text:
Is it acceptable to mark off or comment on someone's presentation based on their non-standard English accent?
I am working as a TA for a seminar course and class presentations are considered a significant part of the total mark for the course.
Some of the students in the class — who mostly happen to be international students — do not perform the best presentation in terms of the communications of ideas with the audience.
It is mostly because of their thick accent and other flaws in their English, making the presentation hard to understand for the audiences.
What is the best marking strategies in these situations?
I am skeptical about commenting on this issue and discussing the problem with the students or reducing a part of the mark for the lack of communication quality, as I am afraid it would come across as racist.
The university is in North America and about 80% of the students are native speakers of English.

Since you're a TA, this would seem like a good question to ask the course instructor...

That is true. but I am also interested to know about the general consensus, laws, or policies on this issue as well. Mostly, as a takeaway that would be useful in my future career.

English is my first language but I am not from the USA, and you'd probably have a hard time understanding me. Would I be marked down? It would be wise to consider the intended audience as a strong factor in this, rather than just your opinion/understanding

There's really no such a thing as a "standard English accent", and I've seen native English speakers barely understand each other (and admitting that afterward). How would you grade a native English speaker with a thick accent that you couldn't understand?

How this should be answered depends greatly on whether or not “student shall communicate effectively in English” is one of the course objectives.

This seems to be the reverse of this question :)

If the point of the presentation is to relate information and you have a hard time understanding what is related then they should be counted off. Would you have the same issue if it was a native speaker with a stutter?

@MassimoOrtolano It’s entirely possible to argue that there is a standard English accent, and it’s either BBC English or General American English.

An important point to consider: was the accent/dialect merely hard to understand, or did it actively impede understanding of the material?  Example: I went to a lecture in physics by a grad student whose accent caused the words "fission" and "fusion" to be nearly indistinguishable.  That made it impossible to keep track of what he was talking about, which is a very different thing than merely taking more effort to understand.

There are two ways to interpret the issue that is being raised. One is that the people simply have accents and not completely correct grammar in spoken English... but not to the point that it seriously impedes intelligibility. The other is that their English is so poor that it does greatly impede intelligibility.
The former is of little consequence, of course. The latter is a serious problem, in fact. It's not about bias for/against languages/nationalities, but about the context in which one operates. If one cannot communicate effectively, that's a minus. Even if/when people are "understanding", it's still not a plus, but a minus. Overcoming such an impediment should have a pretty high priority... as opposed to simply believing that such an issue solves itself in time. In particular, this will not happen for people whose English is sufficiently compromised that they spend nearly all waking hours with their fellow speakers, and thereby never practice the local language (as Dir. of Grad. Studies in Math. at my university on two different occasions, and participating in such issues for 35+ years, I've seen many cases).
In particular, outside of super-special cases, it serves no grad student well to have English be an obstacle. It will significantly obstruct their hiring on teaching-communication grounds, if nothing else. And, unavoidably, it reduces the impact of their portrayal of their research work.

That's a well-reasoned explanation why poor English can be a real problem and should thus probably be addressed by actions. I still wonder if you could comment on the actual actions suggested (downgrading and commenting on it).

Strongly agree, +1. I would also mention that it gets to the point of being an honesty issue. There people are expecting and receiving degrees that state/imply that their instruction was in English.

In addition, if this institution is known to give out high grades for non-functional level of English (not being able to communicate being the "function"), it immediately degrades its value across the board.

This is so true.  I've known so many smart people with advanced degrees that have ended up stuck in bottom level positions simply because they are absolutely terrible communicators.  If you can't share your mind with the world it is extremely limiting.

This answer assumes, without justification, that poor intelligibility must be due to very poor English. But differences in accent alone can cripple communication between two fluent speakers if one's accent is alien to the other. I experienced this after first moving to London; the various accents of its black immigrant population were near-incomprehensible to me for the first couple of years, often to the frustration of both parties in a conversation. I've heard people report similar difficulty understanding the Scottish. That sounds to me more like what the question is describing.

Poor intelligibility implies poor English. If you have an accent of the English language, then by definition you're not speaking the default version of English, therefore it's poorer. That's perfectly justified.

If the student gives the presentation in perfect French instead, then it’s the audiences problem, not the student’s.

Gloweye It implies you are not very good at understanding accents.

@Gloweye Your argument would hold more water if there existed a standard version of English. To my (and many other ESL speakers') chagrin, such a thing doesn't exist.

@DenisNardin: Of course there's a standard version of English: not specified down to every last syllable, but certainly specified enough to observe whether someone deviates from it slightly or massively. For example, consult the material on grammar and pronunciation given to BBC journalists and newsreaders up to at least the early 80s. Even better, there are multiple standard versions of English to choose from, including several quite highly standardised English accents in North America. The bad news is that even native speakers of standard upper RP sound odd, let alone ESL speakers ;-)

And crucially fatal to Gloweye's argument, the "standard" RP accent is not "default" British English in any meaningful sense. It has never been spoken by a majority of people even within England, it's not recognised as typical English, and there's more than one variant on RP. While some people do speak it more-or-less naturally, its use as a standard is performative. Everyone speaking English "has an accent". It's true though that, objectively, some of those accents are more widely understood than others.

One side issue about context: if someone speaking an Indian dialect of English is perfectly comprehensible to his Indian peers, and his intent is to learn how to make presentations in his native India, how then to mark him for being only marginally comprehensible to Americans and British?

@BobRodes: I guess you mark him down if, regardless of the intent of the student, the intent of the course is to communicate to Americans and Brits. He won't care about his grade since he knows he has no interest in that part of the syllabus. Or, if the course doesn't care how comprehensible your speech is to Americans and Brits provided the TA can establish by other means that your subject-specific knowledge is sound, you don't mark him down at all because his slides are fine and although you can't make out every word, you can tell he's delivering that material.

@SteveJessop That of course sounds entirely reasonable in the context you describe. My underlying point is that it's a question worth asking when deciding what to do.

Some decades ago, my professor summarized it roughly like this:

The professional vocabulary must be right.
The grammar should be right, but errors are acceptable if they don't affect meaning.
The pronunciation is optional.

The goal was to train students to write acceptable papers, and to understand (or be understood by) other students who are benevolent and largely have the same accent.
I haven't been in academia for some years, so standards might have shifted at least in some places. Being able to present your results is part of scientific process.

I don't think pronunciation is optional. Incomprehensible pronunciation would render the first two points irrelevant!

@user76284, see the text under the bullet point. The main goal was to write proper papers. Being understood by other students was also important, but a posh accent certainly wasn't.

I see we meant different things by pronunciation.

The view that writing is more important than speaking may be a bit outdated and/or domain-specific. Writing deficiencies can now be better patched with the help of computers than in the past, whereas verbal communication is more important, both with the focus on conferences that disciplines like CS have and more globalised collaborations aided by the ease of video calls.

@left Computers are still of little help with, for example, grammar. And they don't help with spelling either if the spelling is so far off that the actual word is not encompassed in the suggestions.

@MattSamuel if the spelling is so far off that the word is not encompassed in the suggestions, then the writer knows they need to look up the correct spelling of that word. Mission accomplished. As for grammar, yes, computers can nowadays check this – again not perfect, but at least it's something. When speaking, you have nothing.

@leftaroundabout, spelling of the professional vocabulary would go into my first bullet point.

I wish to elaborate on paul garrett's point, which I agree with:

It's not about bias for/against languages/nationalities, but about the context in which one operates. If one cannot communicate effectively, that's a minus..

