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How should I respond to a professor's email following up on an offer of admission?
I am a final year undergrad and applied for graduate programs in various universities for Fall'16 admission. I recently got an admission offer from one of the programs. The admissions chair cc'd the offer email to potential supervisors I mentioned in my application. Here's the email from one of these potential supervisors.

Dear xxx,
just to follow on Dr. xxx's invitation to xxx University: I was very
  impressed with your record and ambition, and would be very interested
  in having you join my group. I am looking for very motivated and
  strong students at the moment. I have been working on various aspects
  of xxx, with my students and postdocs at xxx University, and in
  collaboration with colleagues in xxx University and xxx University.
You can read about my recent research at my webpage: xxx or check some
  of my papers on the google scholar: xxx
Please let me know if you have any questions about living and studying
  here in xxx. I think we have a very lively and a friendly department,
  in spectacular surroundings.
Very best from xxx.

This is my first admission offer, so I'm waiting for offers or rejections from other places. So, I'm not really sure how to respond. And even if I did want to work under his supervision, what questions do I ask to begin with? I'm totally lost.

Well, the potential supervisor explicitly mentions "Please let me know if you have any questions about living and studying here
in xxx"...just email him/her if you have any such questions. If you are waiting for offers/rejections, I think a polite reply stating the same would be alright. If you are excited to work with him/her because of reasons X,Y,Z, just mention them in the email. In any case, it is highly likely that the potential supervisor understands your position (of waiting for all offers).

Yeah, I think being honest is the way to go here. Is the fact that the supervisor emailed me mean that I am a very strong candidate, or do supervisors quite commonly email applicants in graduate admissions?

I do not know anything, but the email reads enthusiastic. Only you know, however, whether this reflects the strength of your submission....

Professors tend to be very busy. I doubt that someone would go out of her/his way to express interest in you joining their group if that interest was not genuine. Think about the worst case scenario from the professor's perspective: if I contact this person even though I'm not interested and that person accepts, now I have to supervise a student I'm not that keen on (= lots more work!)

@varun you really should add your comment as an answer. It's spot on.

Well, the potential supervisor explicitly mentions "Please let me know if you have any questions about living and studying here in xxx"...just email him/her if you have any such questions. If you are waiting for offers/rejections, I think a polite reply stating the same would be alright.
If you are excited to work with him/her because of reasons X,Y,Z, just mention them in the email. In any case, it is highly likely that the potential supervisor understands your position (of waiting for all offers).

Note particularly "joining our group" and "check publications at http://research-group.umiskatonic.edu". Before answering do at least skim the publications shown there.
Be clear that you appreciate their prompt response (first one you got!), and that you are still waiting to hear from other options before deciding where to apply. They will know that you are going to apply to several positions, you aren't telling any secret there.

Buy time.

Thank the potential supervisor for the email
Let her know that you are reading about her research and that you are impressed by what you have read so far
Ask open questions about living arrangements such as "What aspects of the living arrangements there support the focus on research? What aspects are detrimental?"

Do not tell her or anyone there that you are waiting on other offers.
If you get other offers then choose the best one and thank the others


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Master's degree vs. Master's degree without thesis
I'm a doctoral student (in a fully funded applied statistics program) opting for the terminal master's degree with thesis due to personal reasons and the lack of fit in the program. However, I'm unsure whether it is better to write the master's thesis (option #1) or to take the master's degree without a thesis (option #2) - which option best puts me in a position for industry and the possibility of reapplying to a PhD program (in a different field) in a couple years.

You may want to add in your field.  For mine (languages), a writing sample is asked for normally when applying to a PhD and a section from a masters thesis is inevitably going to be far more polished than a term paper.

@guifa are you talking about the field im currently in or the field I hope to get into? If it's the former, then I already stated that it's in applied statistics, but if it's the latter, I'm still deliberating (probably something very quantitative/computation and in either neuroscience or physics).

somehow I literally read right past that. I'll go put my dunce hat on and head to the corner. (But if you're looking at changing future, that would be relevant enough to add, methinks)

I think in industry nobody cares if it was with thesis or without (except maybe in R&D).

