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How to increase the productivity of undergraduate research assistants?
I supervise a few undergraduates doing independent study and internships in Computer Science. Some of their tasks are to assist me with various back-burner research projects. I can offer them college credit in exchange for their work. However, their labor is difficult to utilize. Their commitment may only be for a few hours a week, they can take a long time to ramp up work, and they sometimes disappear mid-semester. What strategies are out there to make the most of working with this mercurial resource?

At my school, most PIs don't accept undergrads unless they do it as an independent study course credit, which requires 6-10 hours of commitment per week and prevents them from leaving midway through the semester. It helps. (And Corvus and Raghu's answers are also very correct.)

They're undergrads, cut them some slack. Taking on undergrads means more work for you and less benefit than just doing it yourself. But you do get to help people that will become scientists later on, which is pretty cool.

You get [less than or equal to] what you pay for...

Also keep in mind that they may not find your suggested research tasks/projects interesting or that those tasks might not line up exactly with what their expectations were prior to joining your group -- hence there is possible a lack of motivation if you don't communicate well with them -- especially when they have to choose between spending more time for a test for which they get credit or working on research in your lab for which they don't. Also, confidence is probably a big issue too -- if they don't feel like they are likely to succeed at the task you have assigned them, they might try to

procrastinate and put it off for as long as possible in order to avoid acknowledging what they perceive as their imminent failure/having been set up for failure. I mean obviously perfect communication won't guarantee anything either, but at the very least try to remember that their perspective about your work is different from yours.

I worked on a number of projects as a research assistant during undergrad. I think the thing that made me most able to be productive was the professor asking - before anything started up - "can you come to the lab at [x] time(s) for [y] number of hours each week?" Then, the assistant-ship felt like a class, and most undergrads know how to do well in a class. Each time they come in (briefly) check on the work, make suggestions, and say what you'd like to see the next week.

I've had a lot of undergrads in my lab (physics). Unlike Corvus, I'd say that certainly more than half have been net positives to the group's research, and several have been very productive. The two most important things, I would say, are:

A lot of direct contact and guidance -- not by email, but actual conversation -- either (ideally) from you (the PI) or from graduate students committed to the project and to mentoring someone. Simply being clear about tasks to be done, etc., is insufficient; every new researcher comes in without a good grasp of the motivations of the field, the challenges of exploring something new, etc., and these are only surmounted by talking to people. Several times, I've had great conversations with undergraduates in which I point out that I'm thrilled that their experiment has failed, because now they can better understand what doing science is like, and they can pick themselves up, learn from what happened, and try again, and this is what makes them 'real' researchers.
I require a commitment of more than a few hours a week. If people aren't putting this in, we chat about the impossibility of having a meaningful project, and, again, learning how to be a 'real' researcher. Sometimes people drop out (or I ask them to leave) if the motivation to do this isn't there. There's no point in mentoring someone who can't commit real effort, and it doesn't do them or you any favors.

Your question is a great one. Best of luck, and please don't think that mentoring undergrad research should just be a net-negative "service." It does take a lot of work, but it can pay off!

"Unlike Corvus, I'd say that certainly more than half have been net positives to the group's research, and several have been very productive. "
This probably varies a lot depending on the research focus of the lab. The vast majority of my work is pure theory, and this is quite a tough place for undergraduates to contribute. If I were doing more on the data science side, say, it would be easier to find ways for undergraduates to contribute in ways that are net positive.

+1 especially for the first point! In one of my undergrad research projects, we only talked in person a few times over the semester. I was floundering -> I felt bad -> I didn't go into the lab as much because I didn't know what to do there anyways -> not a great experience. Also, keep in mind that bright, ambitious undergrads wanting to do research may be more afraid of looking bad by asking for help - research is very different than homework and this may be the first time they've hit such a wall.

Accept that what you are doing when working with undergraduate researchers is teaching and developing young scientists. Make that mental shift, and your view of productivity changes enormously.
Even the very best undergraduates I've had -- students who now have R1 faculty positions or equivalent -- were time-sinks at first and break-even after a year or two as undergraduates. But increasing productivity is not why I invited them into the lab.  What was so cool was to see them turning into independent scientists while in my lab.
I suppose if you really care about productivity rather than developing scientists, assign them very simple tasks: scraping data or building interfaces or whatever. But if you can manage to see productivity as students building skill and confidence in independent research? The sky is the limit.

Indeed! undergrads != cheap labor. In fact, it might be more cost effective to hire an experienced developer/technician instead of undergrads, if labor is your issue.

I'm the undergraduate.
Props to you for offering undergraduate credit. Now, do they get charged tuition? If yes, keep in mind they pay to work for you. The I haven't worked on a project for credit or pay. I've done it for a resume booster. Between classes, work, extracurriculars, and other researcher's schedules, I can't always get things done every week. But I donate my time when I can.
Do your students know what they need to do? I worked on a project where I saw the professor exactly once: at the initial meeting. I could ask him questions via email but we were on our own and winging it. We had a manual, but not the required knowledge. When we got into that project I realized he needed circuit design people, and none of us had taken a circuits class. He knew circuits and I think he thought we did too. Make yourself available to help. People rarely admit when they struggle with stuff; are you regularly checking in with them to make sure they're not in over their heads? This gets critical they work on open-ended research where they don't have a hard deadline and they know someone else will pick up where they left off. They might get lost and figure the next person will figure it out.
Yeah, undergraduates get lazy. If we didn't suck at time management and had the drive almost everyone would graduate in four years, and plenty would graduate in three years. Your researchers 20-nothings surrounded by other 20-nothings. Not a recipe for responsibility. If they ghost on you, send them an email. Don't start with "Why aren't you working?" Start with "How's the project? How are you?" They might be buried or burned-out by the middle of the semester. Cut them some slack. They might be struggling with their classes and the research.
And make sure you got the right undergraduates. That probably sounds stupid, but the project I mentioned—it sounds like I'm ragging on it, but I mostly enjoyed it—I thought the professor brought me on to write the software. He needed people who knew Python, Matlab, and C++. He had his grad student write all the code, and me and the people I worked with did all the hands-on construction. I only wrote some Java code (a language I didn't know, and it took way too long for me to write a dozen lines of working code) and we didn't use it. By the middle of the project I didn't know why I was there.

Thanks for pointing out the tuition issue. I can in fact afford to pay for a few in-state credits, contingent on completion of some milestone, to sweeten the deal.

My sister got caught in a situation like that, where she had to pay $150 to be a TA in a lab. You give them the money upfront and make them pay it back to you if they don't meet their milestone, as long as they don't face a legitimate challenge.

Was it because she failed to reach a milestone? I'm not sure what to learn from your anecdote.

It was two separate statements. I wanted to make two paragraphs but it wouldn't let me.

Making them give you the money back seemed like a fun way to create incentives and maybe get an extra paper out of project

I've had very productive undergraduates helping my team with software development and data input for research projects.
As others have pointed out already, high productivity is not the main aim of the exercise. Obviously experienced professionals will almost always do the job much more quickly and accurately. I would even advise against focusing on productivity too much as I have seen situations where I had to completely rewrite some of the substandard code some trainees had written in a rush. You can't expect both quality and speed for high level tasks.
If the student can spend only little time on the project, I'd recommend sticking to simpler, narrowly scoped tasks which may be more repetitive and less creative but nevertheless valuable. That still requires preparation in defining the task and describing it very clearly.
Of course some students are more talented or motivated than others but I've realised that the more effort, regular face-to-face communication, early troubleshooting you put into it the better the results and the satisfaction for everyone.
Research projects can appear extremely specialised or even useless, particularly to non-experts eyes. Making sure they understand the whole picture, how your project fits into it and what their contribution helps you achieve is essential in giving them a meaningful and motivating sense of purpose, helping them make the right choices and think more broadly.
Trusting their sense of initiative and their ability to come up with their own solutions can also be rewarding. I've often seen students suggesting more efficient workflows and approaches or being critical about the system they have to work with. One advantage they have over you is that they are very close to what they produce and every scientist knows that this a privileged perspective from which new ideas can emerge. And having new ideas, for academics, is very productive.


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What should be done about a professor who treats foreign students worse than domestic students?
My school and my department has a lot of undergraduate students from China. When I took this instructor's class, he routinely

pressured the foreign students to answer questions about their home country that they weren't comfortable answering. (This is a math department; his questions weren't relevant to the course.)
pressured the foreign students to quickly answer when they struggled to either understand him or respond in English.
sneered when they answered one his questions wrong, no matter how strange the question was.
didn't accept "I don't know" from Chinese students.

