduate professors, who I had for a year long course (actually, two back-to-back semester long courses). The department told him his average grade for the course was too high after the first semester. The professor told the department he would change his grading in future years, but would keep the same grading for the second semester course because we were the same group of students. This was my professor's first year teaching at my university. I respect him and still keep in touch with him to this day.
If you are unwilling or unable to stand up to your department, I would turn the question on your department and ask them how to handle the situation and make them own the decision if they want you to lower grades. Also, hopefully you have a mentor at your university who can help you with local politics. I would add the warning you might accidentally burn bridges in your department if you do not handle this well.

Grades are too high for the department - what should I do?

Make the class harder next time you teach it.
Set the bar higher in terms of learning objectives and challenge your students to meet that higher bar.  Continue whatever teaching strategies you were using to promote that engagement, learning, and quality work among your students.
If there is a formal policy requiring a certain distribution of grades, obtain that policy and share it with the students.  Share with the students what their grades would be without that policy and what they are with it applied.  Tell them where the policy comes from (i.e. which authority/group within the university) and, to the extent you understand it (maybe ask the vice chair for some help here) the reasoning behind it.  Then the students can organize to lobby for a change in the policy if they want (as other comments/answers have highlighted, there are good reasons to do so).
If there is not a formal policy requiring a lower distribution, issue the grades as they stand and just use this comment from the vice chair as a feedback point for you to raise the bar for the next class.
If you think the bar is already quite high, and students are meeting it with exceptional work, share some of that exceptional work with the vice chair and offer to ask students' permission to highlight their work in appropriate public promotions of the department's educational programs as examples of what students from your department are successfully able to do.
The most important outcome is students gaining knowledge and abilities they didn't have before.  If you can show impressive success at that, and the department can show this to the dean, provost, prospective students, current students' potential employers, etc.,  the educational mission is a demonstrable success.
Regardless of the grading policy, be sure to give the students the positive feedback you feel they deserve.  They worked hard and exceeded the standards you set and deserve praise for that.

+1 for "Share the exceptional work", Sometimes an inspiring instructor meets a hard-working, creative class, and a high number of A's is the result.

Back when I was in the military, I was in a Data Processing A school and has the (mis)fortune to be in a class full of people who knew what we were doing. Yes, we totally blew away the lifetime average of the school, and until the program was revamped due to rate changes, we were mentioned to having had set the highest they've seen, and dared other classes to do better.
Don't change it to a curve. There is nothing in the curriculum or subject matter that has them competing with each other, so that should not be part of the grading.

Giving high grades doesn't cause grade inflation. Grade inflation is where you give higher grades for the same quality of work than the year before. I assume he does understand that but what he wants is to avoid having to explain in the future why grades went down one year.
I think a good way for your department to handle this would be to have a number of other members grade a random sample of your class and move the average accordingly. Better still would be them at the same time grade some previous years samples so the grades are 'calibrated' based on the previous grades.

If there is more than one class, with more than one teacher/lecturer/tutor marking, then you can cross-mark a sample of each group to establish a baseline. This is known as moderation.
You could do a similar exercise if, in previous years and under the same syllabus/criteria, there is student work available as a comparison.
There is a school of thought that says you should never give 100% for a submission because there is always something that could be improved. I disagree with this because if the student addresses all the criteria and meets or even exceeds the standard set then they deserve the credit.
It's like going to work, doing your job to the best of your ability, delivering what was asked (or more) and your employer saying that you're only going to be paid 90% of your salary because there is always something that you could have done better. Nobody would stand for that.
It's the same flawed argument that if you grade a large enough sample of students on a normal distribution then half of them are below average. You don't fail half of the students on this basis because there are modifiers to the sample - not everyone has to take the class, the group of students in the class have progressed to a certain level and those who could not meet the standard are no longer in the group, etc. The students in the class are already at the upper end of the distribution.
The students should not be penalised for delivering what was asked. I would discuss how to address it in the future but submit these grades as they are.

Let's set aside your vice chair's use of the term "grade inflation".  No, that term means something else, as PStag has already pointed out. The important thing to know that he's telling you your grade distribution is off from department norms.  He's saying he thinks you're an "easy A".
It's up to you to decide what to do with that information.  He may or may not be right and you may or not care, especially depending on whether it's a grade on an assignment where everyone gets an A (so what) versus a final grade in a course.
You're the instructor, you decide your students' grades.  This is solely your responsibility and your call, nobody else's.  If you're satisfied your grading is fair and correct, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.  You have to call 'em as you see 'em.
But most instructors do like to keep their grading in line with their colleagues'.  Most of us would like to avoid students thinking there's a grade advantage to one instructor over another.  Also, there are a lot more students than instructors and we expect that with a class-sized sample, we can be more confident of what the distribution of A's and B's should be than of whether an assignment or exam we just wrote will turn out to be harder or easier than we expected.
So you might reach out to your colleagues or bring up the question at your next department meeting, asking others in the department how they set their curves.  It might be helpful to know more about how your colleagues decide grades.
But let me get to the real bottom line:  If everyone gets an A, it is likely, as WBT argues, that the material was too easy.  It is your job to match the material to your students so as to be able to make that distinction.  When I read your description of the assignment, it sounded easy to me and I wasn't surprised by what happened.
If it were me, I'd make the project more difficult somehow, add more structure, more hoops for the students to jump through, a more fine-grained rubric with pickier grading, whatever it takes to push the students enough that you can differentiate their performances.

+1 on all counts. I'll note that being "demanding" and being "generous" aren't inconsistent. But it usually takes a smidgen of "inspiring".

"we expect that with a class-sized sample, we can be more confident of what the distribution of A's and B's should be"... I was disabused of this notion a few years ago. I had two sections of the same course, meeting on the same days, receiving identical lectures and exams, etc. On the (uniform department) final exam, 23% passed in one section and 60% in the other. (This being consistent with other assignments/exams; N = 25 in each section.) I'm pretty sure that student performance is often dependent on the section they enter.

@DanielR.Collins Twenty-five is a very small class.