Generally PhD programs require a significant amount of research. That being said, a Master's Degree with the Thesis option is a good indicator that you have applied rigorous and reviewed research methods in the past - and is therefore an example of what your future work may be.
As I was advised, "if there is any notion in your mind that you will pursue a PhD later in life - then you should take the Thesis option now."

Thanks! I'm deliberating whether I need to write another master's thesis, if I already have one written. In other words, I already have a master's thesis (in a public health area) and if I write this one, a second thesis (in applied statistics).

Ah, I see. In that case, I believe it boils down to how relevant will your second Master's Degree be to your PhD field.

I been thinking that a master's without thesis is probably not worth it if the skills that I learn in industry will more than be enough to make up for the lack of a [2nd] thesis. That is, I can show projects in data analytic and statistical learning that probably looks better than a thesis in an out-dated research field when I do want to go back into academia again.

I tend to concur with that notion. If you decide to go back into Academic you will already have the 1st Master's, and a portfolio of work you've accomplished sense. You should be fine.

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How often to meet for successful supervision of Master theses?
Currently, I am in the process of finishing my PhD and starting a PostDoc position. Part of this position will be the supervision of Master theses.
I have little teaching experience, and no supervising experience except for "passive" experiences of being supervised myself when writing a Master's thesis myself. An added difficulty is that my workplace and the university where the students are studying are 150 km / 2 hour train ride apart, so I can't just have "open office doors" and meetings have to be pre-arranged.
What frequencies of meetings with students under supervision do you find helpful or too much? This will surely depend on the student, but how do I figure out what is right for a student I have never met before?

I have edited your question slightly to focus on what seemed to be the most salient concern, how frequently to meet with students.  This should give you higher quality answers.  If you want to ask about other aspects of supervision, you can ask more questions.

My supervision is (in Computer Science, although I think that this is likely not particularly field-dependent) in the beginning usually quite tight (meaning meetings once a week for about one hour each, although for other fields "tight supervision" may mean something different). At the beginning of the project, the student is usually not yet fully caught up on the literature in his field and does not yet fully understand her/his topic. Hence (s)he is still unsure about where the project is going, and often has a hard time deciding on tactical issues, such as what to try and work on next. In this phase I usually have a weekly jour fixe.
As the project progresses, I more and more retreat to the background and give the student the freedom to decide more individually how to conduct her/his research. This naturally also means that meetings become less frequent, and the jour fixe becomes more an on-demand meeting. I still try to catch up with the student approximately every three weeks (again, concrete frequency may vary for you), mostly to check that the student is progressing and that her/his research is not completely derailing into a track that I consider dangerous or wrong (I will let the student make smaller, tactical mistakes, such as wasting some time on an approach that I suspect may fail, but I will step in if the student embarks on a detour that I consider bad enough that it may seriously threaten the success of her/his thesis).
Towards the end, meetings tend to become more frequent again, mostly because I like to give students quick feedback on individual sections of their thesis while they are writing. No point in letting them make the same 15 standard mistakes through their entire document before I get to suggest improvements. In this phase, and especially if time is already running out, I sometimes have quick feedback meetings almost every other day.

Could some of the frequent thesis interaction be handled by e-mail or shared documents? With the advisor and student not co-located, that may be more efficient than office meetings.

@PatriciaShanahan If it has to be yes. I have supervised students across the atlantic ocean, and it worked out OK. However, if at all possible, I try to do the supervision face to face. A lot of urgency is lost without direct interaction.

Thanks for you great comment. Do you have any suggestions on how to figure out what is a good frequency of meeting for the student - as differnet students might have different requirements

@user3825755 Well, I monitor the progress in and between those meetings. If I have the impression that the meetings are a waste of time, I reduce their frequency. If I have the impression that only the pressure of having to show me something in the next meeting motivates the student to work, I will make meetings more frequent. And, of course, talk to the student how (s)he would like to handle things.