He never did this to any of the domestic students. This was a topic of discussion among the American students before his class—we all noticed it. Several Chinese students dropped his class because of the way he treated them, but they didn't complain because that isn't considered kosher in China. (He actually said, "I don't understand why 'A' students are dropping," after a very talented Chinese student withdrew from this class.)
I can't point to any one thing he said or did that clearly crosses the line—I would have reported him to the dean's office and the department chair if he had—but he came up to it too many times for me to be comfortable with his behavior. I liked the guy in the beginning of the course, but I was sick of the way he treated my Chinese friends by the end.
To summarize: I feel this adjunct's behavior towards Chinese students borders on harassment, but isn't obviously harassment. Should I do anything? What?
To clarify—this class already ended, but I'm told he still keeps up this crappy behavior. And the Chinese students actually come from mainland China.

Talk to the university ombudsman about your concerns. That is what they are there for.

"Several Chinese students dropped his class because of the way he treated them, but they didn't complain because that isn't considered kosher in China." - for what it's worth, if it were only this part, it could be argued as legitimate filtering out of students who fail to show or develop a certain degree of own initiative and adaptability. That does not justify specifically targetting selected students with the measures that are meant to provoke such own initiative and adaptability, though.

@scrappedcola: Not all universities have an officer with that title.  Usually there is someone with similar duties, but it is not always easy to determine who that is.

@O.R.Mapper You've completely missed the point of the question. It's about how to deal with bad behavior, not asking for apologetics.

@knzhou: I don't think so. Answers are for addressing the point of the question.

@O.R.Mapper Not to mention, your justification doesn't make sense. Try replacing 'Chinese' with 'women' and 'academic harassment' with 'sexual harassment'. Would you stand by your statement? The idea that it's legitimate to subject a certain class of people to harassment, and that they deserve it if they don't complain, is highly offensive.

@knzhou: As I explained in the second sentence of my comment, I explicitly oppose subjecting a certain class of people to any kind of hardship while sparing others. That notwithstanding, I do not consider the mere existence of a situation that leaves an opportunity to complain, which might not be not used by a certain class of people due to their upbringing, as harrassment directed at that class of people. Learning to complain is exactly the adaptability I mentioned. Note that I am making no statement about whether the concrete reason for complaining was legitimate to start with.

@scrappedcola I seriously thought the ombudsman did public relations. I will go speak with them early next week

@knzhou: Indeed, I do not claim that straight-out complaints are a useful and/or manageable course of action in the case of sexual harrassment, which you brought up. I was commenting on a part of the question, where complaining was insinuated to be a useful and feasible reaction, and the only reason against doing so was the students' upbringing.

@JackSt.Claire It happens, sometimes schools aren't very good at informing students of their options. I've been to two that were very proactive about it though. Sometimes schools will even have a web resource for you to submit complaints anonymously. If your school has a search function on their website you might search for "student complaints" as well.

See https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/55803/how-to-deal-with-an-abusive-advisor?rq=1

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/75291/what-should-be-done-about-a-professor-who-treats-foreign-students-worse-than-dom?rq=1

Your university almost certainly has an office devoted to considering situations of racial harassment and discrimination. If the behavior is in general towards international students rather than just Chinese ones, this is usually also explicitly prohibited as "national origin" rather than race. You should Google your university name along with the phrases "civil rights office" or "discrimination." Usually you can make a report to them, often anonymously, and in theory you ought to be protected from retaliation.
Note that from what you've said here, I would be surprised if serious action was taken against the professor -- his actions were bad but no single action crosses the line, you say, and behavior like this is sadly common. However, it may result in a reprimand (which can, after all, change behavior if he feels pressured). In addition, I would encourage you to make this report so that, if his behavior ever escalates, there will be a case history. So often I read stories about harassment cases in academia where the defense is something like "well this was just one offense" and it seems it almost never is in reality; just the first one reported. If you say something, then the next person who says something (and may have a more serious complaint) is more likely to be believed.

Thanks. I'll definitely look into that. I should clarify that the Chinese students actually are from China.

@JackSt.Claire right, my comment in the first paragraph is more that I don't know whether he's also this way to e.g. Koreans

@JackSt.Claire or Russians or Indians or...basically the office should be the one that handles racism complaints, but if it's international vs domestic than "racism" is not quite the word to use, I suppose

I wish I knew. There was a guy from the Middle East in there but the professor mostly ignored him.

The professor is an adjunct, so it's actually reasonably likely that he won't be asked to teach again if there are significant complaints.

@zeldredge I think we have an international student support office, so if I can't figure out who I should deal with I'll send them an email. I'm not worried about retaliation, there's basically nothing he can do me and I'm fine standing behind my complaint. I feel like it would have more credibility if it didn't come from a direct victim.

@ff524 That'd be my preferred outcome

Indeed, they will likely be very responsive. If they seem hesitant, ask if it would be OK for the professor to treat the women in the class differently than the men, and in such a way as they are treating the foreign students. That might get them to realize they have a real problem on their hands.

"His actions were bad but no single action crosses the line" - this is the same logic my kids use to get out of trouble. You can't point to any single thing that says they should be grounded, but they generally have been brats all day. It's a shame when you take a description of a professional educator and a toddler and can't tell which is which.

Most universities provide anonymous teaching evaluations for professors at the end of the course -- that is, the students are given forms to evaluate the course, the teaching, etc.  In my experience, these forms are taken very seriously by the various Deans offices.  It's expected that there will be a certain level of disgruntled complaining, but if multiple people in the same course complain about race-based harassment, it's likely to get a response; whether a serious talk with the professor, or removing him from teaching duties.

Do foreign students at your university get proper orientation about such matters? E. g., something like "in this place you don't have to endure such and such treatment even from a professor, you can go to such and such office with your complains, we take it seriously"? And if not, maybe you should raise this issue rather than counter-attack a particular instructor (or, well, you can do both). May seem obvious to you, not to them. As Russian I do understand this "complaining isn't kosher" mentality, but there may be more to it than just old habits dying hard. We tried complaining at our university, the only thing we learned is that no action is ever taken on those complains, so why bother? Never been to China, but I suspect things are same there, if not worse. Are things different at your university? Do foreign students know about that?

Not that I know of. I'll speak next week with the ombudsman. I'll ask the question and maybe make the suggestion.

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I'm not comfortable with paying for a practicum that involves doing work for a company, that also pays the school. How to handle this?
My department has the undergraduates and the graduate students do a practicum. The department tries to get a corporate "sponsor," who pays the department to solve a problem, like an Operations Research problem. If the department doesn't find a sponsor, they usually do a math competition or work some other problems.
We, the students, have to pay about $1,200 in tuition to take this course and do the work for the company.
I don't like the idea of paying my school to do work for a company that the company also pays the school for.
I'd be fine with this if I didn't have to pay tuition or if the class was an elective.

The nerve of the school to try and get their students some real experience! The school has fixed costs associated with the course, and will put it on regardless of having an external partner or not. The external partner is likely losing money on having random folks come in and 'help' them solve a problem (at the least just on time spent making sure you all stay safe int their facility). Any actual money they pay to the university is likely a donation to help out the department keep producing students that they might hire eventually. Do well, and you might get a job eventually.

@JonCuster Do you routinely pay to work for corporations?

Assuming the practicum is properly documented in the catalog as a requirement of your program, your options are basically (1) get comfortable with it (2) ask nicely for an alternative and hope the powers that be will accomodate you (3) change programs or universities.  Which would you like more information about?  You won't have a lot of success claiming the arrangement is inherently improper - such setups are quite common and widely accepted, and the university's argument will basically be "you should have thought of that before enrolling in the program".

@JackSt.Claire - You are paying the school to be in their program and get a credit. The fact that they will do a practicum without a sponsor shows that clearly. The fact that they can also get a corporation to both let you work with them as well as kick the school some money is an added bonus for both them and you. The opportunity provided you through a real practicum is well worth it so when you interview for a real job you can talk about how you worked with and impacted a real company problem, not some textbook.

Have you considered that the cost of the course is probably far more than the 1200 you pay? Someone has to cover that shortfall, especially when it's not always possible to obtain sponsorship. The company will be paying enough to cover their own project plus a bit of the courses where no sponsor is involved.

I doubt you will have much luck convincing the faculty to change their curriculum, which is subject to institutional vetting on dimensions that even graduate students may never hear about. However, they might be sympathetic enough to your concerns (expressed politely) to grant you the chance to work on a non-corporate problem. If not, expect to grin and bear it -- and do good enough work to put the experience on your resume/CV.