Specifically, I do not agree with a popular approach that assigns some fixed fraction of the marks to "presentation" and the remainder to "content". In my opinion, marks should instead be assigned for "effort" and "content". Majority of the marks should be for "content", and should accurately reflect the amount of content that the student successfully conveys to the target audience. This applies to all types of student work.
For presentations in particular, this does mean that if a student is unable to convey any content whatsoever to the target audience, it is fair to give zero marks for "content". Poor English grammar or pronunciation is not an issue until it begins to affect the ability to correctly understand the content that the presenter intends to convey.
This also means that if the presenter successfully conveys the content via slides and hand gestures, then an inability to convey well that same content verbally is less of an issue. More often than you might think, presenters who speak perfect intelligible English fail to convey their presentation content well.
I do not think that anyone would dare to accuse you of unfairly giving lower marks if practically the whole class cannot understand what the presenter is saying. But you must make it clear beforehand that the grading will be based on how well the content is presented.
To preemptively avoid any accusation of racist bias, you can offer to give some feedback on students' presentations prior to the actual presentation date, but students have to request in advance if they want this feedback. During these feedback sessions you can specifically point out how they can improve their delivery of the presentation. But this is extra work, and not necessary for fair grading.

Incidentally, like Buffy, I know a guy who has a stutter (will stop and start in the middle of sentences almost entirely beyond his conscious control), but his speech is otherwise normal. Everyone just has to have the patience to wait at each 'pause'; there is no real difficulty in understanding him. Thus in such a case, I feel it would be unfair to take marks off.

I agree with the principle, but how to ensure that it is actually the student having a really bad pronunciation and not you being unable to understand them (it being only "midly bad")?

@Ángel: One indirect way is to have a short Q&A after the presentation and observe what the other students ask and their reactions. One direct way is to collect peer feedback or evaluation of some sort. But even if you don't do this, it's really quite difficult (for a teacher who is a native English speaker) to be unable to understand more than the students can. In any case, it may be reasonable to penalize the student for failing to communicate the content to you, simply because you are a major part of the target audience.

After all, as Martin and Nelson said in a comment on paul's answer, the course is supposed to be conducted and assessed in (standard) English, and the teacher is hence a proxy for the English-speaking target audience. If the teacher has a poor grasp of English, then they have to fix that first before even asking about grading someone else's English presentation.

I think it would be a serious breach to downgrade people for something not really in their control. They will surely improve in time if they stay in English-speaking countries. But you can also do a few things to make it easier. One is to make sure these folks aren't mocked by other students. Respect for all. Another is to ask that presenters also give outline handouts prior to the talk. This can help.
You might also want to reassure people before and/or after that you respect them, knowing that these things are actually harder for them than for native speakers.
I once had a person who was an extreme stutterer. Really extreme. The course project presentation called for everyone's participation. I didn't let him off the hook and he did his best. People happily knew what was going on and so just let him struggle with his words. After it was over, I complimented him privately for his bravery.
Of course, the presentation has to be properly organized with the appropriate information, just as for any student. And you may need to set aside time, generally, for questions when people don't understand.

Setting aside things like a stutter, people have the same control over their proficiency in a language as they do for the topic of the presentation or for the techniques used for organizing a presentation.

@Tobias Kildetoft.  Beside that I would be less accommodating than Buffy, I am at best in control of the effort I might or not put in a foreign language, but for sure I am not in control of my pronunciation. It is superficial to equate the control I can have on a (new) topic to that of my vocal chords. It is not exactly as to control heart beat but you should get the point. I can distinguish twenty regional accent and even city ones if not suburbs, all in one and the same language.

@Alchimista I think it's more about grammar than accent.

@FooBar I just read what OP said here. " Thick accent " and "...based on their non standard English accent". It can be indeed so strong to prevent communication, to the extent that grammar switch to second place.

Why did you not also quote the "other flaws in their English"? And even it is an extreme accent, that's something you can work on. (And that's exactly what is expected e.g. for actors which main task is also to communicate)

@TobiasKildetoft, I'm pretty sure that isn't true for students who are recent arrivals from some non English-Speaking place. If you move to, say, China, how will your pronunciation seem to locals in the first few years?  It hasn't been very many years ago that people from Mississippi and people from Brooklyn, NY had a hard time understanding one another. Television news changed that and regional accents are disappearing, but both those places are nominally English-Speaking.

@Buffy: Also, Indian Engish has several strong conventions that are inadmissible by the standards of British or American English. So international students from India, speaking perfectly consistent English, can find themselves in the same position as that New Yorker in Mississippi in the early 20th century. The locals just haven't been exposed to the way they speak.

@SteveJessop, and let's not forget Cockney English. Or Australian. Or, dare I say, American.

@Buffy: Well sure, but Cockneys don't have a decent proportion of a billion people, spread out over thousands of miles, all agreeing that they way they speak is perfectly normal English. I would guess that almost all Eastenders can fairly easily switch into a register of English that removes most of their distinctive vocab, at least from the POV of other British English speakers. Maybe not from the POV of Nouwfumeri'uns.

As an "adult," I understand the need for respect and this answer sounds nice. But in my experience: 1) You really shouldn't assume that being in a country long automatically improves your language abilities. This is very often not the case. 2) The best non-native speakers that I know received a lot of mocking of their accents.  What I want to say here is that accents are certainly in one's control and it takes deliberate effort to (for lack of a better word) fix. In the long-term it requires practice. In the short term, it requires very deliberate effort directed towards pronunciation

Sorry, to state it better, in my friends' cases, the mocking motivated them to consciously work towards fixing their accents*

In my view (and in agreement with Buffy's answer), it is inappropriate and rather unfair to penalise someone for their "accent" (presumably you mean their "pronunciation"; having an accent which does not impede correct pronunciation, is generally not a problem). This is true even if what they say sounds like complete gibberish to anyone in the audience.
However, it is also entirely fair to point out that this is a non-trivial issue, and that the presenter shouldn't just shrug it off simply as "this is how I speak".
There is a lot of nonchalance when it comes to putting an effort to correcting one's accent, when it is actually a big obstacle to effective communication, and pointing out that, it is in fact a problem that could be worked on going forward, is more than fair.
With regard to such a presentational context specifically, while it may be unfair to comment on what their accent is like 'now' -- since they have little control over it in the short-term --  it is not unfair to point out that they should work on it, and that, in the meantime, it is a limitation they should be aware of, and try to mitigate against in their presentation. Therefore, what you could mark, is the extent to which the rest of the presentation showed an effort to overcome this limitation, by using appropriate visuals, quotes of the important phrases, logical flow of slides and argumentation, etc. If, given their 'limitation', they failed to convey their message "because" of their presentation, rather than "despite" of it, then it is fair (or at least "less unfair" * ) to reflect this in the marking.
This should hopefully encourage the student to both improve on their presentation technique, as well as point out that language is an issue that deserves to be improved in its own right (if possible).

 *: there is still a degree of "unfairness" if you do that, in that other students would not have had to make the same effort, so I would treat carefully even with that. If you penalise someone on that basis, it should be minimal, and according to a marking scheme that would have affected other students equally.

"Is this racist?"
Having said that, just to address the "is this racist" point. Consider this thought experiment.

You are a student, who's been chosen to represent your university in an international competition, taking place in, say, China. The competition itself is in English, but, as it happens, it turns out that this year most of your competing presenters who made it to the finals, are from Asian-speaking countries. When it's your turn to present, you naturally speak in flawless Queen's English, but as a result, the large majority of your audience and panel who is more used to "Chinese English" fails to understand you. Meanwhile, they were perfectly comfortable understanding the other presenters.
You finish last, and the feedback on your card was "sorry, we just couldn't understand you; perhaps you could work on trying to sound more 'Chinese' when you speak".

Would you consider this a racist attitude? I suspect you might.