The answer by xLeitix is quite detailed and on the mark. In any case, the frequency of of interaction, and how, will depend a lot on the student (some require handholding the whole time, others are able to work independently and just require the occasional hint or (re)direction). A phone call, or a wiki with daily progress report that you check from time to time, gathering the whole work group for in-general discussion of advance(s) are also useful.
In my case I had students who shared a git repository with their LaTeX source to the thesis-in-progress, where I had a branch with my suggestions of changes. I skimmed through this making my suggestions perhaps weekly, and we interacted by email most of the time. We met face to face somewhat like once a month.

The shared git repository is a great idea. Should work for code as well

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Are publishers making less money on textbooks now?
A colleague of mine, who teaches chemistry, claims that these days, sales of copies of college textbooks are no longer profitable for publishers. He says that their revenue is now from services, such as answer-checking services like MyMathLab. I asked him to provide a source for his claim, but he didn't. I have a pretty hard time believing this as stated, because his statements sound categorical and extreme. But is there at least some truth to this? Is there any way of knowing, since the publishers may not make the data available?
My suspicion is that a $280/copy o-chem text is even more profitable than it was before, because the online services can be used to force the students to give money to the publisher. Before the online services came along, a student could just buy a used book, which would put no money in the publisher's pocket. Now, the student may have no choice but to buy the book shrinkwrapped with a card providing access to the online service.
The publisher can also rent the book to students in electronic form, with a DRM scheme that makes the book evaporate after a year. This also helps to kill off the used book market.

Anecdotal evidence in my experience TAing something like calculus: Fewer students actually buy the book than you'd expect (many who do have much easier access to cheap used copies not through the publisher), and those who don't can often find online copies of the book in the illegal fashion.

And there are lots of other on-line resources, making textbooks less essential.

To be honest, I'm not sure even to what extent a book can be seen as profitable separate from the online tools because of the ever tighter integration between the two. A number of textbooks in newer editions have started offloading (er, onloading? uploading?) activities that would traditionally be in the textbook to online systems.  This is especially egregious with audio or video activities that used to come on CD/tape/VHS/DVD, and now are only accessible online (those materials are important for us in foreign languages).
And to really drive home the point that they are considered to be a single unit, I've used at least two textbooks now in the past few years for which the physical book + e-book + online tools cost less than the physical book alone.
So I guess in that sense, you could say that the online tools are where the money are (because that's where they're pushing people), but it's not like they could discard the textbook and just sell the online tools, at least in my field.  A good book can go without online tools, but the other way around isn't so true.
Now there is a trend to goto single-use sells, and again, it's easy to conflate that with the online portion (and hard to fully separate out the economics of it without detailed numbers none of us have): they've always been able to grab people on single-use sells via workbooks, but now I notice there's a small trend to try to integrate textbooks with workbooks in a single print to reemphasize the formers' single use nature, with or without an online system.

I don't have any evidence to back this but I believe they are making less profit. As someone who has TA's for years one thing I have noticed is that publishers are sending less free books to academics. They used to send more freebies to people who taught related courses. Also, they would provide several free copies of a textbook to the department when a textbook was selected for a course. Now they only provide one. I think this could be an indicator that they are not making enough profit.
I think the reason is that students buy less books than before. People find PDFs online and download them for free which hurts the publishers. Also, used book sales (which do not benefit the publishers) are ever increasing. A lot of students even opt to just use wikipedia and online resources to complement lecture notes and forego using textbooks all together.


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What to do when you find out your research result is wrong because it's based on wrong methods/results, after years of works?
This is not my current situation. However I've heard similar stories from different people (along with my own past experience) a few times. Therefore I want to ask a general question(the title).
For example, suppose you're a graduate student in one of the following scenarios

You believe you prove a theorem but later find out it's wrong because one of the lemma/theorem you cite from another published paper is wrong.
You spend long time setting up experiments and finding out an published experiment result is not reproducible and is likely to be wrong.
You rely on co-workers' code to run simulations but it turns out that there are errors in the code that makes the simulation inaccurate, therefore the conclusion based on that is wrong.

and let's further assume you find out those problems when it's closed to advancement or dissertation time of graduate study. You've spent a few years, only to get a faulty result that is not likely to advance you to the next stage of a researcher.
Q. Are these scenarios hopeless (i.e. a student in that scenario must terminate graduate study)? Should the student be the only one responsible for the issue?
If not, what's the best thing one can do in those scenarios?
If so, how to prevent them? (You can still answer this question even if your answer to Q. is no.)
Highly appreciated if anyone can discuss this from either student's or advisor's point of view.