The sentiment of the vice-chair is really quite alarming and very sad: He should have said "What have you done? The engagement with your course is fantastic! I think it would be really valuable if we could have a discussion about your overall approach, and your methods of teaching and assessment and see if we can implement some permanent changes for the seminar in future years, and perhaps on a wider scale in the department."
Of course that's in a perfect world where everyone has plenty of time for workshopping and professional development, and the vice-chair isn't stressed out and run off their feet and isn't able to see past the next fire they have to put out. :)
That, said, I think you should take this tack: Basically, talk about how happy you are with how it's gone, with how engaged the students are, and how this certainly gives you the perfect opportunity to increase the difficulty/scope next time and that you have some guidelines/recommendations for the course in the future to help make it so effective every time it's offered.
Basically, act slightly naive, but completely positively: relentlessly keeping focus on the benefits that have come solely from your hard work, and those that are still coming

If the grades are deserved as you state, and within the marking framework for the course, then hold the line and keep the grades as they are. It is not the fault of the students that they all achieved well within the framework that was set before the semester started, therefore, they should not be 'retrospectively punished' in their grades for doing what they were asked to do, and ultimately doing it well.
This situation does pose a series of opportunities:

Restructuring the coursework/assignments
Reframing acheivement levels in the marking criteria
Department wide review to ensure parity across the student assignments for different courses

In all my lecturing roles, these periodic reviews were undertaken on a fairly regular basis e.g. every year for small adjustments, every 5 years for a full course overhaul.
In your case, as I said, you must maintain the grades as they were deserved in this instance, but for next years cycle of teaching, make sure you have set clear expectations in what is needed to be done to acheive each grading level through a marking criteria matrix (and make sure the students can access this), and structure the coursework, so that additional work can earn extra credit. Students at different levels of abilities will then work at their appropriate level and that will be reflected in a broader distribution of grades.
If however, they all complete the work within the framework you set, complete the extra credit work, and all at a high standard - then they deserve the high grades.

The question of distribution of a good (in this case grades) has been extensively discussed in public finance. Warning: if you consider the way economists usually handle questions of distribution cynical, you may not want to continue reading and save yourself from throwing a fit.
Here is how this problem would be addressed from a public economics standpoint. Consider obtaining data on the performance of the students in other classes. If the students consistently scored highly, you may present this as evidence to the department that high grades are justified. If your course is new and has an exotic title you may have a sample of students that is not representative of the overall student pool. This violates the idea that grades should be independent across courses but throwing away (potentially) useful data would be irrational.
However, you may also find out that your students actually perform very poorly in other classes. In this case, you may ask yourself the question whether the criteria by which you score the course are likely to be uncorrelated (or even negatively correlated) with performance in other courses. For example, if you teach an acting class to econ majors...
A third reason why students performed well could be that your teaching style is very motivating or the topic of intrinsic interest to the students. In this case, you need to decide for yourself (or by department policy) what you consider the function of grading the students. (This is where the cynical bit starts.) If you consider grades only to be a job market signal of a student's ability, you may not want to give high grades if the achievement was not due to ability but due to your teaching style/course content. Notice that in most countries grades have exactly that function. Better grades mean (on average) easier admission to further degrees, more job interviews, better jobs. If instead you consider grades to be a measure of the degree to which a student understands the material, you may insist on giving high grades. Just remember that in this case you are perhaps slightly distorting the job market outcomes.
Now here is a strange bit from public finance. You may also care about interpersonal equity between students. If you reward students with high grades, then students who could not attend your class (class size restrictions, limited information) are disadvantaged. Here things become a bit complex. First of all, you would need to check if your student sample is currently worse off or better off than the remaining student pool. Next, you need to balance the efficiency loss due to a worse signal against a potential improvement in interpersonal equity. Luckily, if you do not have any information about the expected lifetime income of your student pool, you may simply ignore this aspect.
tl;dr: I would be highly skeptical of my own grades if they were to vastly differ from the department's and consider it important to find out the reasons for such differences. Once you have found out the reason, you will know whether you want to act on it.

downvoters care to elaborate?

It's a tough situation that you are in...
You feel like your class deserved the grades you gave them,
while the department wants to limit the grades.
I assume that you had a grading rubric for the various subtasks?  If yes, great...If no, ok too.  There's a difference either way.
The good thing for a rubric is you can later point to it and justify grading
-- both positive and negative.
My thoughts are to either go to your supervisor and say that this class deserves the higher grades because while people were required to do X they did Y, which was beyond the scope of what they had to do, so they deserve more.
Or, re-calibrate the grades so the people who minimally met the requirements would get an 85%..if they exceeded the minimum, they'll get more -- and rightly so.

This is your first problem:

I feel this is somewhat unfair to the students who worked hard for
  their presentations.

You think just about your students. What about students that got 80 for the work that you are willing to give 95? Is that fair to them?
Your second problem:
Course is too easy. Now it is too late to fix this, but for the future you should make sure students have hard time "maxing out" easily. Not to torture them for fun, but to make sure that the spectrum of outputs is recognized(instead of half of the results piling on around 95).
This brings us to your current situation. You should rescale the grades, but unfortunately this will hurt some students because since course is easy precision of the measurement was bad. But it is unfeasible for you to do anything about it now.

It is absolutely not clear that the course was too easy. it could be just a graduate course or a course with good people. Good outcomes does not necessarily mean that the course was to easy. If it is the courses goal to aquire a certain skill and everybody managed to do that, why should one make it artificially more difficult?


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Steady meeting room for Zoom office hours, ready at any time
I would like to have my office hours via Zoom with

A link that doesn't change, so it's easy to find the meeting, and
I can join my meeting at any time, if the need shows up, not just a scheduled times.

I already know how to address the first problem, namely with repeated scheduled meetings. But I don't know how to address (2) as well. What is the best practice?

Personal meeting room. Set your number it will never change. You can use anytime without scheduling.

My issue with the personal meeting room is that I want a seperate course meeting room. For example, I don't want undergraduate students to zoom bomb my research meetings with nude pictures.

So maybe personal meeting room with a Waiting room?

This semester, I was able to join my office hours for a scheduled meeting at any time, even outside the window of the scheduled meeting.
Zoom has a checkbox “Allow participants to join anytime” that may be selected when creating the scheduled meetings. You will get an email notification if someone joins when you are not there. This allows students to join at any time.
Because the meeting ID does not change, this satisfies your link request.
Disclaimer: I do not know if I have a special version of Zoom; whatever the university provides is what I have.