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Why don't mathematics professors use social media to promote their work?
I notice that many computer science professors do a great job of self-promoting; they are very active on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and many of them have tens of thousands of followers.  They post their papers on social media, give updates regarding their research group's progress, talk about interviews they recently participated in, and some even comment about their political preferences and views on current events.  By now, it is also well-known that many of the best CS professors get poached by industry giants, e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber, which at least one professor thinks is beneficial to both academia and industry:
https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/26/it-isnt-just-uber-carnegie-mellons-computer-science-dean-on-its-poaching-problem/
However, I don't see much self-promotion going on from mathematics professors on social media.  Many that I know of - both young and old - either do not have Facebook accounts (or they are completely private on Facebook), do not have Twitter, nothing on Quora, except for maybe some conversation on mathoverflow.net.  On their school websites, math professors give relatively minimal information - office location, publications, course notes, a resume.  Sometimes they will say whether they are going to some conference to give a talk.
Main question:
Why don't mathematics professors advertise themselves more on social media?
Is it perhaps frowned upon by the math community, and that they would come off as "less serious" about academic research?  Is it some traditional, philosophical reason for not publicizing one's work for the non-math world to see?  Of course, an extreme example that comes to mind is Grigori Perelman, who turned down the Fields Medal and never gave an interview about his important work.
Secondary question: Don't they also want the chance to be poached by an industry giant and make a few million dollars for a couple years of work - and then return to academia?

Nice question. There are mathematicians who promote themselves and their works in social media. But for those who don't I say: good for them!

Plenty of top math profs have been poached by big tech companies too. Most professors I know didn't take this route in their career for the money so getting poached isn't an explicit goal.

I would venture to say that there are many fewer researchers in math than in CS whose research topics make them an obvious poaching target.

Do you have any reason to assume a math professor wants to go work in industry and make a bunch of money?

One could argue that you promote yourself on Facebook, not your work. Professionals have other ways of promoting their work to their peers.

I think some commentators are missing the point, any answer would have to address the difference between math and CS that create this disparity. Though I think @NateEldredge has touched on it, the nature of CS means that there is a lot of industry crossover, much more than a field like math (even though there is still obviously some).

I guess to elaborate on my point, I don't think publicizing one's work to the non-math community is frowned upon in any way.  But the highly specialized nature of math research means that it is often less interesting (or accessible) to the lay community than research in other fields might be.  Thus the expected benefits of publicizing are reduced, and mathematicians might be less likely to decide that those benefits outweigh the costs in time and energy, concluding instead that other activities (e.g. more research) are a more rewarding use of their time.

Actually, I think there aren't many CS researchers who promote themselves online either.

Because the mathematical mind-set is about the search for enduring truths, and any kind of social-media promotion is both fleeting and at least partly faked-up puffery. Plus, dealing with people is just generally sort of awful.

Maybe this is a bit of selection bias. You see all the people who promote themselves but you never see the ones who don't. Still doesn't address your question about the difference between math and CS though.

Even if I wanted to get poached, it's not at all clear to me that sharing my math papers on social media would help make that happen.

I think there's a bit of an answer in your question: "Many that I know of - both young and old - either do not have Facebook accounts (or they are completely private on Facebook), do not have Twitter, nothing on Quora" - Then why would they want to publish anything there? If the target audience is not active on those services, it's probably not worth it to publish anything on them.

This is entirely anecdotal, but as a current (pure) mathematics student with ambitions to go into academia, I and those like me at my university avoid social networks like the plague. For me, "being poached" has at least two big downsides: it means I'd have to stop doing my work and stop teaching, which are the main reasons I would have taken an academic job, and the work would likely be too far afield from my (pure) interests for me to transition smoothly. A related point is that we are generally introverts whenever we aren't talking about maths, but this last might generalize badly.

@WillR You do realize that when you are "poached" like this, no one is compelling you to take the job offer, right...? You don't have to give up your academic career because a recruiter has set their sights on you, you can just say "no"...

@NajibIdrissi: Yes, I meant "accepting the offer has at least two big downsides...". My point was that academicians stereotypically do what they do because they care more about their work than their salary, and I know of at least one case (myself, hopefully) where the stereotype holds true.

@WillR Well the way you phrased your comment, it seemed like you believed that using social media would paint a target on your back for recruiters who would then poach you and prevent you from continuing your academic career... But that's not the case, so I see no reason to "avoid social networks like the plague" if that's what you fear. And as a current math grad student, almost all the grad students I know in my lab are on facebook, and several of my facebook contacts are other grad students I met at conferences -- people hardly "avoid social media like the plague".

Because we're not tweens

@NajibIdrissi: Yes, I realise my comment makes an unfortunate abrupt change in topic. I was addressing what I saw as two different parts to the question: The bit about why more academics don't use social media for such-and-such reason, and the bit about "poaching". I too have an account on Facebook, and even occasionally post pictures; but besides it being a convenient photo album, I don't use it much at all. I also have a Twitter account which I almost never even look at. Perhaps "like the plague" was a bit too hyperbolic, but I hope you see the relevance.

i think most people who post their work on social medias, are doing work which run towards application which can be easily translated into general non-research words. While people who work on heavily theoretical stuffs with maths formula, theorems, etc., general people would find that it is difficult or uninteresting to listen to those heavily theoretical stuffs.

[It's hard to imagine an answer that isn't somewhat speculative, so let me give a somewhat speculative one.  A lot of what I will say is more or less the same as various commenters already said.]
For context, I am a pure mathematician working in the UK, but I did postdocs in the US and in Europe. Here are some reasons I can think of that a mathematician would not use social media to promote themselves in the way you describe.
First, motivation. It takes a lot of work (as well as good fortune) to become a mathematics professor. It's safe to assume that almost everyone who achieves this goal actually wants to be where they are. (Initially, at least.) If we all wanted to work in the tech industry, we would have made a different choice at some point in the past. But we want to do math, and teach math.
The contrast with computer scientists should be clear: it's plausible to think that a computer scientist could move from academia to the tech industry without changing their research focus too much, and then come back to academia if they change their mind. For most mathematicians, though, this move would mean no longer being a mathematician, and most of us don't want to do that.
Second, nobody is going to poach you! (Probably.) This has already been well-covered in the comments, but it's worth repeating. The idea of a mathematician being poached by a tech company on the strength of their research is not very realistic in most cases.
Despite what we write in grant proposals, a lot of the research done by academic mathematicians does not have much relevance for the "real world" outside math. (Even in what is usually called "applied math", my personal impression is that many people are more interested in the research itself than in possible applications.) Of course there are exceptions, but even among these, many people are working in fields not relevant to the tech companies that you describe as doing the poaching.  Other industries may have use for the outcomes of mathematical research, but not the resources to employ dedicated mathematical researchers.
In particular, the scenario you describe of "mak[ing] a few million dollars for a couple years of work - and then return[ing] to academia" is wildly unrealistic for, I would say, the vast majority of mathematicians. To me your second question feels a bit like asking "Why don't more mathematicians spend more money playing the lottery? Don't they want the chance to win millions of dollars?"
Again, by contrast, it seems very plausible that an academic computer scientist might be working on something that is of immediate relevance for a large tech company, so poaching is a realistic prospect here.
Finally, mathematical culture. OK, but even if being poached is not a realistic goal, or not even desirable, why don't mathematicians promote themselves more on Facebook, Twitter, and the like? Don't they at least want to boost their profile and get a bit more recognition? I think the answer to this involves, more than any philosophical reason as you suggest, the norms of mathematical culture. (To repeat, I 'm a pure mathematician, so my point of view is heavily slanted towards this part of the discipline.)
In my experience, mathematicians as a community tend to be extremely sceptical of anything they regard as boasting or exaggeration of one's achievements. The norms of our culture teach us that self-deprecation and understatement are the appropriate attitudes to adopt, at least in public. (Real example: a seminar speaker writes his big theorem on the board, then says to the audience apologetically "Now, this is not entirely trivial...") In this context, using social media to "promote" your work might have the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of people reading, and respecting, your work more, people might start to think of you dismissively as "that Twitter guy".

Probably also mostly true for theoretical computer scientists who work heavily towards maths too.


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Papers from thesis - short term postdoc?
I am a PhD candidate in Physics who handed in his thesis a few months ago and will defend soon. I am based in Sweden and I am now applying for postdocs outside Europe in different fields and working (mostly "translating" materials which was already in the thesis) on three papers from my thesis. At the moment I have no papers published, but my thesis work is quite good.
Do you think it could be possible (and a good idea) to find a short-term (1-2 months) grant, so that I can work full time and finish the papers before starting a postdoc (my supervisor has no funding for that)? Otherwise things will just take longer, I think. Do you have any suggestion regarding where to look? Thanks!

Finding a grant might be as difficult as finding a job, so I'd opt for finding a job. You can finish papers once you have a job.