Would you consider being disqualified on that basis to be unfair? I think you would.

But, would you also accept that, given the context, your inability to speak in a way that would make you understood, while 'not your fault', is still in fact 'a problem'?
What if the organisers had warned you of this before the competition? Wouldn't you have made sure your slides and flow of presentation could make up for that fact so as to minimize the impact? And if you hadn't made that effort, would your disqualification still feel as unfair?

Or for another thought experiement: suppose that you are presenting in French, in France, and for reasons best known to yourself and your high school French teacher, you have never made any attempt to pronounce French words the way French people do, instead you speak as if reading English words spelled the way the French words are. Someone in your French audience says they don't understand you. Which (or both) of you is taking a racist attitude to the whole business?

Fundamentally, if you are speaking a language that is not your first, you probably won't try to develop an accent that will pass "undetected" by a native speaker, but you must do some work on pronunciation. Whether that work is part of what the questioner is supposed to be grading is another issue on top of that, of course.

@SteveJessop Is there even a way of consistently pronouncing unknown words in an "English" way?

@PaŭloEbermann: not entirely consistent no, since English spelling is so irregular. "ghoti" could be pronounced either like "goatee" or, stretching a point, like "fish". But you can guess within the ballpark of the pronunciation of unknown English words, and if you make some simplifying assumptions about the most common pronunciations of various letter combinations, you can do the same for collections of letters that aren't English words. It won't be "correct", I just mean it as the extreme edge of what happens when you speak a foreign language and literally don't cultivate any accent!

Mark them in accordance with the assessment's marking criteria.
Each assessment item should have a sheet of marking criteria that will dictate what is required to reach each grade level for that assessment piece, usually divided up into multiple areas with different weights.
In an oral presentation, it's likely that one of the areas you'll be assessing is their communication or presentation skills; if their accent makes it difficult to understand them, you would naturally mark them down in this area, the same as you'd mark them down if they spent the whole presentation mumbling or reading off of printed notes.
The amount you'd mark them down would depend on the wording of your criteria sheet - you'd evaluate whether or not they met the requirements for each grade level in this area, and give them an appropriate mark for it.

I have serious reason to believe that the planet from which the little
  prince came is the asteroid known as B-612.
This asteroid has only once been seen through the telescope. That was
  by a Turkish astronomer, in 1909.
On making his discovery, the astronomer had presented it to the
  International Astronomical Congress, in a great demonstration. But he
  was in Turkish costume, and so nobody would believe what he said.
Grown-ups are like that . . .
Fortunately, however, for the reputation of Asteroid B-612, a Turkish
  dictator made a law that his subjects, under pain of death, should
  change to European costume. So in 1920 the astronomer gave his
  demonstration all over again, dressed with impressive style and
  elegance. And this time everybody accepted his report. - Antoine de
  Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

So I suggest using the content of the presentation as a basis for their marks, and ignore the accent/grammar/presentation style. You can comment on those, but don't give them worse marks for that in this case.
If the course is an English language course, then it's the complete opposite. Mark their language and accent, but not the technical part.

Bottom line, grade according to the published criteria
While it varies, most major projects should have well established criteria ahead of time for the students to focus on. Items such as use of proper grammar and word choice may or may not be on it.
The type of class matters
You didn't mention what type of class this is, and I think that matters a great deal, especially if no clear list of criteria was provided ahead of time. If this is a class in English, Public Speaking, or Law then it seems reasonable to put a great deal of emphasis on the actual presentation. Use of the correct words and use of correct grammar would be expected in a case like this and you would expect the person giving the presentation to take steps such has thoroughly rehearsing with emphasis on those items. If outside help was not forbidden, they might even do a presentation before a test-audience who could provide feedback on those matters ahead of time. In a sense this is not entirely fair to people who do not have English as a native language, but learning how to present well to a broad-based audience is explicitly a part of the education in topics like that and it is a disservice to the students to not emphasize those items and provide incentives for the students to emphasize them.
On the other hand, in a field such as theoretical math or physics the art of the presentation is probably less important and it probably only makes sense for the presentation itself to affect the grade to the extent it impacts the ability to understand the material presented.

The course is, as I hope, intended to improve students' presentation skills so they can deliver their results more effectively on the international stage, not only on the local backyard called university. English is not my mother tongue, therefore I need to translate the speaker's speech from their accent to English I understand and then to my mother tongue. When giving a talk, I have to translate my thoughts to English on-the-fly. I do my best to pronounce all the words correctly even with nuances (sheet vs. sh*t, bed vs. bad); I do my best to use correct grammar structures; I do my best to avoid my-languages-homonyms misunderstanding (word-to-word translation of "Your eyes September" makes sense in Czech) yet I make mistakes. I need to be corrected when I commit such to be able to avoid them in the future.
Throughout the time I've developed shortcuts and I am "thinking in simple English" to reduce the delay between question and answer. But it took a long time and I needed to be interacting in English only with no workarounds.
I have also attended several international congresses with speakers ranging from grads to tenured professors from all over the world.
Trust me, Scottish English, French English, Korean English, Russian English,... all with their accents, grammar leaks combined with speaker stress made a lot of talks unable for me to process.
Therefore:

Do comment on the students' grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation errors. That's how they can learn and improve.
Do not include this in the final assessment. Give the points only according to the actual quality of their work.
Try to give a presentation of your work in either German, French, Spanish, etc. and ask native speakers for assessment.

"yet I do mistakes. I need to be corrected" -- well, since you set the bait for me, I'll bite. This is one of those areas of make/do distinction. Should be, "I make mistakes" :-)

@SteveJessop Bite taken...

For grading - I would only deduct points if it was quite difficult to understand. If a native-English speaker ALSO spoke too fast, or combined words, would you take a deduction there?  I try to be very generous grade-wise with international students, because they are dealing with a lot.
Some students are ahead in their written ability than their speaking ability -- it's the difference between having time to proofread, vs creating words in real time.
Try to identify PATTERNS: not 15 instances of confusing words, but perhaps a tendency to not be distinct with the last consonants in a word, or a set of vowels that are confused.  Don't give someone more than 2 speaking issues to work on: it can be overwhelming.
Many US Universities have an English Language Center (for foreign students: separate from the English department that does the writing and literature classes) to help them with conversation and pronunciation.   Let your students know about these resources.
If the ELC has too limited a schedule, email that center to let them know that you have students who would like to improve, and ask for suggestions for resources.  (This email can also help them have "proof" if it's a budget issue and they can't hire enough tutors to cover the hours your students need.)


text:
I believe my PhD dissertation was unfairly graded too low (cum laude): what should I do?
I recently completed my Ph.D. in Germany. I believe my dissertation was evaluated extremely unfairly. For my dissertation, I published seven papers in high-impact international medical journals (IF from 3 to 6). I used four of them as core papers and three of them as additional publications. I also have six conference papers. My seven papers have been cited about 34 times so far. The first one was published in Oct 2017.
For the written theses, I had two main reviewers and one of them suggested my grade to be “strong magna cum laude” and the other one said it should be cum laude¹. Then, I was very much prepared to change the second reviewer during my defense. I did an excellent presentation and defense (that is what everyone who was there told me). The second reviewer asked only four questions during the defense. I answered them properly although one was unrelated to my work.
After the defense was over, I was told to go out with the entire audience until the review committee decided my grade. They took a long time and I was sensing there must be something they didn’t agree with. Finally, I was called to go in and one of the reviewers said: “Congratulations, you passed. Unfortunately, your grade is cum laude. We are stuck in the middle.” This was extremely disappointing to me and I believe the whole process was totally unfair as everyone else also think so.
As I heard from the student members who sat with the committee, this reviewer said I didn’t include a reference for the animated graph that I have produced myself, and insisted that I don’t deserve more than cum laude. They were fighting for a long time until the first reviewer gave up. I, my wife who also has a Ph.D. from many years ago, and the entire audience didn’t expect my grade would be like that. In fact, many believe that I am unfairly treated because of my skin color. This is the most difficult situation for me. I am very much stressed and I don’t know how much impact it will have on my career at least to get a postdoc position. What bugs me is that this reviewer doesn’t have a major point.
I am now considering to appeal to the university. But, I am scared.
I also wish to retract my thesis and submit it to another university in Germany and defend it again. Please advise me on what to do.