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Which university rankings use the impact factor?
As the title says: which university rankings are known to incorporate the impact factor as part of their ranking process?
Of course, I would like to use that as a negative criterion: rankings that use the impact factor are certainly trashy.

I think impact factor generalized over a university would be meaningless since each university covers many (many) fields, but with somewhat different emphasis and support. Don't overthink it.

It's best to not consider them at all.

The three major rankings are the ARWU, QS, and the THE. None of them use the Impact Factor, which after all only applies to journals.

The ARWU does not use citations directly.
QS uses citations/faculty.
The THE uses normalized citations/paper.

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Display well-roundedness in letters for Grad school applications
Many students have asked for a letter of recommendation to support their grad school applications at US universities. Most of them aim for business schools, but many also go for science.
Now, admission committees to American undergraduate programs consider not only the prospective student's school performance but also their "well-roundedness". But how does that matter for graduate programs? Should I appeal to that in a letter of recommendation and if yes, how should I do that? One student actually asked to write a letter that makes him appear more well-rounded.
How much does this weigh in for grad school admissions? Are there differences between scientific disciplines to consider?

This may have been discussed previously in Academia (I haven't searched), but I think the question is worth raising, because I would think non-high-BMI well-roundness would play a more important in some areas (education, business, etc.) than in others (classics, math, etc.), and I'm curious as to what those who are more knowledgeable than I am about these matters think.

Undergraduate institutions are interested in building a student body that will work well together and develop on many fronts simultaneously. They look at many things beyond academics, such as sports and various student organization activities. Socialization is a goal.
In graduate school the concerns are much narrower and more academically focused. However, at that level being well rounded can mean having fairly (or very) broad academic interests. At the doctoral level people specialize, but prior to that, universities expect that students will have a broad education that will support them if economic and political conditions change. In fields like Business, it seems obvious that having a background in History or Philosophy can be a help, both in the narrow and broad sense. But even in science and mathematics, knowing something outside the narrow field can help you do the technical work as well as help assure that you aren't leaving too much aside as your interests narrow. Such knowledge is also useful if some art or science needs to be applied.
So, if you are writing letters for graduate school, stressing academic breadth is a good thing, though of course, the student needs skills in the chosen field.

Why be well-rounded?
Well-roundedness for undergraduates is partly about being adaptable and therefore prepared for a college education. Someone who both has good grades and also competes in athletics, holds a job, etc. has perhaps shown some experience in balancing their different responsibilities. Additionally, someone with a breadth of experience is more likely to actually know what they want to do next rather than sort of just blindly going with the flow.
Usefulness of well-rounded experiences for potential graduate students
I think this last part applies best to the appropriateness of well-roundedness for graduate school. Someone who has shown multiple interests and is now choosing to specialize one is probably making a more informed decision than someone who hasn't. As an example, if they've gathered experience in math, physics, and engineering and are now applying to a physics graduate program, they probably know physics is actually the field that excites them most. They also might carry in some extra skills that not everyone in their graduate program would have: programs in the biological sciences or business, for example, can really benefit from incoming students with quantitative or computational skills.
Knowing what sort of recommendation letter to write
As far as how to write recommendation letters, I would recommend asking the student for some feedback. Prospective students should have some idea of why they are asking certain people for recommendations; when I applied, I asked for one professor who taught me in courses on the history of science, completely outside my field of interest. I hoped to convey some breadth of experience by asking for that letter.
My other recommendations were from people more in my field and were better positioned to talk about my potential for research (which is still the most important thing in a graduate application). If those people had written about breadth instead of their opinions of my research potential in my field, they would look quite odd and probably not be helpful.

@user37208 My point was that different letter writers are often meant to highlight different parts of a student's suitability - asking the student is a way to find your role. If the student hasn't thought about it, then this is also a cue to them that they should be thinking about it. If they don't have any idea what admissions committees are looking for, then they are in pretty big trouble because recommendation letters are just one small part of an overall application.


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How to assign grades in a game development course?
I am planning a course on game development. Currently my main problem is how to design the assignments and grade them in a fair and objective manner. In previous courses I taught (like basic programming or algorithms), I could always design homework assignments that had objectively correct solutions. However, in game development it is important to encourage creativity and imagination. Ideally, I would like to have each team of students work on their own game. But how can I assign grades to such assignments? There is no objectively "good" solution: each  game can be fun for some gamers and boring for others.
I could try to assign grades by "effort" or "creativity", but I do not have an objective way to measure them. And if I assign grades by my subjective perception of effort/creativity, this will inevitably lead to complaints by students who believe they made a lot of effort.
For background, the course is intended for third-year undergrads in a computer science department, and it will probably involve programming in Unreal engine and C++. But, I think the question is relevant to any course in which the main goal is to encourage creativity. What is an objective and meaningful way to assign grades in such courses?
NOTE: The question is related to https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/q/3656/1873. However, there the problem is that the students lack motivation or ability. In my case they will (hopefully) have motivation and ability, since it is a choice course taken by advanced students. Still, I will have to assign different grades to different students since I cannot give 100 to everyone..

Consider looking at best practices for how writing (especially creative writing) is graded; there may be certain parallels.

It's not true that game design is subjective. Good game design follows specific principles that can be described in clear form. I am surprised you don't know that as you are teaching the course.

Echoing @cag51, you may want to look at grading criteria in design and art.

Don't know how well it would apply to your field, but generally in projects I tell the students in advance how points will be awarded for various components of a project, with some amounts of points devoted to how challenging and novel the problem and approach they choose are. Of course it's still subjective, but easier to come up with (and defend) a number for challenge versus creativity.