While I'm not in Physics, my experience and knowledge (Comp Sci) would suggest that:

Finding such a grant would generally be difficult.
Your best bet would have been some kind of late-PhD-research-assistant/short-term-PostDoc employment with your PhD advisor or at your lab; if that's still an option, try it;
Maybe it's possible to get a part-time short-term teaching/teaching assistance position instead of a proper research grant; it "eats away" some of your paper-writing time, but it might be better than no job at all


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Do generous donations to U.S. universities influence STEM PhD admissions committees?
During the U.S. admissions process to PhD programs in the STEM fields, are the admissions committees typically notified by university administrators, if one of the applicant's family is a generous donor to the school?
If the answer is yes, does this cause PhD admissions committees to consider that candidate more favorably, assuming that he or she has the qualifications to be admitted?

I do not think. Decisions on PhD admission applications should normally be made based on applicants academic CVs.

@EnthusiasticStudent: Well, maybe you'd think the same should also hold for undergraduate admissions - but you'd be wrong.

See The Price of Admission by Daniel Golden. I would suspect this practice is more unusual at the PhD level since the supervisor would also need to be willing to work with the student. But I wouldn't rule it out.

My guess is that this probably happened at least once, but that it is rare, and for it to have a non-negligible effect on admissions is very rare.  Let me give a few reasons:
1) Admission for an undergraduate program at a US university is a very different process from an admission for a graduate program at the same university.
In the former case, most of the people handling admissions are admissions officers: these are staff members of the university that are in direct contact with the administration.  They also meet students and parents of students in large quantities.  They have a variety of motivations for admitting students, and they admit such a large number of students that any one admission decision could be chalked up to breadth / desire for (e.g. geographic) diversity / individual taste.
In the latter case, all of the people who are materially involved are faculty (usually tenure track faculty) in the department.  As a tenured faculty member in a research university, my communications with students' parents outside of a quick handshake at graduation day (if I attend, which I most often do not) are exceedingly rare.  When we admit a student into a graduate program, it's because we think that they are (i) likely to successfully complete the program and (ii) likely to be more successful than other students whom we did not admit.  One wrongly admitted student can really drain a lot of departmental resources.
In some STEM fields, admissions are not even done by a committee; they are done by the PI who wants the student to work with them.  Whether this situation is more or less susceptible to generous family donations, I can't say.
2) The idea of a "legacy student" makes less sense at the graduate level.  In most cases that I know about, large donations to universities are made by alumni of that university.  Moreover, a successful alumnus of university X often wants their children to go to university X, spends a lot of time telling their children that when they are growing up, is a generous donor to university X over a period of many years, and so forth.  It is less likely that a child of someone who attended university X is going to want to attend a graduate program in university X: the best graduate programs in a given academic field are only mildly well correlated with the best undergraduate programs.
3) While it is very surprising to many, there really is infrastructure in place for "legacy admits" to undergraduate programs at many universities.  There is no such infrastructure in place in graduate programs, so far as I know (certainly not in my STEM US graduate program).  Most faculty are by nature highly independent and not very amenable to being influenced by administrators.  In fact many faculty are quick to spot the possibility of influence and push back against it.  If a dean in my university came into my office and told me (I am the graduate coordinator of my department) that a certain Mr. Y was the son of an extremely generous donor and that I should take that into account accordingly...well, suffice it to say that I would have to steel myself not to allow that to have a negative effect on Mr. Y's admissions.
However:
4) At the graduate level, the decision is not just admit / reject, it is admit with funding / admit without funding / reject.  Most departments do have lower standards to admit students without funding.  If someone came to us and said "We'd like you to admit this student to the program.  His funding will be totally covered for as long as he's here.  Moreover, we will give you [enough money to be able to fund another student, say]" then...well, this has certainly never happened.  But would we give it some consideration?  Probably we would, if the student had a broadly suitable background in absolute terms.  In the field of mathematics in the US at least, being a graduate student and paying your own way is not a position of prestige.

I think you mean "not highly sensitive to being influenced." I agree an obvious attempt to influence things would probably backfire.  What if you had an admissions committee meeting, and the chair of the committee said "Oh yeah, I know so-and-so's uncle.  He's considering endowing a chair in the department."?  I feel like that would set a different tone.  Still, that's a very unlikely (and purely hypothetical situation).

@Ben: No, I actually meant "highly sensitive to being influenced," or perhaps better: "highly suspicious and wary of others attempting to exert influence".  The answer to your question is that it would ring fewer alarm bells, but yes, it seems very unlikely.

Ah.  I see what you mean now (I think you can see how its easy to read as the opposite).  I can see how this was a reasonable question on the OP's part, but there are so many factors that push against it that it's hard to imagine how it happens.  The pure statistics of the situation suggest it probably has at some point, but it was presumably an odd situation.

I would guess that the answer is typically no.  The administrators themselves certainly aren't looking through the list of Ph.D. applicants, and I doubt that they have any system for staff flagging such applications.
That said, they do schmooze a lot with donors (actually department chairs also schmooze more with donors than I realized), and if a donor had a child/relatively applying for a Ph.D. at the school, it would be totally natural for them to mention that to the chair of the department as an interesting fact.  It would also be totally natural for the chair to mention that to the committee, though some probably wouldn't, precisely to avoid any appearance of pressure on the committee.  I suspect that application would get a more careful look due to just curiosity.  I doubt there would be any conscious attempt to tilt the scales, but simple attention might give them a small boost, but no more than if the parent was a friend of someone in the department, a well-known researcher in the field, or a famous person who hadn't made a donation. There are a lot of unfairnesses in the system based on how good the networks of your LOR writers are; I think that's a much bigger issue.
Since the admissions decisions are made by faculty, most of whom have tenure, rather than professional admissions staff, I think there's much less possibility for this sort of corruption; probably the indirect effect of donations getting students into prestigious undergrad institutions, and thus having an enhanced application is bigger.


text:
Dealing with a coauthor whose contribution was not used in the paper
I recently completed a course project with some other students in my department. In this project, we discovered a few novel results that might be of interest to others in the field. I would like to revise and submit this project for publication (with the consent of my coauthors, of course).
The problem lies with one of the coauthors. The portion of the project that they wrote and sent to the rest of us was nonsensical. When reading their draft, it seemed as though they had not even read the reference material our project is based on. As a result, I and the remaining coauthors had to rewrite that portion from scratch, and the final report contains nothing written by that particular coauthor. (We left their name on the report since it was too late to change groups by the deadline.)
What should I do if we choose to publish these results? I worry that excluding the one coauthor might offend them if they saw the published paper. At worst, it might be considered academic dishonesty.

Based on what you write they did not contribute to the manuscript or the results described therein either due to lack of ability or due to laziness. I also assume they did not contribute any useful ideas. Thus, they are not a coauthor. It's as simple as that. The ICMJE criteria are useful for assessing if someone is an author.
In principle, this is independent of any considerations regarding their conduct in the course project. However, you should have reported their lack of useful contribution to the teacher since they would probably benefit from repeating the course. The problem now is that they could claim to be a coauthor since you put their name on your report and didn't tell the teacher. If the teacher sees the publication they could indeed assume academic dishonesty. Thus, I see two options:

Include this person as a coauthor and ask them to make a meaningful contribution since you probably have to rewrite most of your project paper to make it suitable for publication.
Explain the situation to your teacher, so you can move forward without getting in trouble with your school.

They chose to not make a valid contribution. Not being a coauthor is a consequence of that choice. Why do you care if that offends them?

+1 for: "you probably have to rewrite most of your project paper", also I think that option is the best moving forward. Talk to the person, see if they are interested in trying to publish it, then ask them to work with you to make a meaningful contribution. Chances are they don't even care if it gets published or not and will not help in the rewrite. At which point, it makes perfect sense to not include them as a co-author.

What discipline?
If you are the first author, then adding a middle author won't take any credits from you. And as classmates, I think he is able enough to (non-significantly) contribute at something to the paper, like proof reading, checking results, uploading the paper, and present the paper somewhere.
You could email him to shortly meet for a discussing of paper submission. If he ignores your email then you just exclude him from the paper. If he comes to the meeting then you ask him these:
"Hey, we are submitting the paper, and if you can do XYZ, you will be included."
If he disagree to contribute, then just exclude him.