See What to do when you spend several months working on an idea that fails in a masters thesis?, What to do when research leads to poor results?, How to overcome discouragement on finding major error in work just before paper submission?

Also Is a research thesis (report) with zero contribution to human knowledge acceptable? and What to do with negative research outcomes (results) of PhD research experiment?

I took the liberty of adding the [tag:negative-results] and [tag:errors-erratum] tags. Browsing previous questions with these tags might be useful.

Should the student be the only one responsible for the issue? Yes, because it is his PhD. He should have cross-checked multiple times the previous works he bases his work on.  Should a student in that scenario must terminate graduate study? No, but he should expect to spend another 2-4 years in this PhD to produce something meaningful and publishable. If even after this additional time he does not produce anything worthwhile, then he does not deserve a PhD.

@Alexandros well if your conclusion is "spend another 2-4 years" in many places it means "leave the program immediately" because the department has time limit on when a student should advance/graduate.

Usually PhD programs may be extended easily for 2 years more.

@Alexandros, in the U.S., in math, it is highly non-trivial to get funding (e.g., as TA + tuition) for two more years. Yes, often one can get put into a status that one does not have to pay tuition, and is still "in the program", but... not funded. For one thing, there are too many people competing for the 5-6 years of funding to let people stretch it out to 8.

@paulgarrett I never said anything about funding. If the OP has spent 5-6 years to discover that his research was based on wrong assumptions and is meaningless, then he does not deserve a PhD. If he can come up with something publishable and worthwhile in the next 2 years (funded or not) he might get his PhD. You cannot grant someone a PhD just because he tried.

@Alexandros, of course, I didn't advocate giving PhD's "for effort". And, in fact, there is an ever-greater push at my university to have very limited time after "prelim oral exam" to finish the degree, apart from funding. It is a hostile situation.

One thing to consider is that showing fault in an "established" result is, in itself, an important result. If a student spent years working on a project, only to find that the results from their new work disprove earlier accepted results, that's worth telling other researchers (i.e. publishable). Especially considering there's probably dozens of other graduate students all working off those same results until someone tells them the results are not reliable. In fact, my father, an emeritus professor of mathematics, lists "counter-examples" as one of his areas of research.
In the case of proofs and lemmas (i.e. case 1), this is clearly publishable. In the case of experiments, it's a little harder: you would need to make a strong case for your new experiment being substantial evidence that the previous results were wrong, rather than you just botched your experiment. But if you can make a solid case, it is well worth publishing.
Sadly, the third case is not so good for the student. Assuming the student's colleague has not published yet, the research community does not benefit much from the student saying "hey I just realized my friend messed up". They should still tell their colleague and advisor so that the situation is communicated.

This is not really a problem at all. As a matter of fact, correcting previously published results and refining applied methods is part of research. Such an honest mistake is not an offence or ethnical misconduct in any way.


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Accepting a graduate offer of admission and then turning it down
I was offered admission into a graduate physics program in February. I was given 21 days  within which to accept the offer and pay the admission deposit.
Now I was sent an email from the program offering me a prestigious university scholarship to motivate me to accept the offer of admission. I had not yet received any other offer of admission, so out of desperation, I accepted the offer of admission and paid the admission deposit.
Now, if I am offered admission into any of the upper grade universities I applied to, I will write to the graduate program director from the former program and politely mention that I cannot enroll in their program because the upper grade university is a better fit for me.
Will this cause a serious problem for me, i.e., in terms of my future academic career and the graduate program director's denial to let me go?