I would think that one technique you might choose to use in this case would be to establish what your learning objectives are for the assignment and then construct a simple rubric for evaluating each project.  You will likely have some areas that will be present for each assignment (e.g., documentation, code clarity, compiler warnings, possibly even a baseline score for a runable attempt, etc.). However, you will probably have a few aspects that are required to be present for each assignment (e.g., sprite usage, pathfinding, narrative) which you can then assign points for.
For example you could use something like the following:
Narrative

5 points - had a clear and easily understood narrative
3 points - had a narrative, but some portions were confusing or difficult to pick up on
1 point - an attempt was made at a narrative, but it was generally insufficient
0 points - no attempt at a narrative

Pathfinding

5 points - no (or almost no) issues with pathfinding
3 points - pathfinding mostly working, sometimes units get blocked behind obstacles/jump through obstacles/etc.
1 point - pathfinding is clearly deficient

For project based courses or assignments, I find that a rubric like this will greatly simplify my life when grading and lets me focus on giving constructive feedback over trying to decide if this is an 82% vs 85%.
Alternate approach
I have also had project based courses where the grading was not based on the artifact, but on a report and presentation/demo that the student teams had to submit. I also used rubrics for scoring those, again greatly simplifying the process and letting me focus on feedback over points.

If you want a grade as objective as possible you will need multiple sources for rating.
For example :

quality of product
understanding of their (students) own code
documentation

Quality of product
It is possible to objectively grade the quality of written code by comparing it to standard guidelines or relative to other average quality of code delivered by all students.

Understanding of their own code
Grading actual written code can be tricky because one student can copy a good solution from the internet while not understanding it and another student puts hundreds of hours of work into developing his own code which is, because of the lack of experience, not that impressive.
So I would let the students present their own product and let them explain certain parts of code.

Documentation
Any work being done needs some kind of documentation and myself as a student hate that. Nevertheless a written documentation of the assignment explaining the goals, challenges, solution, outcome and possible improvements does give a good look into the work a student put into his work.

Personal experience
In my ongoing educational path I had several courses in which the assignment enabled creativity and still I never had the feeling I was graded in an unfair manner.
One of those assignment were the development of a card game in C and another one was to simply do something interesting with a microcontroller (I designed, build and programmed a Joystick.
In both of them the grading were done by the professor reviewing the code by himself and the students giving a presentation about the end product. The presentation gave the professor the opportunity to ask specific and complicated question to test whether or not the work was done by the students themselves and how good they actually understand what they've done.


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Is it reasonable to ask other researchers to send me their previous grant applications?
My university administration pushes all lecturers to apply to competitive grants from a national science fund. I am new to this and do not know how to start. So I thought to ask my previous advisors, or senior lecturers in my department, who work in related topics, and received such grants in previous years, to send me their past applications to the same fund. This may help me a lot to see how a successful application looks like.
However, I fear that this might be perceived as rudeness, since my application competes with theirs. The fund is very competitive, and if I send a competitive application, it reduces their chance to win a new grant. It's like asking a competitor in a code competition to show me their code..
Is it really considered rude to ask other researchers for their previous grant applications?

In the US, where I realize you are not, universities have grant management offices and you can look at old grants there. There may be something similar in Israel. Looking at old grants avoids the competitiveness problem in any case. Such an office will also provide assistance in preparing yours.

Talk to your colleagues. Some may be happy to let you have their grants. Sometimes also the funding institution has old successful sample grants which it has permission to show.

What about asking them for previous, in particular successful, grant applications?

@Buffy yes, we have a research authority whose goal is to help researchers with grant applications, but they did not agree to show me past applications of other researchers. Probably because they believe it is private information of the submitting researcher.

@CaptainEmacs Permission is usually not needed.  I would hope that funding agencies fully honor their FOIA obligations.  If you don't want the public reading your grant proposal, then do not submit it to a taxpayer funded organization.

@emory Beside the fact the OP isn't in the US, unfunded proposals are usually not covered by FOIA. Additionally, many funding types allow inclusion of proprietary information, which may be broadly withheld. For example, NIH will allow withholding of information that may be part of a patent application. Finally, doing a FOIA request will usually result in a notification to the proposal author, which may lead to personal/political issues. (There was a question about this previously)

@emory I do not know what FOIA is. Different rules of transparency apply to different jurisdictions. Just because in your jurisdiction, tax-funded grants entitle others to inspect them, it does not mean that this is true in other jurisdictions. In other countries there is a surprising amount of confidentiality surrounding various academic activities that you would think would warrant transparency. I do not claim it's wilful, but there may be quite legitimate reasons for that (as well as for the opposite - it's complicated).

FOIA = Freedom Of Information Act, the US law that provides for public access to (certain classes of) government information. People have used FOIA requests to my US public university to successfully obtain (funded) grant proposals, after several annoying hours of negotiation between the grant office, university lawyers, and the PI over what must/can/must not be redacted. Just ask the PI directly.

In my experience in both the US and UK this is quite common, and in fact encouraged. While technically, we are all in competition for funding, research works best when it is collaborative. There are so many nuances in a grant application that vary from across funding calls, that seeing successful (and even unsuccessful) applications can be hugely beneficial. they can give you an idea as to the scope of the project, how much it should build on previous work, and how much preliminary research should be done prior to applying.
I would hope current and past colleagues will share their funded proposals and would never hesitate to ask, and in fact would be mildly offended if they did not share them. Unfunded proposals are often helpful to see, but some colleagues are more hesitant to share unsuccessful ideas that they may still be trying to improve. In addition to asking to see proposals, you should be asking for feedback on your proposal as well as offering to read the proposal's of colleagues.
One aspect of a grant proposal that is difficult for new investigators (okay they are all difficult), is the budget. Many PIs will not share the budget of the proposal with others since they include salary information that many people consider private.

My personal experience in neuro is a bit different; in that people tend to be a bit more protective, and I would only consider asking to see grant applications from someone I knew very well, not just anyone in my department. But people have widely different opinions on the matter

For national funding there exist often official detailed guidelines about expected/prescribed length, style, content, outline of the application. You probably also find inofficial guidelines on single university servers by googling (filetype:pdf, inurl:edu)
Very similar rules of thumb as for writing a paper and getting it through the review process apply: No redundancy, logical consistency, clear structure...
And like publishing papers you learn it by doing. If you never wrote a paper and try now to write your first one and submit it to nature/science, reading a former nature/science article even about research of your field will not help you a lot. In the best case someone who reviewed for that journal takes a look on your paper, which is often the professor.
The big difference to writing papers is the section about your financial/working plan. How much money do you need and for what. This needs advise from experienced PI's, otherwise you might even in the case of funding end with much less than you need to successfully conduct the project, as often only a fraction of the requested money is granted.
Contrary to a journal review, the examiners scrutinizing your application are often no real experts in your field of research, as the pool of reviewers for national funding is much smaller. Therefore, the level of comprehension of the examiner will not be as high as compared to a journal reviewer and you have to write your aplication accordingly. Depending on the goal of your project (fundamental research, prototype -> TRL level), more scientific/technical/economic reseasoning and planning is necessary.
If you have experience in writing papers, I don't think reading old applications will help you a lot and improve your application significantly, as the application guidelines often set so much constrictions to describe your project in the necessary shortness. And if not, I think you might waste a lot of time without an experienced reviewer of your application.
I would also rather suggest to you to take courses on project managment at your university. In the end not the better scientific idea gets the grant, but the project that seems to be well planned and has all obstacles and details foreseen and listed with an according project/financial plan.