¹ There are usually four passing grade for a PhD in Germany: *summa cum laude, magna cum laude, cum laude* and *rite* (from best to worst).

You only have two reviewers? Did you already have a look at the written reports? My own advisor gave me the worst mark for my phd (cum laude) while two other gave me magna and another one summa. Now guess who understood the most of my topics? The one who gave me summa and I think my own supervisor understood the least. This is not his problem, of course not, my research just got more and more complicated and mathematically over time, that's why I tried to fill my panel with as many mathematicians and computer scientists as possible. But I was only allowed to select one..  who gave me summa

That's a terrible situation, I'm sorry that you have to go through this. You should talk to your advisor and to the doctoral examination board about the situation and check for your options. Also, consider that outside of Germany, your PhD grade doesn't mean very much.

Thanks. I will meet the head of Promotionsausschuß and see what next.

Not sure about Germany. In science nobody really care of those marks. In medicine a kind of phd might be sort of mandatory so I am not sure if is the same as well. If it would be chemistry or physics I would tell you to forget and relax.

What do you want to do after your PhD?

Thank you for asking. I have more than 30 publications and have a broad range of skills in statistics and epidemiology. I really want to stay in academia. I don't want to be pushed out this way. I have never received such a lowest grade in my life. And everyone is telling me it is unfair and I should fight back. I am just not sure about the outcome of my actions in this narrow circle of academia. That is why it really hurts me.

"n fact, many believe that I am unfairly treated because of my skin color." -> is there any kind of indication that this is the case? e.g. any discrimination pattern from this particular reviewer, or anything they said that could support this hypothesis? If yes I'd say it's worth considering a formal complaint, because this is a very serious issue and this academic should be punished. If no, then there's no more reason to believe that any other explanation (secret revenge against your supervisor, bias against your methods, academic jealousy, ...).

Looking for jobs outside of Germany might be an idea - in the UK, for example, PhDs don't have grades attached, so people are unlikely to care about that, whereas your other achievements will count for more.

Why it matters
In my field, cum laude or rite (the two worst German PhD grades) are rarely ever awarded and if they are, it’s usually a sign that there were major issues and a strong hint that the PhD should not consider any career aspirations in academia. Such PhDs often end in positions which mainly care about the title for its own sake (e.g., to impress customers). Your field may differ a bit, but even in law (which is known for using the entire spectrum of grades), such grades would not bode well on an academic career.
I would be careful with taking the position that the grade does not matter. As already said, the vast majority of PhDs that stay in academia have either summa cum laude or magna cum laude (the two best grades). Since getting a summa requires at least a bit of luck in many examination rules¹, many people do rightfully not care about the difference between the two. On the other hand, not having either is likely to raise some eyebrows and may prevent you from getting your desired position without you ever knowing why. Even if you find stories of people who had a successful academic career in your field with a cum laude, beware of survivor’s bias.
Moreover, many job offers in Germany (in particular at government agencies) explicitly require a very good PhD². This includes professorships to the extent that it is in the text of the respective laws (Landeshochschulgesetz), e.g., the one for Northrhine-Westphalia states (translation mine):

Einstellungsvoraussetzungen für Hochschullehrerinnen und Hochschullehrer sind […]:
  […]
  besondere Befähigung zu wissenschaftlicher Arbeit, die in der Regel durch die Qualität einer Promotion nachgewiesen wird; […]

Preconditions for being hired as a professor are […]:
  […]
  an outstanding qualification for scientific work, which usually is evidenced by the quality of the doctorate; […]

Now, this does say “usually”, which means it is technically not impossible to get a professorship with a bad PhD, only more difficult. But that already can be a severe disadvantage and may mean that you are ending up with a considerably worse position.
One function of such rules and phrases in job offers are things like avoiding nepotism or having to hire a bad candidate due to lack of better ones. Still if the criterion is phrased respectively, it may be legally impossible to hire you since you fail a hard criterion. If I found out that the successful candidate for a public job I failed to get only has a rite, I would certainly suspect foul play and consider legal action.
All in all, this grade may very well be career-ending.

¹ I know of cases where somebody did not get a summa only because they did not perform top-notch in a one-hour oral examination on their field of study that was unrelated to the topic of the PhD. Consider a theoretical cosmologist PhD being asked about lasers.
² Including your grades on your CV as well as providing a copy of the actual PhD certificate is the default in the hiring process, so you cannot really hide it.
What to be scared of

I am now considering to appeal to the university. But, I am scared.

… of what?
It sounds like you have little left to lose here.
If your PhD gets re-evaluated from scratch, you are very unlikely to end up with a worse grade.
There is a small risk that you earn a reputation over making a fuss about this, but those who care about this will also likely care about your grade.
On the other hand, if I were to consider you for a position and asked you for the story behind your grade (and I probably would), I would rather be negatively surprised if you hadn’t made a fuss.
What to do
Now, every faculty in Germany has its own PhD rules and therefore it is difficult to make any general statement here.
However, there are several aspects of your story where my PhD rules could have kicked in:

There would be two further members of the committee who can intervene in case of major disputes or grades being given with questionable reason or an accusation of academic misconduct (using material without a reference) against which you could not defend yourself.
The entire committee (four professors) grades the defense.
If the two main examiners differ by more than one grade, a third examiner would have to be consulted.
If your thesis is deemed to have major flaws, you have to be given the opportunity to amend it.
Grades for the thesis have to be given independently and cannot be changed afterwards. (It sounds like the “bad” examiner wanted to give a cum laude, so it cannot be the middle, unless he changed it to a worse grade later.)
There is a written record of committee’s decisions.
Nobody else would have been admitted to attend the committee making the decision. It is particularly weird that students can attend, but you cannot.

I recommend that you thoroughly read your faculty’s PhD rules and consult with whoever oversees the process (usually the dean). Also talk to the “good” examiner (your supervisor, I presume) to get a more detailed story of what happened.
Note that most PhD rules also forbid you to just submit your thesis to another university.
Caveats
Beware that you very likely did not get the full story so far.
For example, attendees of the committee’s decision tend to primarily report the most egregious aspects even though other points had been made.

Excellent answer, just a small clarification: "All in all, this grade may very well be career-ending." (for a career in Germany).

So basically Cum Laude is misleading. Big surprise. It should be something added at the top.

Indeed, career-ending (for a career in Germany) -- because a substantial part of the rest of the world doesn't have grades in PhDs and will likely not care one way or the other. In fact, I would suspect that if you have a 3-year postdoc and publish lots and in good venues, nobody will care any more about the PhD grade when it comes time for a Juniorprofessur. No "foul play" involved, just looking at a candidate's trajectory.

Thanks for this detailed response. I have started approaching the Prüfrungsamt and will continue proceeding for justice. The Prüfrungsamt hasn't so far received the protocol written during the defense.
If re-evaluated fairly, I am very confident that I will win. Most of that reviewer's points were plain wrong!

@user115916 -- Don't get your hopes up yet. In the end, the grade is a judgment call: It relies on the evaluators' experience, comparison with other candidates, etc. You will find that by and large, unless you can prove concrete misconduct, the Pruefungsamt will generally defer to the evaluators in their judgment. If they say that "in their professional judgment", the grade should be X, what should the Pruefungsamt do? Say they know better?