I've never heard of an "admissions deposit", but whenever an agreement involves a deposit, it's implied that you can back out if you're willing to forfeit the deposit (what other purpose could a deposit have?).  If there were no deposit (which I think is more common) then that's a different matter.

Traditionally, the recommendation is that as soon as you are accepted you withdraw your applications to schools that are out of the running. Then as soon as you accept an offer you withdraw your remaining applications. If a school make a decision early and requires a decision before you hear from schools you may find more desirable, it is best to ask for an extension.
I go against the norm a little and believe that if a school/employer will not give you and extension and wishes to put you at a disadvantage that it is not unreasonable to reneg on your acceptance. As this is not the norm, it will burn bridges.

If you do it early on in the process the first university will have time to call/recruit someone in their shortlist, in that case you shouldn't worry about it. Depending on how you handle the situation you might or might not burn your bridges at this university, but I wouldn't worry too much about it, just act right away and give yourself a deadline by when you will refuse other offers.

I am hoping to receive at least one other offer by March 10 (given that I was offered such a huge sum of money in scholarship by the first university, so I must be in demand), if not earlier. Do you consider March 10 too late to reject the offer that I already accepted? I plan to email the program as soon as I receive another offer.

@failexam the norm is that once you accept an offer that you do not go back on your word. As I say in my answer, I find it a stupid norm.


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Is it worth it to write a book with my advisor instead of focusing on journal/conference publications?
Is it worth it to coauthor a book with my advisor in place of spending time publishing resrarch in journals or conferences?
Would the fact that the book is a much larger piece of work contribute more to my academic reputation? Or not as much because it won't contain as much novel research.

The standard advice in STEMcademia is never write books until tenure, but this is heavily field-dependent.

A data point is that my colleague wrote a book with our advisor prior to completing his PhD. It certainly slowed down some publications, but now he can put it on his CV. I think in his case, it was a wash, he still has good papers, just not as many as if he hadn't written the book.

In which field are you?

Probably stick with the papers. If and when you look for a research tenure track position, I assume it would make you a stronger applicant to show a history of research and adding to the field in novel ways vs. coauthoring a book.

@user37208 I wouldn't write physics books after tenure either, because I doubt they would be read (at least in Physics).

In my field (economics), even very known economists are writing first papers and publish in top journals. Once publishing, they are writing books based on these papers, with modifying some parts of them. An example could be a book entitled "Economic Growth" by Robert Barro and Xavier Sala-i Martin where some substantial content of some chapters are already published as paper in top journals.

if you want to make a lot of money write a book.

What do you mean, in place of?

@user4050 You generally don't make a lot of money out of an academic book.

Regarding money, I'll state it even more strongly.  On rare occasions, someone makes a lot of money from an exceptionally widely-used textbook (one with many sales to huge classes) or a book that crosses over to a general audience.  Otherwise it's pretty much guaranteed that you won't make a lot of money.  If you computed your effective hourly wage for the time you spent writing the book, you'd probably be embarrassed to tell your relatives.

No, you should focus first on publishing journal papers in journals with high impact, these are the "real" things , while a book should be for later. The most important goals on any PhD would be becoming sufficient independently in order to ask questions in the field, see the connections, and publish the "played" results.

Since he is your advisor, co-author the book (as in your name will be up there on the cover with his). Because you are still a student, you need papers (maybe he doesn't or he can delay them for sometime; you can't!). So, you will need to do both! That's my advise.

Have you written an academic book?  I haven't, but I have several book-length manuscripts, one of which received a "letter of interest" from one of the standard academic publishing companies.  I decided not to try to pursue publication because -- even after the time I had already spent on it -- the amount of work necessary to get it in publishable form seemed prohibitively high.  Most faculty members take a full year sabbatical in order to even make significant progress on writing a book.  "So, you will need to do both!" seems likely to be very impractical.

The OP did not specify a time frame! We do not know if the book has to be written from scratch? How long is the book? When it has to be finalized? From where I stand, in order for him to continue evolving, he needs papers. Doing both, although impractical to you, can be achievable in multiple scenarios/ conditions. Putting papers aside seems  harsh! Putting aside an opportunity to publish a book is equally harsh! To me of course.  This forum is about sharing ideas and opinions.