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How to encourage students to answer their peers' questions
We have a forum in which students can ask questions about the course material, homework exercises, etc. Usually I answer all the questions. I want to encourage students to answer some questions too.
One option is to give some bonus points in the final exam to students who answer a substantial number of questions. Another option is to create a reputation scheme like in stackexchange, and give bonus points to the three students with the highest reputation at the end of the term.
The problem is that these two schemes are manipulable: two students can conspire to have student A ask questions and student B immediately answer them, and vice versa.
Is there a better way to encourage students to answer their peers' questions?

My classes have a similar online forum (Piazza).
The best way I’ve found to encourage student participation is to have an explicit policy, published in the course syllabus, that the TAs and I will not answer any question about course content in less than four hours.  Not “may not”, but “will not”. (Questions about course administration or potential errors in lectures/notes/homework/labs/exams/solutions are exempt; we answer those as fast as we can.  We also try to upvote good student answers on course content quickly.)
I also offer extra credit for especially helpful questions or answers.  (Notice I said “helpful”, not “numerous”; it’s important to reward quality, not quantity.)  But I have the sense that this helps considerably less than just getting out of the way.
It’s also important to encourage a supportive and collaborative environment elsewhere in the class.  So among other things, I encourage students to work together: in small teams (up to 3) to write homework, in larger groups in discussion sections, and with whatever groups they want to figure out the homework, study for exams, and so on.  (Homework teams that work together are still required to write solutions independently, and they are required to cite each other.)  So students are already used to helping each other offline.

I used to have a course mailing list that subscribed every student in the class. Students were permitted to ask and answer any question on the list at any time. I encouraged people to help one another using this list.
The list was used quite a lot by people when they were doing their homework, and they wanted quick answers. I would try not to answer immediately so that students would have a chance to chime in. With such a list, you can even respond to a question by asking for answers from anybody monitoring the list.
I learned over time that about half of the answers came from me and also that I would have to occasionally issue a correction to an incorrect answer. I might also comment on the excellence of a post if appropriate.
Basically, it just worked. I didn't have to offer points and such to encourage participation.
However, you will find that most of those giving answers are the same people. I think it is harder to get some people to participate. Participation was far from uniform.
One advantage of such a list is that even if you, the student, didn't ask a question yourself, you get to read it and one or more answers. And another advantage is that students don't get stuck between class meetings and stop progress when they could have been learning. People could work in the middle of he night and still get questions answered in a timely way.
This has a different dynamic from asking for solutions in a face to face situation. However, I think you will find that it is the same people willing to answer, rather than a uniform spread of participants.
If you want something that will encourage wider participation during class time, make sure that every student has a few index cards at all times. When a question is asked, ask the class as a whole to write a hint for the answer on an index card. Collect and scan these, picking out one of the good answers to read. You can make it anonymous or not. But note that it takes some time to do this so it works best with small groups and flipped classrooms where participation is the main goal of the face to face sections.
I've found in general that index cards have so many uses in teaching that I basically required their use; note taking, for example.

Weight the score by the answers to different students:
so if student A has answered 10 questions from student B then
10* 1 = 10
But if student C has also answered 10 questions but to 5 different students then
10 * 5 = 50
Which would help mitigate the "tricking" you describe...


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How to change the title of a paper without harming the citation counts
Sometimes, after I publish a working paper in arXiv or a refereed paper in a conference, I change the title of the paper. This can be due to several reasons:

A reviewer in a journal I submitted to suggested a better title;
I found out a different paper with a similar title and decided to change my own paper's title to prevent confusion;
I submitted to a double-blind venue and wanted to reduce the chances that the reviewers find my working paper.

My concern is that this title-change might confuse search engines such as Google Scholar. Nowadays, automatic citation counts are counted towards promotion so this consideration should be taken into account.
My question is: how can I change the title of a paper, in a way that will not harm its automatic citation counts?

Google Scholar allows you to merge two papers, if you don't mind having to make a manual intervention

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Isn't the job prospect in theoretical/mathematical physics too bad to justify doing a PhD in it?
Almost every theoretical physicist (string theorists) that I meet tells me that it makes no sense to try do a PhD. in these subjects since there are simply no jobs available and things are only going to get worse for those seeking faculty jobs 8-10 years from now.

What you mean by "justify doing a PhD in it"? I mean, every decision depends on many factors; and most of them may be your own. You can ask about chances of getting professorship in string theory, or - if they are surveys saying if people liked their PhDs.

I am not sure what answer you expect. Yes, becoming a professor is competitive. Yes, many apparently still try.

@xLeitix The question as to how does one know if one should try.

@user6818: The question asked in your last comment seems different from the one you've actually asked: "How can I know whether I should enroll in a PhD program in theoretical physics?" versus "I heard that no one should enroll in a PhD program in theoretical physics; is that right?"

@PeteL.Clark I didn't see them as being different :D If I want to be a faculty member in future then how do I know if its worth me trying for a PhD given that the prospects looks so bad in these areas..

@user6818: The second question has a universal quantifier in it.  The first question can have a different answer depending upon who is asking it.  This is an extremely important difference.  I would ask you to stop and reflect on this before you proceed.

@PeteL.Clark What are the relevant questions that I should ask to judge my suitability to this career track?

That's a much better question!  You can ask it here...