+1 This advice is pertinent to Germany. "It doesn't matter" is only true if candidate seeks employment in academia outside of German-style academic environment (this includes Austria, Switzerland, possibly Netherlands, not sure)

@captain emacs We only have two grades in the Netherlands: "passed" (95% get this) and "cum laude" (5% get it, it's a really special honour). So also here one would not care. In general, an excellent answer for Germany, though!

@damian Would any committees in the Netherlands be confused by the low grade (for Germany) of "cum laude" and think it corresponds to their high grade of "cum laude"? That would be funny, if so. (As Alchimista mentioned, the title of "cum laude" for such a low grade is misleading.)

Maybe I can reveal that I actually got rite for my PhD. I think my second reviewer is a psyco who never let his PhD student passed. I think I am the first one getting away from him.
So in the end I got rite. He was so delighted and told me that with that grade I may not be able to find a post-doctoral position.
Outside Germany no one asks about the grade.
In Germany I still got an academy position in a research center.
I believe the grade matters. But the reality is that fewer and fewer people want to do academia and therefore you might still get a position since you are still a Made-In-Germany PhD. Best wishes to you.
[EDIT] Updated 2 years later

I am now still a post-doctoral researcher in the research center for the 4th year. First of all no one ask for my grade. Second my advisors are happy about what I did for them.

One of my friends with made-in-Germany PhD, who also got a rite because the second reviewer did not like his research topic, is now an association professor and also the Institute Head in our home country.

I just want to address that rite is not the end of the world.

Welcome to the cum laude club! I've been a full professor at a polytechnic in Germany since my defense, am now retired. Since there is such an inflation of mcl and scl grades, search committees for which I have read the decision book or participated in myself are more and more disregarding it. The papers (in our field, computer science) at least, especially the conferences, are the ones looked at. And as someone noted above, many professors are retiring in the next years, so there will hopefully be many positions to fill.
Trying to challenge a grade in Germany will be difficult. You can obtain the protocol of the deliberation with a freedom-of-information-act application to the official office of the university (it will differ from state to state). Generally these tend to offer little possibility for requesting redress legally, and that can take anywhere from 3-8 years, as the administrative courts are overworked.
Oops, just saw this is three years old - so tell us, what happened?

The user that posted this question was deleted, so I highly doubt they will see your query.

I know, I saw that too late. But I thought it might be useful for some readers.

At least if you are or plan to be in the United States:
Let's come to the important point first: Nobody will ever ask you about your grade, and if they did, it would have no impact at all. The point of a PhD is to show that you're a capable researcher, and you've made that point. Beyond that, it's about the concrete accomplishments -- papers, presentations, where and what you published, etc. You have a bunch of papers in good places already, and so anyone who evaluates you has plenty to work from.
In other words, you worry unnecessarily. In the 17 years since I got my PhD, nobody has ever asked me how it was rated, and I've never asked anyone that question either. So just let it go and move on: focus on the things you can affect (your next publication) and not on the things where you feel like you didn't get a fair shake.

Nobody will ever ask you about your grade, and if they did, it would have no impact at all. – Given the vast inhomogeneity of academia, I would not accept such a bold general statement without very good evidence. Many job offers in Germany (in particular at government agencies) explicitly require a very good PhD and including your grades on your CV as well as providing a copy of the actual PhD certificate is the default in the hiring process. This includes professorships to the extent that it is in the text of the respective laws (Landeshochschulgesetz).

Therefore, hiring somebody with a rite (worst-grade) PhD for such a position sounds next to legally impossible. Mind that I totally agree that the difference between summa and magna is overrated and acquiring a summa requires at least some luck, but if I were facing a candidate with a rite PhD in a hiring process, I would certainly expect them to have some good answer what went wrong there, no matter the publication record. At least in my fields, this grade is rarely ever given, and cum laude is already regarded as an award of tenacity rather than skill.

At least in the US world, no grades are attached to PhDs. I bet that half of my colleagues here wouldn't even know what the grade terms mean. In fact, I didn't know: I have a summa cum laude PhD and have always known that that was a distinction, but cared so little about it that for 17 years I've never looked up what the other grades are. Goes to show how little importance the issue has in my world.

I think down voters are too harsh on this answer. This is the correct answer with the caveat OUTSIDE GERMANY which should simply be added to it to make it correct. The highly upvoted answer does not seem to even include the opposite caveat that it is completely incorrect outside germany. True the question is flagged Germany but that could have been simply because the PhD was obtained there and an academic career is inherently international.

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Wrong email id on letter of recommendation
My professor has entered the wrong email id into my letter of recommendation, gmail.com rather than yahoo.com and signed it. Can it be corrected using white ink? My college is very far away from my home and a reprinting would be extremely difficult. Would corrections on letter of recommendation hurt my application?

Is the mistake in the professor's email address, or yours, or something else?

In my professors email address
In the last line which says that if you need additional information regarding the recommendation contact me at

Have you confirmed whether it is a mistake? It would be unusual for somebody to fill out their own e-mail incorrectly. It's entirely possible that they own both e-mail addresses.

Never ever manipulate a letter written by a third person.
Explain the discrepancy, yes. You have to hope they accept the explanation.
However, if you manipulate, you are committing fraud, breach of trust, and you will be blacklisted where this is possible. You may also lose your recommender for the future if he gets to hear about that (e.g. if they manage to check with him). In some countries (such as Germany), manipulating official documents is explicitly a crime and can be punished with years in prison.

Would I be better off getting an entirely new letter of recommendation?

@HrishikeshBorkar Yes, if you can. If it's the professor's contact, you may just want to add a comment in a separate note that this was a typo in the letter (although, are you allowed to see your own letter of recommendation)?

It may also not matter at all -- the chances that anyone is going to contact the professor (and can't find their email address online if necessary) are essentially zero. You're just worrying too much :-)

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Introductory books in the public domain
I came across several collections that are of great interest to me: they are books that summarize the knowledge of a specific field in about a hundred pages. There is, for example, the "Que sais-je?" collection in France or Oxford's "Very Short Introductions".
I was wondering if an equivalent project existed under an open source license to freely translate and distribute the texts.
There is no commercial intent.

Are you asking about a project to translate and distribute those specific copyrighted texts (which would be illegal, whether commercial or not), or a project to write, from scratch, texts of a similar sort?

I am looking for translating similar texts but which are under a permissive licence.

Isn't that basically Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is always changing and article are much shorter than the books I mentionned.

Some textbooks are freely downloadable. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ is an example

What your looking for looks a lot like the wikimedia project wikibooks.org.
Here a quote from the main page :

Welcome to Wikibooks,
the open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit.
3,072 books with 83,999 pages

Also there are a lot of old textbooks in the public domain published in different languages. One repository of such books is project Gutenberg, where I find the category page helpful to get books in the right context/science.
Also some books, event recent ones are published with a open licence and as such you are allowed to read, copy and translate them at will, such books are for example published by framabooks (mostly in french).
These are must have books and there are some others to be found.
Also some book are freely readable online, copyright holder being aware, eg see VMLS if interested in maths or Motion Mountain for physics, but a big mouthful, not just 100 pages.  (not sure for the licence, couldn't check it).
These are more often than not typeset in latex... So you might also ask on the author for the sources.
(I hope this answer isn't too much out of the context of the question)

Some textbooks are freely downloadable. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ is an example
You could also be interested in Creative Commons Licenses.