"Doing both, although impractical to you, can be achievable in multiple scenarios/ conditions." I didn't mean to imply that I was only giving my own personal experience.  There is a lot of advice given on writing books at an early career stage; some of it is given generally and some of it has been given to me personally.  It is widely observed that writing a book is incredibly more time-consuming than one might think.  You didn't answer my question of whether you wrote a book.  When you tell someone "you will need to do" something, whether you yourself have done it seems relevant.

I'm currently co-authoring a book with my advisor as I'm finalizing my thesis and I have wrote two book chapters earlier, one of them is published. To be honest, I didn't think you wanted an answer to your question. I thought it was more of a sarcastic question.

The fact that you are coauthoring a book with your advisor is extremely relevant information that would lend credibility to your answer if you would include it, along with enough information about it to indicate whether the circumstances may apply to the OP.  I would also ask you to keep in mind that your own productivity as a graduate student is quite extraordinary.  While that is wonderful for you, it is really not feasible for most students (and perhaps for no students in certain academic fields).

I agree with you! I should have added that to my answer but didn't feel the need to be very detailed. I will make sure to be more specific with my next answers/questions. Thanks for pointing this out!

I think it depends on your goals really (and your field).
With books they generally tend to be long term single use projects to discuss the current subjects in a partiular field and reference a lot of papers.
Obviously papers tend to focus on cutitng edge research and practices within the field. SOme people prefer the relatively fast pased research environment of submitting papers and others prefer the slower pace of authroing. Again it primarily will be determined, by field, goals, and your own time as well.

It would all depend on your focus and how well it would correlate with that of your advisor.
In general, standard textbooks would receive more citations than research papers. It would have a wider outreach (still dressing on the general case here). It would be pretty effective on the long run.
Coming back to your degree fulfilment, research papers would bring you closer to your immediate goal. This would quantify your achievements as a researcher and eventually qualify you for the degree.
Having stated above, the final decision is yours. If you are bent on finishing your degree quicker, resort to publishing research papers. If you wish for your career to develop in the future, then publishing a book would be a better option. This would accumulate your popularity while you work on your research papers afterwards. Also keep in mind the wavelength of your advisor.


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Why pay a fee to have your article (in a subscription-based journal) made open access when you can just put the preprint on arXiv?
Upon acceptance, some journals offer open access through an optional fee. This model differs from the usual open access model in which all authors pay a fee and all accepted papers are accessible without restriction. Addendum: the latter is referred to as simply open access, while the former is referred to as hybrid open access.
My question is as follows: I publish (most of) my papers on the arXiv, and as such, the preprints are picked up by search engines. When the corresponding camera-ready journal version appears, anyone with an internet connection can still access my arXiv paper, and hence I always opt not to pay the optional fees to make my paper open access.
In fact, most respected researchers in mathematics/computer science/physics/etc. also publish to the arXiv. As such, I am confused as to why this model of open access exists. What demand is it satisfying? Is there some advantage to paying these optional fees that I am not seeing?
P.S. -- The journal I have in mind currently is a SIAM journal. Their open access policies are listed here. Their open access fee is $2,500 USD (this is not an unusual number for publishers following this approach). This (at least to me) is a substantial amount of money per paper.

Actually, SIAM even allows you to post their final typeset copy on your own website (though not on arXiv).

"This (at least to me) is a substantial amount of money per paper." This is of course in the eye of the observer. In Computer Science we often publish in conferences, which requires us to travel there, which in essence means that we commonly pay northwards of 2000 USD for a paper (in hotel fees, flights, and conference tickets). Of course there are added benefits and the "feel-good factor" is better, but the matter of the fact is still that each published paper incurs costs in a similar dimension to us - and then the paper isn't even open access.

I'm asking myself the same question, especially since in fields where Arxiv is not an option, the majority of good journals allow posting preprints online.

I think you meant "not an unusual number" instead of "not an usual number". In fact it's a typical, if not low, fee.