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


text:
Has there ever been a trend in academia like the one we're experiencing with Data Science?
At a panelist event that I attended recently, exactly 100% of the current students and alumni in the room who didn't have PhDs in Machine Learning stated that they wanted a PhD in Machine Learning -- and they all wanted to know how and where to accomplish this goal.  I'm honestly not sure whether most of these students can even describe what machine learning is.  There were long lines to talk with computer science PhDs, who are directors of research either at a university or in industry, e.g., Google, Goldman Sachs - everyone was so infatuated with the thought of getting into Data Science.
Does any field in the past compare to the current field of Data Science, in terms of trendiness and importance?
Was it Probability Theory?  Fourier Analysis?  Number Theory?  Mechanics?      Law School?
This coming semester, I really wanted to follow my interests and study measure theory and functional analysis - just skimming through the table of contents of the functional analysis book by Reed and Simon was pretty exciting in itself.  Yet, it's hard to drown out the Data Science influence, and I feel that I should be "wiser" and take machine learning / data science courses instead.
A respected math PhD student in our department advised me that, "if you study some subfield of algebra deeply, then in the future perhaps a dozen people might understand your work.  But if you get into Data Science, it's a field that's projected to grow for decades to come, and if you land in industry instead of academia, all of the skills are transferable, unlike the skills gained from studying algebra."

We should all aim to be celebrities? :) And, gosh, surely there's no hype in any of this! Whew! Lucky there's no b.s., ... :) Slightly more seriously, if you're talking to crowds of people who self-select for X, they will tell you that you, too, should go for X, because it's the only sensible choice. Noise has swamped signal in any such case.

I think one of the major reasons is because data science pays a lot in industry. On the other side, if you are in academia and do data science, chances are you will get grants (most NSF CHS and IIS "Dear Colleague" call for grants are data-driven nowadays) as well as the ability to partner with industry for funding (Google Faculty Research Award) etc.

I assure you that there are rooms full of people 0% of whom want to get a PhD in Data Science.  So it depends a lot on what the panel is.  In general, the whole point of an academic career is that you get to spend the rest of your life studying what fascinates you.  I'm not (at all!) recommending that potential PhD students think deliberately impractically, but if you're being primarily influenced by maximizing the number of people who can understand and the percentage of skills that transfer over...maybe pursue a nonacademic career.

Also, getting a PhD in anything involves poking at the boundary of what is known in that field.  So of course people who are getting their PhDs in Data Science are spending a lot of time thinking about things that are not of current interest to the majority of data scientists: they're going deep and specialized.  Conversely, if you want to jump onboard doing Data Science in a broad, crowd-pleasing way: who says a PhD is necessary or helpful for that?

if you study some subfield of algebra deeply, then in the future perhaps a dozen people might understand your work. But if you get into Data Science -- ...then in the future perhaps a dozen people will understand your work, and you won't be one of them.

Actually, if "everyone" seems to be interested in going into a field, it might be a sign that it's going to get saturated.  This has happened many times.

I just finished my degree, including lectures about ML and reinforcement learning and wrote a thesis about an aspect of deep-learning in neural networks. ML usually means (multidimensional) optimization on discrete sets, often with uncertainty. From a mathematicians PoV this means stochastic, topology and measure theory (+ optimization methods). Thus, I'd take measure theory and functional analysis, as you are doing ML there. You just don't know it yet :) Also nonlinear system theory and stochastic is useful. Its the 'why it works' behind ML.

Does any field in the past compare to the current field of Data Science, in terms of trendiness and importance?
Yes. It has happened before, it is happening now, and will again.  There was programming in the 80's and 90's.  Then Software Engineering...
Back in the late 40's and 50's there was a big boom in nuclear physics, and nuclear engineering.
Don't get a degree because you think that there might be good jobs.  Do what is interesting to you (and something that is likely to get you a job.)  If you like Data Science, then do it.  If you don't, then don't.  you are going to have to live with doing the work all day, every day for many, many years to get a PhD.  If you aren't in love with it, then you will not succeed.
Since a PhD is a long-term commitment, takes a lot of patience, costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time during the term, it is not to be undertaken by an answer on the internet. It is your decision.


text:
Does better learning affect teaching evaluations? If so, how?
Arum and Roksa (p. 7) say:

Research on course evaluations by Valen Johnson has convincingly demonstrated that "higher grades do lead to better course evaluations" and "student course evaluations are not very good indicators of how much students have learned. "

I don't have access to Johnson's book, but a review states:

[Johnson] found the "grade-attribution" theory the most useful: "Students attribute success in academic work to themselves, but attribute failure to external sources" (96). Regardless of the reason, the analysis provides "conclusive evidence of a biasing effect of student grades on student evaluations of teaching" (118).

Johnson did his work in the US. If I'm understanding correctly based on the fairly brief descriptions I have available, he managed to get permission to spy on students' actions over time, so that he could actually detect not just correlations but the time-ordering of events, which could help to tease apart questions of causation.
Johnson says that evaluations are "not very good" indicators of learning. My question is basically on what the available evidence is as to what "not very good" means. It's possible that someone could answer this simply by having access to Johnson's book and flipping to p. 118.
If "not very good" means low correlation, then it would be interesting to know whether the correlation is statistically different from zero, and, if so, what its sign is. My guess, which encountered a very skeptical reaction in comments here, was that the correlation might be negative, since improved learning might require higher standards, which would tend to result in lower grades.
If the correlation is nonzero, it would also be interesting to understand whether one can infer that learning has any causal effect on evaluations. These two variables could be correlated due to the grade-attribution effect, but that wouldn't mean higher learning caused higher evaluations; it could just mean that better students learn more, and better students also give higher evaluations.
If we had, for example, a study in which students were randomly assigned to different sections of a course, we might be able to tell whether differences between sections in learning were correlated with differences between sections in evaluations. However, my understanding is that most of these "value added" analyses (which are often done in K-12 education) are statistically bogus. Basically you're subtracting two measurements from one another, and the difference is very small compared to the random and systematic errors.
My anecdotal experience is that when I first started teaching, I was a relatively easy grader, I got very high teaching evaluations, and my students did badly on an internationally standardized test that I gave at the end of the term. Over time, I got confident enough to raise my standards, my teaching evaluations went down, and my students' learning got dramatically better, as measured by this test.
References
Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
Valen Johnson, Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, 2003
related: Do teaching evaluations lead to lower standards in class?

I suspect that teacher's evaluations are designed to evaluate what the faculty wants to evaluate about its teaching body, and the outcomes might not be correlated to learning by design.

@MassimoOrtolano: Good point. The forms used at my school have remarkably little material on them that is actually about learning. It's mostly stuff like, "The instructor's grading criteria were made clear," and "All students were treated equally." (These are not real quotes, just my recollection of the style of the questions.)

At my R1 univ, teaching evals are required by the administration, but/and completely ignored except for moments that someone wants to sabotage tenure of a junior person. And, some decades of observation does tend to corroborate the skeptical viewpoint mentioned above, in any case! ... and that more personable instructors are better liked. Gosh, who could have predicted that? I guess the thing to remember is that the goal of teaching is not to induce the students to "like" the teacher, but to ... impart knowledge? Get them past some gateway exams? Help them, even if against their own will? :)

... and, yes, the "evaluation forms" at my place have recently been redesigned by apparently very naive people (hired at great expense, etc.) on-line into glossy-but-irrelevant "UX" thingies. I imagine that people of students' ages have long-ago become disenchanted with such stuff... But, again, the only real point is that "teachers" are not teachers, literally, but (status) gatekeepers. Unfortunately. Not my fave role.

It looks like you want answers supported by citations, not anecdotes. In which case, seems like this should be tagged [tag:reference-request]?

@ff524: My understanding of the reference-request tag was that it was more specific, like for questions where you say, "I want to learn about the history of the German university system, please point me to books." That is, it's for questions where the answer would consist only of references.

I don't think questions with answers consisting only of references would be on topic here. My understanding of [tag:reference-request] is that it's used for questions where answers should be supported by citations. (At least, that's what I do when I answer questions in this tag.)

@ff524: Does that differ from mathoverflow? I would think that any answer to a factual question should provide evidence, so it would seem like reference-request would be extremely broad. Maybe this would make a good question on meta.

My understanding is that many answers here are based on personal experience, and that [tag:reference-request] distinguishes questions that seek answers that are substantiated by reliable evidence (with citations to said evidence). I agree that it would be a good idea to clarify on meta.

meta discussion: http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3441/how-should-the-reference-request-tag-be-used

Not sure what sort of contribution you are looking for in an answer.  Could you clarify, please?  For ex. - do you want more citations?  You've already done a lot of legwork.  Do you want people's personal experiences (with teaching and/or learning)?  Do you want insight?  do you want help with figuring out exactly what you're asking?  Perhaps you'd like to know how much of a positive or negative correlation there is between academic success in a class and teacher evaluations?  (The insight I could offer would be to make sure to involve your students in the goal setting.)