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How to work with a student who has a tendency to overcomplicate things?
I am supervising a senior reading course. As I cannot give a name to a problem I am having with one of the students, I will give an example.
We are reading a paper, and he was not making progress. He was not able to read the introduction and present an overview of the paper's method and main results. I held an extra meeting to outline the paper and review the methodology step by step. I explained the first two outcomes, and asked him to fill in the steps joining them. I checked on him two weeks later, and he has been reading a book that is related to the paper only in title.
I have two other students who are working on similar topics and they get it. I can tell they have not mastered the topics yet. They are still good at figuring out and presenting intermediate steps on their own. Maybe they have different abilities, or maybe they are better at interpretting what I am saying. I do not judge anybody based on their abilities or skills. That is, I am not holding this against the student. I still want to help him and myself learn to be more efficient at whatever this is.

It is hard to give advice from a distance. Inexperience alone could explain it. At the other end is a reading impediment or other learning issue. For the former, patience is required. For the latter, professional help. The question may also be close enough to your earlier one to be a duplicate.

For starters, maybe it would help to meet more often than every two weeks?

Does the student lack confidence in their ability to figure things out for themselves?  Let me take a chess analogy - suppose (before the days of good computer chess engines) you're given a chess position and asked to find the best move with a lot of time.  You can try to read a bunch of relevant chess books to see what they say, but probably at some point you'll need to set up pieces on the board and try a bunch of possibilities and see how they work out.  Does your student not believe they can set up the board and calculate possibilities?

@NateEldredge They have a full-time job beside school.

@AlexanderWoo I have noticed that my student is a bit insecure, yes.

1 anecdote is not enough stuff to work from. Voting to close.

Have you taught him about the structure of research papers yet? Abstract, introduction, methodology, results, conclusion?

Instead of explaining at him, have you tried asking him in a nonjudgmental way why he is taking the approach he is taking?

Have you tried talking to his advisor or previous instructors? Somehow he got this far.

He has been reading a book that is related to the paper only in title.

This along with him not making progress might be a sign that he is missing pre-requisites. Maybe the paper requires mathematical tools he is not familiar, or has several words which are new to him.
Usually, I'd go with some assisted reading/reviewing. This is very harsh, so be careful and prepared before attempting.
Set up a meeting with plenty of time, explain that you'll be studying the paper and he should try to read and understand by himself first. Mark some time you know he should be calm (i.e. don't do it last hour of Friday or right after a difficult test, also make sure the student isn't hungry). Schedule at least two hours, but preferably have more allocated time on your schedule, and try to know that he'll be free after the scheduled time as well. Ask him to bring a laptop or have a computer in front of him at the meeting place.
Then, the strategy is to tell him to read the paper and interrupt him at least once per sentence asking for clarifications (what does this word mean? Can you rephrase this? Why is the author making this exception?). He should know that your are trying to measure gaps in his knowledge and habits, so tell him to be honest if he does not know anything and that it doesn't matter if that's the case (might be a particular poor strategy when dealing with people from a cultural background who have issues admitting they don't know something). The tense scenario will naturally keep him focused (though you should try to put him at ease).
When he doesn't know anything (I don't know this word!) you can either explain to him (and check if he understood) or say something like "and how would you look it up?" (that is why I've suggested leaving the computer close by). Very often, you'll notice he has poor googling skills, so you'll present him with some useful websites (Linguee comes to mind when dealing with translation issues, it is simple to use when you know it exists, but a student might not find it out by himself). Maybe you'll need to introduce him some book on the matter, and go through its index (some students may have only learned an important topic over classroom notes that he/she threw away, he might be unable to name a single book he could check some equation if needed be).
Additionally, this will reveal gaps in the student background, maybe there is a complete theory that is relevant to the paper but the student knows very little about (something like: "yes, you need to know trigonometry before learning calculus" or "Yes, you need to study electrodynamics before studying quantum mechanics"). Many elective courses try way too hard to remove pre-requisites for students, and then student simply don't know about things that should be the pre-requisite in any sane place. The process of asking for clarifications over each sentence usually reveals this kind of gaps.
Often, people read complex texts ignoring parts they don't really understand. Maybe because they expect that part to be clearer as the reading progresses, perhaps they think they'll get it with more context, or they just hope that weird word lies in a sentence that isn't actually important. This is a poor reading habit that almost everyone has at some degree. However, struggling students might take it to a whole new level of reading without understanding. Part of the idea is to identify when this is happening and forcing the student not to ignore too much of the text.
After a while doing so, you should:

Have taught the student how to use some tools that you are used to, be he never heard about.
Have provided him with good basic references if he needs them.
Have identified topics you expected him/her to have mastered, but he/she actually knows little about.
Improved his/her reading habits a bit.

Explain to him that this is not to be done often, as it is too much time consuming and stressing for both of you. Also, the whole point is to fill basic gaps, once they're filled, this tool should no longer be used. Over time, he should get better at identifying these gaps by himself, and asking for assistance as needed.
Another note on how to handle the student:

I have two other students who are working on similar topics and they get it.

Unless they have very similar backgrounds (i.e. same bachelor degree at same university) to the struggling student, the comparison is more likely to be unfair than otherwise. Even if just in your mind, avoid comparing colleagues directly, and specially never compare colleagues in front of them (or speaking to either).

There are too many possibilities to give a definite answer. But one thing stands out:

He was not able to read the introduction and present an overview of the paper's method and main results.

The student may have a learning disability, like ADHD or dyslexia. Most universities have a service that will test students, diagnose the problem, and provide them with the assistance they need to perform as well as anyone else.
Most faculty members are not trained to recognize the problems or to treat them. Since you are clearly a well-meaning teaching who wants to help this student, the first thing to do is to refer them to the school's service for learning disabilities. If that turns up nothing, then at least you can move on to other possibilities, like anxiety or even language issues. But if it turns up something definite, your action will make a huge difference in the student's academic success.

I would absolutely not suggest to do this!!!! Think how horrible it must be for a stusent without diabalities to be sent to this center on such little evidence! (The idea is nice in theory though.)

@Heutl Nobody gets "sent" to disabilities services and there's nothing horrible about it. The answer only suggests that the OP refer the student there for assessment, but it's ultimately the student's decision.

@ElizabethHenning: It is absolutely horrible when you are "referred" there on such little evidence and find out that you are not disabled (or you don't go there because you don't think you are disabled). You must thing your advisor thinks about you as being really stupid. (It would be different if there was some real evidence beside not being able to understand one topic.)

@Heutl Where did you get the idea that thinking someone might have a disability is the same thing as thinking that they are stupid?

@ElizabethHenning: this is what people (in my area) believe: if and only if you suck at something more than most of the people, you are either disabled at this task (then you are "not guilty") or stupid at this task. (Twenty years ago, the conclusion would be "you are stupid", so a lot has improved!) It's good the profs care about having their students' disabilities diagnozed, but thy should do based on actual evidence.


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Student comments from meetings frequently overreacted to by senior 'management'
I've worked at several UK institutions over the past 10 years and one aspect that consistently raises my eyebrows is the reaction to student-staff liaison meetings* from senior members of the team. Often, these meetings are merely an opportunity for the 'representative' to voice their own concerns and are clearly, obviously, not representative. Yet, time after time, when a far fetched and often untrue complaint/comment is made in one of these meetings, senior staff go into full meltdown and start firing off perplexing and demotivating e-mails asking for things to be fixed because the students are unhappy. The simple matter is, as previously stated, these are often not representative views and the sample size is one: the person who said it.
In any other context, a sample size of one would be immediately disregarded by those with only rudimentary scientific knowledge. No sound conclusion could ever be drawn from that sample. Yet, if this sample happens to be one student in the context of a 'staff-student liaison' meeting then it appears to be absolute fact to senior 'management'.
My question is for fellow academics from across the world, do you have this nonsense to deal with? What do you tell 'management' if they ask you to change based on comments from a single source? Am I being too touchy about it?
I am a lecturer at a UK institution.
*These meetings are usually bi-yearly where student 'representatives' voice any matters arising on their degree

For the those thinking "Jeez, this guy gets a lot of bad comments". I have not once been on the receiving end of this but I know good colleagues lose sleep over it.
I also see the benefits of these meetings, I do not wish for them to be scrapped.