@PeteL.Clark May be you can elaborate on the answer? [...that was my main motivation for asking this question...most of my friends don't want to take up these subjects for PhD. because job prospects are so bad...but I find myself very interested in theoetical/mathematical physics!...]

Vote to close as primarily opinion-based. No one knows what will happen 8-10 years from now. Your question makes no sense to me.

Your question assumes that the only possible job destination for theoretical and mathematical physics is in faculty positions. This is not the case. There are many additional fields (finance, consulting, computer gaming, medical imaging, and so on) where the demand for PhD's with training in mathematical analysis is growing.
Now if your goal is a faculty position, that may be a different matter. But clearly the overall demand is still great enough that people continue to get doctorates in the discipline, which suggests that people are still finding employment.

Could you elaborate on "the overall demand is still great enough that people continue to get doctorates in the discipline, which suggests that people are still finding employment."? A lot of people finishing PhDs mean great supply, not - demand.

@aeismail I am talking of getting teaching/faculty/research jobs..

"Your question assumes that the only possible job destination for theoretical and mathematical physics is in faculty positions." I think it rather assumes that faculty positions are the intended job destination for someone who enrolls in a PhD program in theoretical physics.  I find that assumption pretty reasonable: I believe that is the intent of the majority of students of such programs.

"here are many additional fields (finance, consulting, computer gaming, medical imaging, and so on) where the demand for PhD's with training in mathematical analysis is growing." Sure, but if your intention is to go into consulting, computer gaming, medical imaging and so forth, I don't see why you would enroll in a PhD program in theoretical physics: it is not designed to help you do any of those things.

I think aeismail made an important point, also when you didn't ask for jobs outside of faculty. I also started to study myself physics because of astro-/particle physics as many physicists do and did. But before choosing my master thesis, the question came up, how are the job perspectives in this field or other subfields of physics. Many students don't seem to think about this important question. I saw many of my old fellow students pursuing simply the field of their love and/or even doing a PhD in it, also the topic, or, even worse, the methods they learn are barely related to other fields in and outside of physics. Normally you don't have huge problems in finding a job nowadays with a PhD in physics, if your only criterion is finding a job at all.
Getting a faculty position or even professorship at a good university in Europe or US is an odyssey in this field of physics. You compete with very smart, very ambitious graduates from all over the world. If you are not very good, plan to have family life before 35, time for hobbies... I would not start a PhD in this field. Do a master thesis (in Germany you have to) in this field to see how good you are and what experts in this field think of your abilities. But after this really think about what you want to achieve/do the next 10 years in your life. If you want to work in physics research in any case, choose your PhD field and topic wisely. Average physics professor in Germany has around 20-40 PhD graduates during his professorship, so chances are 1:30 you achieve the same. I agree with Pete Clarks comment that most students pursuing a PhD and scientific career probably don't know this, but it's not so hard to find out. In US system, where many start PhD after bachelor degree, this is really a tricky decision so early in your scientific career.
Additionally, this is probably your actual question, the number of faculty jobs in this field is likely to decrease the next decades. Take this link as a start for google keywords.
Some of my friends did their PhD in astrophysics. Most now have well paid jobs in consulting and programming. Their knowledge of physics (higher math, programming languages, analytic thinking) helps them a lot to make career in their fields outside of physics research. For some it is great, some regret that they have only their spare time to read research articles still and cure their curiosity about nature, universe... You have to be honest, you cannot keep up to date in most physics research fields this way. This was the most important point for me to consider. I want to work my whole life in physics research and was sure I don't want to spend the time to try it and would never get a faculty position in astrophysics, so I did choose some other path. Fortunately there are so many interesting subfields in physics where one will have good options for scientific career and/or physics R&D later in industry that I don't regret my decision much.
This answer probably doesn't help you a lot, even if you have the will and abilities to pursue this odyssey, you need a lot of luck. But I know so many students that were talked into doing PhD in such risky and niche fields dreaming of a scientific career when the real chances are below 1:30 that I want to stress that this is a important, tricky, risky and life decision and that YOU should thoroughly think about it. Look at the CV's of some scholars with faculty position in this field and read the link above. Without a good plan B you stand behind I would not start or get talked into such an odyssey.

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What do we know about working times of great living scientists?
I am looking for two kinds of data about the great scientists of today,

Their average daily routine of work. Like how many hours and when?
Their average length of time of being able to think continuously.

I vaguely remember seeing a post by Terence Tao about this - like he mentioned that it takes him some x-minutes to focus on a question when he begins working. Though I don't remember if he mentioned any specific length of time for which he can concentrate at a stretch. [..sadly I can't find that post...]
I am more looking for examples among mathematicians and theoretical physicists though other theory fields might also look more or less the same.

I think the Terry Tao blog post you have in mind is http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/on-time-management/.

I don't see it there. Can you kindly quote the line where he talks of this concentration time?

I was thinking of the following line. "...my ability to do any serious mathematics fluctuates greatly from day to day; sometimes I can think hard on a problem for an hour..." Of course you may have been thinking of another line (in another post).

this would vary too dramatically between disciplines and even between different directions.  the number would not be very useful if you do not specify the area of study.  for quickly developing areas, great minds are competing fiercely.  most leading scientists would not sleep much, (except those that already won a nobel prize and turned their attention to non-research instead) otherwise they will inevitably fall behind.

@XiaoleiZhu Can you give some representative numbers? (I am typically thinking of theoretical physics and mathematics)

@user6818 In theoretical chemical physics, because the nature of theoretical sciences, most professors go home and stay with kids and family at 6pm and never come to lab on weekends.  However, they do read papers on weekends and if you email them, you get rather quick replies any time as long as he/she is not asleep.  And of course nothing can stop them from going over equations in their head while playing with their kids.  The only exception seems to be during football games.  So, it is really difficult to count hours.

This popular book http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work/dp/0307273601 contains precisely descriptions of working routines of various creative people, including several scientists and mathematicians.

I don't have access to this article, but if you do, you might want to look into it:
Hargens, L. L. (1978). Relations between work habits, research technologies, and eminence in science. Work and Occupations, 5(1), 97-112. DOI: 10.1177/003803857800500106.
There is a fair amount of psychological research on eminence/genius/creativity out there, so work routine information might be available, but I'm a little more pessimistic about representative data on "average length of time of being able to think continuously" (partly because I'm unclear on what it would mean to think discontinuously). More general populations are more accessible, and some research may consider relationships between the factors you mentioned interested in and the factors that define your criterion group (e.g., intelligence, creativity, achievement, productivity). You might want to ask this again on the Cognitive Sciences site if you don't get the answer you're looking for here.