The answer, from new research approaches dating from 2010, seems to be that increased learning tends to cause lower scores on students' evaluations of teaching (SET), but this is a complicated issue that has historically been a bone of contention.
There is a huge literature on this topic. The people who study this kind of thing the most intensely are psychometricians. There are many things on which they seem to agree universally, and many of these areas simply represent the consensus view of professional psychometricians on their field in general:

The surveys used for students' evaluations of teaching (SET) should be designed by professionals, and are basically useless if created by people who lack professional expertise in psychometrics. Certain common practices, such as treating evaluation scores as if they were linear (and can therefore meaningfully be averaged), show a lack of competence in measurement.
It's a terrible idea to use SETs as the sole measure of a teacher's effectiveness. Multiple measures are always better than a single measure. But, as is often the case, administrators tend to prefer a single measure that is cheap to administer and superficially appears impartial and scientific.
SETs are increasingly being given online rather than being administered in class on paper. This is a disaster, because the response rates for the online evaluations are extremely low (usually 20-40%), so the resulting data are basically worthless.
The difficulty of a course or the workload, as measured by SET scores, has nearly zero correlation with achievement.
SET scores are multidimensional measures of multidimensional traits, but they seem to break down into two main dimensions, professional and personal, which are weighted about the same. The personal dimension is subject to biases based on sex, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation (Calkins).

Getting down to the main question: does better learning affect teaching evaluations?
Before 2010, the best studies on this topic were ones in which students were randomly assigned to different sections of the same course, and then given an identical test at the end to measure achievement. These studies tended to show that SET ratings had correlations with achievement of about +0.30 to +0.44. But Cohen says, "There is one study finding of a strong negative relationship between ratings and the highest rated instructors had the lowest performing students. There is also one study finding showing the opposite, a near perfect positive relationship between ratings and achievement." This lack of consistency is not surprising, because we're talking about different fields of education and different SET forms. A typical positive correlation of +0.4 would indicate that 16% of the variance in students' performance could be attributed to differences between teachers that could be measured by SETs. Although 16% isn't very high, the sign of the correlation in most of the studies is positive and statistically significant.
But starting in 2010, new evidence arrived that turned this whole picture upside-down (Carrell, Braga). In these newer studies, students were randomly assigned to different sections of a class such as calculus, but they were then followed later in their career as they took required follow-up classes such as aeronautical engineering. The Carrell study was done at the US Air Force Academy, and due to the academy's structure, there was low attrition, and students could be forced to take the follow-up courses.
Carrell constructed a measure of added value for each teacher based on their students' performance on a test given at the end of the class (contemporaneous value-added), and a different measure (follow-on course value-added) based on performance in the later, required follow-on courses.

Academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous value-added but positively correlated with follow-on course value-added.
We find that less experienced and less qualified professors produce students who perform significantly better in the contemporaneous course being taught, whereas more experienced and highly qualified professors produce students who perform better in the follow-on related curriculum.

Braga's study at Bocconi University in Italy produces similar findings:

[We] find that our measure of teacher effectiveness is negatively correlated with the students' evaluations: in other words, teachers who are associated with better subsequent performance receive worst evaluations from their students. We rationalize these results with a simple model where teachers can either engage in real teaching or in teaching-to-the-test, the former requiring higher students' effort than the latter.

References
Abrami, d'Apollonia, and Rosenfield, "The dimensionality of student ratings of instruction: what we know and what we do not," in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: An Evidence-Based Perspective, eds. Perry and Smart, Springer 2007 - link
Braga, Paccagnella, and Pellizzari, "Evaluating Students' Evaluations of Professors," IZA Discussion Paper No. 5620, April 2011 - link
Calkins and Micari, "Less-Than-Perfect Judges: Evaluating Student Evaluations," Thought & Action, fall 2010, p. 7 - link
Carrell and West, "Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from
Random Assignment of Students to Professors," J Political Economy 118 (2010) 409 - link
Marsh and Roche, "Making Students' Evaluations of Teaching Effectiveness Effective: The Critical Issues of Validity, Bias, and Utility," American Psycologist, November 1997, p. 1187 - link
Stark and Freishtat, "An Evaluation of Course Evaluations," ScienceOpen https://www.scienceopen.com/document/vid/42e6aae5-‐246b-‐4900-‐8015-‐
dc99b467b6e4?0  - link

Something I noticed as a student but I've never heard of being looked at in evaluations:  Poor students had very different notions of who were good teachers than good students.

Only commenting on your own experience, I can say that mine corresponds (roughly, very roughly) with your second-half. This is so even though the students were (literally) Ivy League material. I did notice a tad more interest and engagement than in a state university, but only for a few. The group was more concerned with checking boxes for the class, and if I got too critical-thinky, the bad comments came out.
That said, better learning does lead (arguably) to better grades, and so this can help the evaluations. But here we may have to distinguish between the immediate learning that leads to grades, and the longer-term one that produces better thought.
Don't kill yourself - simply mix-in short- and long-term concerns in your teaching. But the latter may cost you some points, although it is the right thing to do.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, but this isn't an answer. This would have been better as a comment.


text:
Why does a mathematics department want student evaluations of a famous professor?
If a professor is very famous for his research and belongs to the most prestigious academies of science for his lifetime work, I find it unusual that the math department would ask us to evaluate him.  We did so anyway and submitted the evaluations to the director of academic affairs.
Is this typically done at most American universities, irrespective of a professor's age, status or fame?  I would think that after a certain point in a professor's career, student evaluations aren't necessary.
Is it sort of a sanity check?  He was 85 years old.  Is it done to try and find reasons to force retirement of professors?

Maybe they want to evaluate something other than his fame.

In every university I've known in the US, students submit evaluations of their professors and courses every semester, irrespective the course level or the professor's rank. Now, whether anyone pays attention to said evaluations may indeed depend heavily on those factors.

Some of my best instructors weren't tenured faculty nor famous for research, they just loved teaching

A more charitable formulation of "...to try and find reasons to force retirement..." is "...so that we notice when, due to old age, someone is no longer able to teach effectively and should not be asked to do so anymore..."

Could even be that the school is trying to recognize him with some sort of award, and they're trying to build the case.

There are reasons to collect data about performance other than punishing bad behaviour and rewarding good. Perhaps the university is doing a study to see how well experience of teacher correlates to evaluation outcomes; in that case, the data you give them on this teacher is extremely valuable. I can think of many reasons why a university would want to collect such data uniforming on all professors.

In the US it would be more unusual not to do the normal course evaluations.  Why do you think that this professor should be given a special accommodation?

Find me someone so good at what they do that they can't improve and I'll call them a liar.

If he is known as a bad teacher (in addition to a good researcher), then the situation is probably obvious. If he is a good teacher, consider the fact that he may have become a good teacher by carefully collecting and evaluating student feedback over his teaching career (in one way or another, official evaluations, conversations with students, etc) and this is just business as usual.

@ScottSeidman ... that was my thought.  They are building a dossier to submit hoping to get him an outstanding teaching award.

In our department it has previously been the case that professors or other teachers could explicitly ask to be part of evaluation or to have a course evaluated. Then the department would take care of it, so it is not a biased evaluation. It can be extremely helpful to know what your students are thinking, especially if you think you can take it no matter what they say.

Once you start with "he is exempt from evaluation because he is famous", five more people will step up and ask "Am I not famous enough to be exempt, too?". It is much, much easier to have a blanket rule "everyone should be evaluated, no matter what".

Have you had other professors evaluated? We (in my school in the US) always had the opportunity to evaluate our professors. Sometimes, however, a university employee would come do it in person. I believe this was randomly selected.

@clueless whatever they want to measure, it appears that they rarely achieve that result.

Sometimes, professors actually take the evaluations seriously in attempting to improve their own teaching, even if nobody else pays attention to the evaluations.  Folks in those positions are sometimes the same ones who like to do something well if they're going to do it.

It could be that the university is trying to norm the scale.  If Professor Nobel Prize rates 3/5, then maybe we can retain professors scoring 2/5 and give out bonuses to professors scoring 4/5.

A professor I've worked with was tenured for many years. When his department started collecting teaching evaluations from all courses, rather than only at the discretion of the instructor when they were tenured full professors, it arose that he was among the worst regarded teachers in the department. This inspired him to pay more attention to what made for effective teaching, and adjust his habits accordingly. A semester later, his evaluations had shifted to above average. Additionally, his research group had an easier time attracting qualified undergrad students to work on projects.

It might be nice to get some more context. Are these regular end of semester evaluations, as people are mentioning, or is the department reaching out to specific students to get their opinions? Are you a grad student, undergrad? Is this your first semester and you're curious why end of the semester evaluations are taking place?