Who are the student's "representatives"? Are they just any student the department can get on the hallway at that time or are they somehow elected (from a student council or association)?

They are 'elected' (often by default, in my experience) students within the current cohort and are meant to represent student views. While a nice idea, rarely do these students represent more than themselves or their own, small social circle of friends.

It seems that the real issue here is that the student representative is not (in your view) accurately representing the position of their constituency as a whole. The route to addressing this lies in trying to increase accountability: do the students have an opportunity to meet and provide input for their representative to present? Are the student body aware of what their representative is saying on their behalf (e.g. are meeting minutes circulated)? I would focus on fixing the real problem, rather than encouraging management to ignore concerns apparently presented through the proper channels.

So, they are elected (no quotations here). And if the students are not complaining about the representatives and what they bring up during the student-staff liaison meetings, they probably either do not care, agree with the representatives or do not even know the meeting even exists.

Also, having some sort of survey so that students can make criticism is also a good option, but that usually requires moderation (as some very rude criticism can be made). And that comments moderation would probably be well done by... students representatives.

@jDAQ We do run module-based surveys whereby students can leave anonymous feedback to staff and more often than not, those criticisms levied in these meetings are not brought up by the vast majority of students.

@avid You should look to make some of those comments an answer as you raise several interesting points.

Do the student representatives have access to those surveys? So those comments are "not brought up by the vast majority of students" but they are by a smaller group? Do they happen to be more serious/grave than the common feedback/complaint?

@jDAQ Yes, survey results are released to all students (just to clarify, representatives are just normal students with the role of 'rep'). "Do they happen to be more serious/grave than the common feedback/complaint?" I'm sure there have been instances, but not from what I've seen. Usually complaints that could have been easily rectified if the students just spoke to the staff member (e.g. "I didn't understand X").  My question is really trying to focus on the overreaction of 'management' based on flimsy evidence, I'm not trying to stomp on student feedback/comments which I do value.

"I also see the benefits of these meetings, I do not wish for them to be scrapped." What are the benefits, in your opinion? I'm asking because you also state, "these meetings are merely an opportunity for the 'representative' to voice their own concerns and are clearly, obviously, not representative." If these are the only kinds of comments put forth, I can't really see any benefits. But if there are actually useful comments made, how are you distinguishing these from the "bad" comments?

@richard I suppose I appreciate the notion of the meeting and there are sometimes constructive comments that are not just baseless complaints. However, more often than not they are hijacked as an opportunity for reps to, seemingly, use them to voice their individual concerns under the guise of being representative. Comments such as "We didn't get any help for assignment X" when it's clear they did get help. This is evidence in module forum discussions, recorded lectures and e-mails. Yet management opt to not look at any of this evidence and just take the student's word on it.

Not wanting to do a fully fleshed out answer yet, but it is all related to the NSS (Nation Student Survey) results and the perceived effect of the universities ranking that stems from those results....

This question needs rewriting to be a single question, without the rant and survey aspects.

[Converting a comment to an answer at the invitation of @hueblue...]
I feel you are focussing on the wrong part of the issue here. It does not make sense to encourage 'management' to ignore the student representative's views; inevitably this will just create problems and bad feeling in the future, when students get the impression that their input is ignored.
The real issue is that (at least in your perception) the student representatives are not doing their job properly: they are using their position as a platform for their personal views, rather than those of the student body at large. It seems to me that this is what you should aim to address. Some things to consider:

How well do the student body understand the role played by their representative(s)?
How are elections handled? Are they treated as important, or an annoyance to be dispatched as quickly as possible in the first lecture of the year?
Is the student body aware of the issues that are being discussed in meetings attended by their representative(s)? Do they know when meetings are due to take place?
Are students reminded to send comments to their representative(s) in advance of relevant meetings?
Is there a clear, well-advertised, equitable opportunity for the student body to get together and discuss any issues and concerns they have with the representative(s)?
Do students have any way of knowing what their representative(s) said in meetings? Are minutes or summaries circulated to the student body at large?

I suspect that at present, the answer to most of the above questions is 'No' - certainly that was the case when I was a student. If you can change some of them to 'Yes', you will probably see a marked improvement in the quality of representation.

I disagree, because these factors should not be under faculty control.  They should be under student control.

@AnonymousPhysicist I agree, up to a point. But faculty play a role in setting the culture here. If they give students the impression that the representative role is unimportant, then it will be treated as unimportant, and vice versa. Moreover, given that committee business is typically run by faculty, things like publicising agendas and minutes (versus labelling them 'confidential') is very much for faculty to decide.

@AnonymousPhysicist To give a concrete example, I certainly remember a lecturer on the first day of the year saying with great irritation "I've been told to get you to elect a class rep. Who's going to do it? Come on, someone put their hand up... right, you. Any objections? Done. Now we can get on with class." Clearly this does not lead to students feeling that the process has any great importance.

In our UK, Russel group, STEM department the Staff-Student liason structures seem to work well.
We have a staff-student committee that is attended by any staff member involved in teaching and representatives from every group of students in the department. The students are there as elected representatives, but obviously they bring their own experiences to the table.
The students can and often do raise worries about thing in this meeting and often an explanation of why things are this way is offered, the students are told that the matter will be investigated and the results presented at the next meeting. This usually results in either an explanation, or a small tweak to how things are setup, or an apology that something went wrong. The students are almost always satisfied with this. Part of this is that those in charge are old hands and are very good at making the students feel listened to, without panicking and deciding everything has to change.
We also have a smaller number of student representatives on the Department's teaching committee, which is the departments ultimate policy making body with regards to teaching. Students are there to express their views on matters of policy, and not to raise specific issues. For example, we recently discussed changing our structure in the 3rd year from 10 credit modules to 20 credit ones, thinking the students would prefer this as it would mean fewer exams, but it turns out that the students unanimously preferred the 10 credit system.
Neither of these forums is the right place for a serious complaint about a specific member of staff, and we have a proper complaints procedure to handle this.
In general this all works well. The students are on the whole pretty happy with how things are run, and in return rarely raise vexatious or petty complaints.


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What are good tips/ways to improve my writing on chalkboards?
Recently, I have started to regularly write on chalkboards. I have also found out that I am quite terrible at it, although my handwriting is quite good.
Any tips or strategies for a beginner are welcomed.

Is this about the physical act of writing and/or about the content of what you write? Can you explain a bit more what do you mean by 'terrible'?

The question is about the physical act of writing, the content is not important. I write too big, and not in a good linear fashion.

Do you have access to a board so that you can try?

Not at home, but I could get access to one, when I am at the University.

There are universities that still use chalkboards instead of whiteboards?

And can you use this to try (or is it in a room where you not really have a lot of access to)?

@nick012000 Yes

@nick012000 Yes, indeed. Mine for example (and I hope they will never move to whiteboards).

@Heutl I can use it to try writing on it, but I probably will only be able to access it once a week.

The answers seem to.assume you are some kind of teacher. True or false?

@Heutl I am not a teacher in the sense that I work as one, but when I am at the chalkboard for a presentation, etc, the tips for a lecturer also apply to me.

About the gestuality. Avoid writing on the side respect of your head. The letters you write must be well in front of you then you move following the flow. Otherwise the hand is somehow swinging unnaturally.