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About email contact with prospective advisors who are yet to join the institute
I am a second year grad student who is trying to find advisors in two people (quite brilliant scientists!) who are going to join my grad school as faculty. They are going to be in campus only rarely now but will be full-time here from the next year.

Does this situation sound very bad or scary or depressing or something wrong?
Am I late into the game?

So I have done studies and have written up research drafts in areas related to these scientists and have been trying to get into discussions with them over emails. Both sounded quite interested in me - one of them met me for a few hours of discussion while in campus about a month ago - and the other one said "we should keep in touch and meet when I am there the next time"  etc.

But I get very scared and nervous when I don't get replies from them after even a week from the last email (stating my progress in their respective subjects)- I am always thinking if they struck me off from their mind - did they just forget me - did they decide I am not worth it etc. etc.

[...I am getting sick of just the unbearable tension of the fear of having been dropped...]
Anyway is the implicit expectation that I am going to read up all current papers in their fields and be able to come up with a paper on my own? (...thats what I am trying to do but clearly thats not easy!...) I don't know how "advising" is supposed to work with so little contact (...may be there is a culture conflict because in my previous institute one met one's professors daily and even multiple times a day at times...)
[just a side information - may be irrelevant but still for completeness of information - I think I am way ahead of my peers in terms of depth and breadth of knowledge and speed of learning new papers and my grad school grades are all at the top..]

how advising work depends largely on the advisor and his/her style. In one extreme, some advisors are really picky and check every tiny thing you do. On the other extreme, some really have no clue what you are doing till you show up in their office. DO NOT ever think you are better than your peers (even if you actually are ! )..

I am a second year grad student who is trying to find advisors — Wait.  What?  You don't have an advisor yet?

@JeffE Well..I didn't find an interest overlap with any other prof around till now..

@JeffE through the last semester I have been attending the group meetings of one of the profs and its through him that I came to know of one of these two people with whom my interests were more aligned.

I personally would be a little too concerned about a graduate student who keeps trying to "hard sell" themselves before I arrived. Partially this is because, if I were just starting a new position, I'd be worried about a million things, including winding down my previous employment situation, preparing for a move, figuring out all the different things that have to be done in the new position, and so on. Others may very well be different, though!
Note that I don't think it's wrong to be active when you sense a good opportunity, such as working with a scientist you hold in high regard as an advisor. However, being too aggressive may be just as damaging as being too passive. Steer clear of both extremes. For instance, have the advisors in question asked you to send them weekly updates? Have you asked them to  schedule a phone or Skype chat? Do you know if they are even "at home" or if they're on travel when they're not responding?
Advisors have their own personal styles, and your style should mesh with theirs. If it doesn't, it will likely be an unproductive and unhappy situation for both of you.

When no frequency has been predefined, I would think its just best to keep updating the profs on my progress as and when I have something to say - We have been planning a Skype meeting for sometime now but it hasn't happened yet.

That's a reasonable approach if they asked you to do this work (or at least agreed with you that you should do it). However, if you're doing this "unsolicited," then you're effectively asking them to commit time to reading and evaluating this work when they may not actually have the time to do so.

@aesmail The works started off in two different ways (1) the first person happened to attend my group meeting talk and he made very useful comments and then I started corresponding with him after that and he met me once and gave me various feedback on future emails- but has been now silent since 1 week! (2) The second person when contacted by me gave me a list of topics that we could probably work on and then I sent him details of my studies on those topics - and then he has also been silent for a week! -

@aesmail I don't know what to do given that they are my best advisor options here - though they will be in campus full-time only from 2014.

You are not yet their advisee. They are under no obligation to respond to your email on any sort of schedule! The innocent explanation is they're on vacation, and haven't seen your recent emails. It's also possible they've had more important issues to deal with. It's also possible that they're not appreciative of the emails—particularly if you've already been sending them frequently without being asked to do so (which appears to be the case here).

There is no formal process of becoming an advisee. What else can I do but to just keep reporting them of my thoughts and progress?

The issue is they have not agreed to supervise you. You should have checked with them if they wanted these updates, how often they would like to talk or meet with you, and so on. If they haven't given any indication that what you're doing is appreciated, then you may want to back off a little. Wait a few weeks before contacting them again. Ask them about how to continue this process. At this point, they may not be as willing to do so as before.

Securing an advisor seems to be an extremely complex process - far far more complex than mastering difficult science! Its not clear that I can just keep learning and thinking about my subjects and that will somehow get me a PhD!

Understand that faculty, even junior faculty, can get over a hundred emails a day, and even dealing with only the most urgent of these, such as

Bureaucracy from the department chair / funding agency program director / etc.
Requests from existing students and collaborators
Reminders about late paper reviews
Conference and travel logistics
Letter of reference requests
Complaints about grades from undergrads

takes up a huge chunk of their time. Recruiting good students is also usually a high priority... but if you've already agreed to work together next year, and have established an outline of what you can be doing until then to prepare yourself, I wouldn't read too much into a slow response to your follow-up emails, especially if they are in the form of long reports.
The best approach is probably the direct one: ask them what you can do between now and the fall to get a head start on the research project, and what kind of updates, if any, they would like from you between now and then.

@user16875 Both these people are currently post-docs and will be permanently moving here as faculty in 2014.


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Can you self-plagiarize within the same document?
The title is the question: can you plagiarize yourself within the same document? For example within a book of thousand pages, do you have to reference ideas from page 50 when you use them on page 950?

Is it a book containing multiple chapters, or a selection of articles/essays published as a collection in book-form? I assume you mean the former, but this is could be a critical distinction from a plagiarism/citation perspective so worth clarifying.

I've always dealt with this by using informal reference language, such as "As I previously established, P implies Q in hyperbolic space where N<5, so we can now process the data in Table A as follows to conclude that the moon is composed of at least 40% green cheese...."