I'm in Australia, and from my experience, almost every unit is evaluated every semester that it runs in pretty much all Australian universities. There might be a few exceptions, but this is just standard practice. The standard survey consists of a bunch of closed ended questions and then some open ended questions for more qualitative feedback.
From this perspective, there's nothing special about whether the instructor is a famous professor or a relatively unknown academic. Student evaluations are just a standard component of university life. It would be strange to make an exception, just because the professor is famous.
More generally, student evaluations serve a wide range of purposes and the relevance of most would not change whether or not the instructor is a famous professor. Such evaluations give the instructor feedback about how the unit was received by students. It can highlight areas for improvement. From a university perspective, it creates some accountability and some metrics that can be monitored.
Of course, there are also plenty of issues with student evaluations. And there is the potential if they are used inappropriately that they can create perverse incentives for instructors: e.g., simplifying education, grade inflation, and so on in order to have "happier students". But that's another issue.

Being a good teacher and being a good researcher are distinct skills. If someone has a job that requires both skills, they should be being evaluated on both.

Teachers also get lazy over the years. Evaluations do their job of keeping a minimum level of professionality in classes.

This addresses why a famous researcher gets some evaluations, at least in the beginning, but not why it happens every semester forever.  The answer to that is in part "blanket university policies" addressed in other answers, but I also think in part because universities want to give all students equal opportunities to provide feedback on their experiences.

This answer tells us why you think experienced professors should be evaluated but does not really answer as to why universities do it. The reason is that such policies apply to all profs.

When I was in school I had a brilliant mathematician as a prof. Undergrad calculus was like childs play to him and I think he really enjoyed teaching the class. Unfortunately, his students didn't enjoy his teaching because he was one of those people who lacked the skills necessary to be a good teacher. Many a sleepless night I spent contemplating my future on the assembly line. Next quarter I took the "calculus for dummies" track, got the assistant dean of the math department, and learned everything I should have learned earlier. This guy could teach!

@Kimball I think you should read the answer as describing evaluation of someone's current teaching skills, on the courses they're currently teaching. To get that information, you have to keep evaluating forever.

@CapeCode And the reason why such policies apply to all professors is explained in the answer (at least cursorily, but in my opinion entirely sufficiently).

@KonradRudolph my impression is that it has more to do with not having to decide who needs evaluation and who does not, and to avoid hurting sensibilities or being accused of discrimination or whatnot. The truth is a top researcher can probably have disastrous student evaluations and that would have 0 consequence to her or him.

@CapeCode it may be true that student evaluations (in general) have a relatively small influence. But simply because other factors may have a bigger influence doesn’t mean that they are completely worthless, even for prestigious/old professors. A University that stops evaluating certain staff has to ask itself some very serious questions.

@CapeCode or this top researcher/poor teacher will be assigned to highly specialised classes (last 2 semester) or assigned only to research and advisory. The good teacher with poor research outcome will be assigned for early classes where treir attitude is crucial.

Is this typically done at most American universities, irrespective of
  a professor's age, status or fame?

Yes. It's likely a required process of the administration, as negotiated in the faculty contract. It's probably not something your department has any say over; and in a case such as you describe, the resulting product is likely to be mostly ignored.
It's probably not worth anyone's time to hammer out every imaginable exceptional case to such procedures (the faculty contract and handbook, outlining procedures, is usually already mind-bendingly long). This is what work is like in a large institution; rules apply to all, and have many stakeholders, and not everyone gets their every whim or convenience satisfied.

I was about to say that it's very rare for tenure stream faculty to be in unions in the US, but I clicked through to your profile and see you're at one of the three universities with faculty unions that came to mind.  Of course, your main point holds true regardless.

@NoahSnyder: Thanks, although this article at Times Higher Education says 28% of all faculty were unionized in 2011, so I'm not sure that counts as "very rare". I conjecture that if we only counted tenured faculty it would be higher? -- https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/unions-reap-rewards-as-us-professoriate-fights-to-keep-gains/415723.article

I thought adjunct unions were much more common than tt unions, though I admit I could be wrong.  Also I know very little about community colleges, which are going to make a huge difference in the raw numbers, but not be relevant to the question.

@NoahSnyder: Anyway, I edited out the "union" modifier. It was news to me that's a minority of faculty; thank you for that observation.

That "Regular Full-time Tenured Faculty ... Shall be evaluated at least once in every three academic years" is part of my institution's faculty contract (collective bargaining agreement). I doubt this is an unusual provision. If they are public, check out the terms under which your professors work!

I have known professors who with good justification were extremely famous for brilliant research done in the past, but (a) they were hopeless lecturers, and/or (b) they were clearly in decline and not keeping up with the latest developments in the field: in some cases even teaching ideas that were now superseded.

Not completely relevant, as evaluations written by undergraduate students are unlikely to be able to assess whether superseded material is being taught.

When newer faculty members come up for tenure, their teaching evaluations are compared against the department average.  So, it makes sense to administer the same questionnaire to everyone to obtain the full population sample as a baseline.

Let's follow that thought for a bit:
Your goal is to only evaluate the bad teachers, but not the good ones.
How do you tell the bad teachers from the good ones? I suggest you use evaluations. Any other suggestions are welcome.
Because some people who run universities think that way, student evaluations are often somewhat standardized and required for all teachers.

authors: Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні


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UK distinction in Masters / 1st at UK undergraduate: are they of equal weighting?
UK Distinction in Masters / 1st at UK Undergraduate: are they, ceteris paribus, of equal weighting when assessing academic potential, in e.g. postgrad applications?

It's not really clear what you're asking. Can you explain what "1st at Undergraduate" means?

wow, ok, i mean a 1st at undergraduate. maybe a uk thing? @Ric

the idea of someone posting on a @acaedemia board when they don't know what a 1st is, is at best surprising

it's what our entire undergraduate system is based around

There's no need to be a jerk. I only have experience in the American school system and am just trying to help you improve your question.

@user3293056, do you assume everyone knows the UK HE system? That's obviously a false assumption.

@Ric touche, sorry

I would suggest a first class degree and a distinction at master's level is a great thing together. Separately, for a postgrad application it really depends. A distinction in a master's program related to the Ph.D. is going to give great weight to your application, even if your undergrad performance isn't as strong. When it's the other way round and the undergrad performance is fantastic but the master's research is not so good, it suggests the student is a great student, but maybe not cut out for research.


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Is it appropriate to ask a professor for a discount on his expensive book?
My question is similar to this  - Rude to ask a book chapter.
I have bought the first of two parts of a research monograph. The second part is even more expensive (around $150) and in my currency it is prohibitively expensive. I do not know the professor and he does not know me either. On the other hand it is possible we may collaborate in the future as we are in the same field. Is it appropriate to send him an email and ask him for a discount on his book? Would it harm a professional relationship later on in my career?

Authors usually don't and cannot sell directly their books, and the price is decided by the publisher. Authors typically receive a few courtesy copies of their books, but they have no access to other copies for free.

@MassimoOrtolano- Good to know that from somebody in my field no less ! I guess I will have to go without the book !

@MassimoOrtolano - would the Professor have a ebook version that he can give at a discount ?

An author can have their draft copy in electronic format, but might not even have the final version as published. My suggestion however is to borrow the book from your university library, and if your library doesn't have it they can probably loan it from another library. That's what libraries are for.

@MassimoOrtolano Can you turn your comments into an answer please?

It is also useful to know that many textbooks in scientific fields can be found in English language in so-called "international edition" that are actually editions sold in India, printed on cheap paper, usually B/W which cost a lot less than the "normal" edition. I know a website which I used a few times to buy them, however I don't know if I can provide a link here.

Consider the size of the audience when deciding when to ask.  For a research monograph that has perhaps a few hundred potential readers, this is a fairly reasonable request.  For a mass-market textbook intended to sell millions of copies, it's not.

Text book "rentals"? Amazon Rent-Textbooks or similar...

it might be worth asking if the author knows where you can get a cheaper version and explaining your situation.  Obviously this is easier if you already have a connection.

Authors usually don't and cannot sell directly copies of their books, and the price is decided by the publisher.
Of course, an author has their draft copy in electronic format, but they might not even have the final electronic version as published. Authors typically receive a few courtesy copies of their books, but they have no access to other copies for free.
My suggestion however is to borrow the book from your university library: that's what library are for, after all.
If the library doesn't have a copy, depending on your position, you can:

Suggest the library to buy a copy. Many university libraries buy books according to the suggestions of their faculties: if you cannot do this directly, probably your adviser can.
Ask your library if they can loan it from another library. In many countries there is a system of interlibrary loans, and sometimes it works even across different countries.

Another alternative if you're struggling to find it in a library is to buy the book and then resell it on Amazon/Ebay when you're finished. If the book is popular enough you can often recoup a decent proportion of your cost.

And ANOTHER another alternative is "Rental"? Amazon Rent-Textbooks or similar...

@JBentley: That's a big risk to take if you can't eat in the meantime, and/or if you can't then make a sale.