This is going to sound stupid, but I've seen it work. Try dividing the blackboard with vertical lines to create narrower "pages." This will make it easier to write in a straight line and will discourage you from writing too large. Of course, the "pages" need to be large enough that you don't write too small.

And it will make much more fit on the blackboard! It's like 2-column style in CS, except here it's actually helpful.

Why would that sound stupid?

As you mention this is about the physical act of writing, then yes, there are things you can do.
Put a projector with text on various sizes (like the vision testing charts optometrists use) and walk to the end of the room to see which size is more fitting given the room size, then go back to the board and mark the size. You then can measure it with a normal ruler (there are BIG wooden rules and instruments for chalkboards too) and then proceed to mark at the edges of the board the lines for that letter size. Then you can get some threat and tape from mark to mark to make a  whole board ruler  to mark dots on the board (or place stickers).
Then it's practice, practice and practice.
Sectioning the data you are going to put on the board before hand in a notebook can help you plan the spacing and distribution. It's a good practice for the lecture but it can be time consuming.
Alternatively,if you want to help the students more then you can provide them with digital notes on the topic.

Maybe it's silly, but there is a section on Blackboard Technique in Gian-Carlo Rota's Ten Lessons I wish I had been Taught that I have always found very useful:
Blackboard Technique
Two points.
a. Make sure the blackboard is spotless. It is particularly important to erase those distracting whirls that are left when we run the eraser over the blackboard in a non uniform fashion.
By starting with a spotless blackboard, you will subtly convey the impression that the lecture they are about to hear is equally spotless.
b. Start writing on the top left hand corner. What we write on the blackboard should correspond to what we want an attentive listener to take down in [their] notebook. It is preferable to write slowly and in a large handwriting, with no abbreviations. Those members of the audience who are taking notes are doing us a favor, and it is up to us to help them with their copying.
When slides are used instead of the blackboard, the speaker should spend some time explaining each slide, preferably by adding sentences that are inessential, repetitive or superfluous, so as to allow any member of the audience time to copy our slide. We all fall prey to the illusion that a listener will find the time to read the copy of the slides we hand them after the lecture. This is wishful thinking.

Regarding a: Great advice! It also suggests that you care about teaching (which is not as clear as one might hope).

If you're going to hand out copies of your slides, hand them out before the lecture. That way even after you've moved on to projecting subsequent slides, students can go back and look at things they missed or didn't understand earlier. Ideally, the students can even spend a few minutes going through the slides before the lecture starts so that they can have some sense of the overall structure and what will be explained when; this can let them be better prepared actually to absorb the material when it's presented.

I assumed that chalkboards were last used when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
Anyway, write slowly and with large figures. Practice. It will probably get better with practice.
But.
The reason for the chalkboard - dinosaur allusion is that the technology is terrible. It was used at a time when there were few options and no better ones. It was difficult and expensive to distribute notes in other ways at that time. Your back is to the students so you are focused on what is in front of you, not on them. You don't see puzzlement on their faces when it occurs. They need to interrupt you vocally to ask a question and that is harder to ignore than a hand raised silently that you can postpone responding to. Whiteboards are no better here, of course.
For this reason, write big so that you can't write as much. Write slowly so that they can keep up and so that you don't try to overdo the stuff on the blackboard with too much detail or content. Don't make it a goal that students just copy what you write there and think they have learned something.
Use the blackboard for things that matter and that you want to talk about otherwise, not just to get it "up there". An important definition (the derivative) might be written on the board so that you can talk about its parts and what they mean -- the difference quotient, the limit, ... how it fits. This leaves the rest of the board free for drawing examples.
If you have a lot of notes for them, then distribute them on paper or electronically. I like paper since the students can write on them in class without a computer. I prefer distributing them before class. If they are read, then you can use the face time more effectively without turning your back on them. See "Flipped Classroom" here and elsewhere.
I once actually took a course from a professor who seemed to believe (the old story) that the purpose of a lecture is to transform the professor's notes into the student notebooks without going through the mind of either. Don't be that professor.

Actually chalkboards and whiteboard for markers are in wide use, specially in developing countries due to budget and technology access constrains. A lot of students still have no access to a PC or internet at home and the cost for mobile is prohibitively expensive. Even in private school a whiteboard is generally the norm as it also serves as a screen for projectors.  I agree on the writing what matters.

@Buffy “your back is towards your students” My understanding was that the “proper” way to do it was to write while standing sideways to prevent this.

@nick012000, hard to do and doesn't solve the problem. Can you look  at your students to the right while you write to your left - sort of blind?

@MassimoOrtolano, the comment is fine. We made a funny. And, I'm one of the dinosaurs, actually.

When I was an undergrad I had a prof who could fill 20 big boards of chalkboard with impossibly neat handwriting in a one hour lecture. We used to joke that our pens would catch fire keeping up with him. This was in quantum mechanics, so it was often equations that he would lay out at this alarming rate. Your advice is excellent.

Sorry but -1. I strongly believe that chalkboards are the single best tool to discuss mathematics, be it with colleagues or with students. They leave whiteboards and (shudder) slides in the dust in terms of effectiveness. Of course blackboards require technique, which is what this question is asking about.

Does this answer really answer the question op asked?

Totally agree with @DenisNardin. Actually, my university has, besides the chalkboards, interactive whiteboards in every room, given by some donator who didn't care of what's useful. Still, all professors use the chalkboards, and I understand why it's better, both from student and from lecturer's perspective.

chalkboards > whiteboards >> powerpoint. One of my professors used to write directly on an overhead with overhead markers, and make drawings and show equations / write explanations. That was probably the best I have seen, but I only saw this one professor do it.

@DenisNardin, I could agree with you about chalkboards for two or three people discussing a topic. But not for lectures.

@DenisNardin You're joking, right? Why on Earth would you think that chalkboards are better than whiteboards? Do you have some weird chalk dust fetish or something? The fact you can use them as a screen to project your Powerpoint slides onto if you haven't written on them makes them vastly superior, even without considering their utility as spaces to write on!

@nick012000 For one thing, chalkboards force you to write slower and to make pauses to erase them properly. Whiteboards are an acceptable, if inferior, substitute but I personally find the smell out of the pens you use to write on whiteboards much more noxious than chalk dust.

@DenisNardin, actually, some markers used on whiteboards are toxic. They should be carefully chosen if used. But chalk dust can also be an irritant to some.

I was a teacher for 2 years.  After the first month or so you get comfortable using your arms to write more / larger.  If you are a teacher / lecturer than the best two options are

Do a practice lecture or a component of it depending on the length before hand.  Particularly practice any diagrams ahead of time.
Just ask your students. Everyone has different handwriting. Ask if they can understand yours. Adjust size or specific letters / habits as needed and eventually you will meet in the middle. Your writing wont be perfect but it will be large enough everyone can see and no characters will look too similar.  At the same time, your class will learn how you write and adapt.

After a year or so you will break almost all bad habits and the one or two you have your students will adapt to quickly when they can make out all but one letter.  It wont be too hard to figure it out

Try to have a good attitude about it. And make use of any technology available.
In undergrad, one of my profs would write on slides directly on the overhead projector. It meant he could produce his stuff in fairly normal sized printing on the slide, and he could even be sitting down when he did it. He had a tall stool by the projector. It means he can be looking at the class when he writes.
One day, the overhead projector was pointed at the curtains at the side of the room when he turned it on. Without missing a beat he said "if you will look over there" and did his lectures on the curtains.
But if you find it difficult to use the blackboard, possibly there is an overhead projector  you can use. You can get dry erase markers in many interesting colors and nib widths. And then you have those slides that can, in principle, be transferred to other lectures.