The short answer is: No, it is not (self-)plagiarism because it is the same book.
The longer answer is that a reader may want to know more about the subject when reading only the chapter on page 950. It would be highly beneficial for him/her to have a reference to the earlier section on page 50 where more information or more detail about the subject is given.
Finally, you should consider whether it is really necessary to literally repeat yourself within the same book (hint: probably not). This could be an indication of a sub-optimal structure of the book, or maybe providing a short summary and referring to the earlier section for more details is enough.

If the part of concern contains any cited materials, when reused it is better to cite the sources again in case readers had skipped the previous chapter.
If the part of concern is your own words, then for readers' convenience it is better to reference the chapter, section, or page number for easy cross-referencing.
In my opinion, self-plagiaring is more of a misnomer. Plagiarizing is when one presents others' work as if it is his/her own. You cannot steal your own idea. One of the actual concerns is while referring to one's own work, the author could have violated copyright of the publisher that published the work. Since you are referring to another part in the same piece of work, I don't think the copyright violation described here is likely. The other, as one of the commentators pointed out, could be project a false impression on one's productivity.

What people often mean by self-plagiarising is passing off one's old work as something new -- which again wouldn't apply one a single publication.

@davidricherby, thanks, that was my thought but perhaps the wording was too strong. I have revised my answer

OK but self-plagiarism is about more than just copyright violation. If somebody pads their CV by publishing several papers that have very similar content then they look like a more productive academic than they really are. That gives them an unfair advantage in the job market, grant applications, promotions and so on.

@DavidRicherby, thanks! I added this point to my answer as well.


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Do 6-year limits for junior professors in Germany include time abroad?
This question follows up on a recent related question regarding Junior professor positions in Germany.
The rule-of-thumb is that Junior professor positions are given to people who haven't worked more than six years in academia, beginning with their PhD.
How do academic positions enter here? Let's say you have spent six years abroad, will that exclude you from being eligible to a Junior professor position?

As far as I understand, this is handled differently in different universities. So my guess would be that nobody can tell you. But I might be wrong.

By "beginning with their PhD", do you mean beginning from the time of being a PhD student or beginning after defending the PhD thesis?


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What are the correct English tenses in a manuscript?
The following examples are representative situations in scientific writing. I hope to understand whether there are any preferred or correct tenses, and whether there are grammatical reasons and stylistic conventions.

Refer to published work:
In his famous publication [1], Einstein [shows/showed/has shown] ...

Talk about earlier parts of the paper:
Earlier, in Section 2, we [show/showed/have shown]...
The previous discussions [show/showed/have shown]...

Talk about later parts of the paper:
Later, in Section 22, we [show/will show]...
The following discussions [show/will show]...

Some of this is a style question, some depends on other sentences around it. For (3) either might work, for (1) any might work. For (2) either of the last two might be fine, but the present tense seems unlikely to be the right one.

We were told 3rd person singular for reports: this was done, this was discussed, the result shows that... There is a small book  "Writing Technical Reports: by B Cooper. https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Technical-Reports-Pelican-Cooper/dp/0140206760

For 2 and 3, there are certainly people who think that everything in a paper should take place in the present tense, and would use "show". However, I personally think that is unhelpful, as it means you have to be much more careful to specify whether you are talking about the immediate proximity in the paper or about something earlier or later.
Therefore I would normally use past, present or future depending on what part of the paper I am talking about. However, I would make a distinction between whether the subject is a person/people or is an argument/paper. So I would write "Earlier, we showed..." but "The previous arguments show...". The argument hasn't stopped showing it, but we (the author(s) and reader(s)) have moved on.
I would use the simple past "we showed" if the past is indicated elsewhere in the sentence e.g. by "Earlier..." or "In Section 2...". In the absence of something like that, "We have shown ..." would be preferable.
For similar reasons I would say "In his famous publication [1], Einstein showed ...", but "Einstein's famous publication [1] shows ...".

The distinction between "Einstein" and "Einstein's paper" is an important one, thank you.


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Referee suggests to split the paper into two. How is it done?
I recently submitted a paper to a journal. It came back with a "revise and resubmit" recommendation and two referee reports. Both of them were quite positive. One of them suggested that I remove from the paper a certain topic and publish it separately in order to give it more visibility. The other referee and the editor did not say anything about splitting.
The referee's suggestion seems reasonable, but I am not sure how it should be done technically:

Should I submit the two sub-papers into the "resubmit" form? (but what if the other referee does not agree to the split?)
Does the other paper have to go again through the entire review process, including finding new reviewers?
How much additional work does this split entail for the editorial board, the reviewer and the authors (in addition to the obvious work of writing a new paper)?

Should I submit the two sub-papers into the "resubmit" form? (but what if the other referee does not agree to the split?)

No

Does the other paper have to go again through the entire review process, including finding new reviewers?

Yes

How much additional work does this split entail for the editorial board, the reviewer and the authors (in addition to the obvious work of writing a new paper)?

As much as any two submitted papers.

Keep in mind: you don't have to follow a reviewers suggestions. Splitting a paper may sound reasonable, but writing the second paper can be a lot more work than you may think - you cannot just copy the first paper's introduction and add different results. Especially when the editor doesn't ask you to do so (or asks you to remove part of your results). Also, the "smaller half" resulting from such a split may not be enough to get published on its own.
The way to go would be to remove part of the results (those that would make up paper#2), as well as the other bits that are focussed on results#2 only (introduction, methods, discussion, references, ...). That revised/shortened paper would be what you submit as revision (paper#1). You can start writing paper#2 (make sure not to copy from paper#1) and submit as a new manuscript.
You could submit paper#2 to the same journal/editor, explain where it came from, and ask to send it to the same reviewers - but there is no guarantee (a) the editor will like what you did and think it's sufficient for a paper in the journal, (b) the editor will send it to the same reviewers, and (c) the reviewers will accept to review it.

I think you could contact the editor in these circumstances for advice. I would also think about asking another colleague in your field to read your paper and the reviews and give you their candid opinion.

The "contact the editor" part of this answer is, in my opinion, the only reasonable way to proceed, unless the editor has already told you how (s)he feels about the suggestion to split the paper.  The "ask another colleague" part of the answer can be useful (if you have a suitable colleague), but I think it's much less important than getting the editor's opinion.