In my school, you could not check out copies of most required texts: they were in such high demand you were only allowed to use them in the library.  My solution was to buy the previous and/or international edition of the book for 1/10th the price online.  I found that, for every one of my textbooks, the only major difference was the homework problems, which I could photocopy from the library's copy.

@BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft: OP is asking about a monograph, which is a completely different animal from a textbook. For instance, it is rather unlikely to be borrowed from your university library (by someone you don't personally know, presuming the monograph is closely related to your area).

I don't think it is rude to ask for the preprint of the book. In fact, many authors publish the preprint for books on arxiv(I can give examples of this). However, the rudeness depends on the culture and has many dependencies. Finally, you can use Libgen for downloading/uploading books, and many authors put their book also here, although they would not admit it.

+1 For Libgen, great resource for obtaining books and articles.

Is Libgen legal? I thought it was in the same category as other piracy sites.

No, it is a normal pirating site, and as such not legal to use (in Germany at least).

I was in same situation and found that the author was on research gate. I message him about my financial constraints and politely asked for favor to which he replied with the copy of whole book.
I think you can also ask him, as they are well aware of student problems and might help you out. In case of refusal thank him and understand his position.

It's not rude to ask - but please also understand it's not necessarily rudeness by the prof if he declines to provide.

As Massimo Ortolano said, authors don't directly decide the prices on their books. The publisher does, and authors have no direct control over that price (it's possible an author can negotiate the price before signing the contract, however).
That said, you can ask the professor anyway to help you acquire a (relatively) cheap copy of the book. Here're some ways he can do it:

He could give you an earlier version. Depending on how much earlier it is, the text could be largely the same. The danger of this is that, the preprint probably won't be in printed form, and if he gives you an electronic copy then he could also damage sales of his book. Specifically asking for this could put him in a difficult spot.
He could have some free copies left behind. Book contracts I've seen typically say the publisher will provide the author some complimentary copies of the book after it's been published. These could range from a few (~5) to a lot (~20). It's possible the professor has some left over.
There's also a good chance that the professor will have donated some of his complimentary copies to your university's library, or your university's library will already have purchased some copies of the book (it's written by one of their academics; naturally they will buy). You can check with them.
Finally, the professor could purchase some copies of it for cheap. Again, book contracts I've seen typically say that if you author a book for the publisher, you get to purchase both further copies of your own book as well as other books in the publisher's collection for a substantial discount (~30%).

Some professors will give you back the royalty they earn on the book in exchange for a receipt for its legal purchase. But on a $80 textbook it is only likely to be $5. Authors earn much less than you might think.


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During one's career in academia, in the STEM fields of research at U.S. universities, what are typical examples of academic politics?
What are some typical examples of "academic politics" that professors face in academia?
Does academic politics mainly affect younger professors?
I've seen the term "academic politics" come up in some past questions on this site, but I realize that I don't actually know what it means - I just know that it is something that can cause students to quit PhD programs and professors to leave academia.
(I kept the question specific to STEM fields of research at U.S. universities, just in case my question would be too broad without it.)

Almost every aspect of the job has politics invovled. Who teaches which classes, on what days and in which rooms. The distribution of TA support. What committees you serve on and what roles you play on those committees. Which lab space and office space you get. Rotation of sabbatical and research leaves. If there is any departmental funding, how it is spent. The hiring of new faculty and the admission of PhD students. I have even seen fights over what types of pens are kept in the supply closet.
Generally as a new faculty, there are certain thing in your contract and other thing agreed to verbally and in emails. In toxic environments, and even in some good environments, these things will come under attack. Even things in you contract will come under attack from colleagues who want to take advantage of you.
That is not to say it is all bad and not all colleagues will be out to get you. In good departments there will be more people looking out for you and only a handful of bad apples.


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Are pure mathematicians at U.S. universities expected to win research grants?
Are pure mathematicians, e.g., Algebraists, Number Theorists, Geometers, and Topologists, at good U.S. research universities expected to win research grants to fund their work, in order to gain tenure and be promoted?
I see a lot of questions here on Academia SE that talk about the need to win grant-funding, in order to survive in academia, but I'm not sure whether that applies to pure math professors.

Grants generally don't pay for math professors' base salary. They usually go toward conferences, travel, student support, and summer salary. I will wait for someone more senior to weigh in on the importance of earning grants to tenure committees.

In case nobody senior answers: I am an assistant professor in pure math at a good, but not Top 50, research university. I have not been on a tenure committee, but my impression is that here you are expected to have gotten some funding (not necessarily a lot). Certainly it helps you travel to conferences, invite visitors, support students, and other things very helpful to your career. I suspect that someone would get tenure here without any grants if his/her record was otherwise strong enough, but this hasn't happened recently in my department, so I don't actually know.

My impression (both at my school and talking to other people at top 50, but not top 10, schools) is that getting an NSF grant is somewhat more difficult than getting tenure (especially post-sequester).  That is if you got an NSF grant the tenure case should be easy, but you could not have an NSF grant and still have a strong case.  But I'd also like to hear this confirmed by someone with more experience.  I'm guessing anonymous was including smaller non-NSF grants?

On the other hand, if someone wasn't seriously and regularly applying for grants, I'd expect that to be a huge tenure issue.

@NoahSnyder: Yes, indeed. Most of the people who have recently gone up for tenure here have won NSF grants (in the low six figures), but I know one who has gotten only non-NSF grants, totalling in the mid five figures. All of the people I mentioned have been applying for grants very consistently.

At my large R1 state university in the U.S., it might be impossible to get tenure without having an active grant at the time, even with an otherwise excellent record, since mathematics faculty disinterested (or hostile to whatever the specialty or person in question might be) would use this as grounds for doubting the quality. After all, supposedly, all the best people are funded. Supposedly, endorsement by the NSF (or NSA) is an external, objective test of quality. This is certainly a convenient assumption for arguments in certain directions. EDIT: and since a strong super-majority is needed for a "positive" tenure vote, even irrational ranting can sway otherwise uninformed or disinterested people to scuttle the vote.
Issues of external funding are apparently even more identified with research activity by engineers (and experimental scientists), who often dominate the college-wide tenure (and promotion) committees. That is, it is sometimes apparently unimaginable that a person would be doing research without a grant.
Further, at my university, in other hard-science departments, often large grants are allowed to "buy out" faculty from any teaching at all. This is rare in my math department. EDIT: thus, in the minds of some engineers, "teaching" is stigmatized, since in their own depts it's only the disenfranchised who have to do any of it. And then there're the wildly different paper-count standards for experimental science/engineering versus mathematics.
The literal "funding of research" usually is less critical, apart from the expense of travelling to conferences, and extra summer salary.

I wonder if any mathematics department (at universities where the sciences and humanities have different deans) has tried to jump to the College of Humanities (or whatever it is called) in part due to these kinds of tenure decision issues.

@AlexanderWoo Well, that brings its own issues: they would wonder why we hadn't written books.  Math has a lot of weird idiosyncrasies as a discipline, so we get trouble no matter what the arrangement is.

I don't actually disagree with anything specific you've written, but the overall tone of pessimism doesn't ring true for me.  I'm not privy to the details of a lot of people's cases, but I don't think I know any specific case in math where a candidate with strong support from the department was shot down by some higher level of administration.  Are these just being hushed up, or happening at places where I don't have contacts?

@BenWebster, I'm sure it varies from place to place, but by this point I've seen such cases come up on a very regular basis. "Applied" mathematicians seem to get uniformly more positive treatment from the ambient administration (still at the "college" level rather than "university-wide"). In most cases, fortunately, push-back from the math dept has gotten the dean to over-rule a committee's attempted denial of tenure/promotion. But the pattern of events is dismayingly consistent, in my observation over many years.

Thanks, as usual, for your incredibly valuable insight, Professor Garrett :)

The expectation was clearly there in all three places I've been so far though the extent to which it was crucial varied a lot. From my perspective, it looks like the external funding is most crucial at the top tier places (where most people around just happen to have it, so why not you?) and at the bottom tier places (where the administration just doesn't understand any measurement units but dollars, so to sell somebody without a grant to the dean may be quite a headache) but not so crucial in the middle.
The good part about pure math. is that the grant support is not essential for performing the routine duties (you do not need to finance a lab, or anything else like that), and getting tenure is just a once in the lifetime event, so you do not need to be in a constant jeopardy as far as getting external funding is concerned. The bad part is that it looks like on top of general budget cuts, the NSF is currently also trying to give big chunks of money to few people instead of supporting more researchers (especially the young ones) with smaller amounts, so getting an NSF grant in pure math. gets harder and harder.

Bottom tier places with administrations that just care about dollars tend not to hire any pure mathematicians, either because the administration knows pure mathematicians don't bring in much money even if they do get grants, or because the department knows it won't be able to grant them tenure.