In most field peer reviewed papers a distinguished from open, non reviewed manuscripts

If you work in a field in which people use and trust the arXiv, then there's little reason to pay fees for hybrid open access.  One reason would be if your funding agency requires open access publication and does not consider the arXiv to be an acceptable substitute.  Another would be if you wish to encourage the journal to transition to fee-based open access publishing.  In your case, I doubt either of these reasons would be compelling.
From the publisher's perspective, it's a no brainer: why not offer authors this option?  It can't do any harm, since it pays for itself.  If few authors choose to pay the fee, then the publisher can use this as evidence that there is little demand to change their business model.  If many authors do, then it smoothens the transition to becoming a fully open-access journal.

"If few authors choose to pay the fee, then the publisher can use this as evidence that there is little demand to change their business model." I long feared that this is really the main reason behind the existence of this model, similarly to how some players in the music industry initially wanted to curb digital music sales with overtly terrible offers.

@xLeitix I don't see why would this evidence be needed. Publishers will naturally transition to author-pay OA if that becomes the fashion. It's much more profitable for them anyways since the number of authors wanting to publish their stuff largely outnumber people willing to pay to read it.

Another explanation for the hybrid model: if some of the authors choose to pay the fee, the publisher can get this money in addition to the subscription fees they are already collecting. So that's a win-win for them. (This is also known as "double dipping".)

Is there some evidence for this: "If many authors do, then it smoothens the transition to becoming a fully open-access journal"? What I heard is the contrary, that hybrid journals' APC are higher than other OA journals, but I don't really know if many hybrid journals have transitioned to fully OA

In fact, most respected researchers in mathematics/computer science/physics/etc. also publish to the arXiv. As such, I am confused as to why this model of open access exists. What demand is it satisfying? Is there some advantage to paying these optional fees that I am not seeing?

Because not all respected researchers work in mathematics/computer science, etc. For example, posting on arXiv or an arXiv-alike is extremely uncommon in my field, and preprints are not readily accepted - nor necessarily searched for. My only two preprints are there, for example, because a co-author insisted. However, these authors may still value open access - especially if they don't have a funding mechanism like the NIH that will mandate it become open eventually. In that case, why not pay for it?
For why it exists for fields where arXiv is a substitute? Likely because it's a publisher wide program, and there's very little reason not to offer it on the off chance someone wants to pay.

Keep in mind that there's open access and there's open access. Let's compare for example the different self-archiving models (yellow, blue, and green open access according to the SHERPA RoMEO classification) with the hybrid open access you're asking about or the otherwise commonly used gold open access model.
With self-archiving, the copyright is typically transferred to the publisher, but they permit you to post preprints or maybe even post-prints to a publicly accessible repository. The license that these repositories typically require simply permits them to distribute the paper (e.g. the arXiv non-exclusive distribution license), without giving any rights to persons who download the paper from there.
In contrast, with hybrid or gold open access, typically the authors put their paper under an open license like the Creative Commons License. This is also the model that the SIAM Open Access policy proposes. In that case, everybody can use the paper under this license. That implies that other researchers and teachers may distribute the paper, and can legally reuse figures or excerpts in their works (presentations, posters, blog posts), with attribution, but without getting special permission from the publisher.
And then there's strange open access policies like the one from the IEEE, where authors pay a fee just to have their paper downloadable by everybody: essentially the same thing that arXiv or self-archiving provides, just with the official publisher's version...
In the end, the authors can (and have to) decide which open access model is best suited for their situation.

Our lab has a portion of its budget allocated to publication costs.  If we don't spend it, it looks like we haven't been publishing enough.  Having nothing else we can actually spend it on, we've been paying for open access recently (e.g. some of my recent open-access papers: 1, 2).

This the most depressing thing I have read on this website. Author-pay open access has negatively affected academia much more than I initially thought.

That money may be useful for the next project.

Who decides that a portion of its budget allocated to publication costs?

Are you really promoting your work here? Seems jarring, since there's little that it adds to the answer.

Prestige and branding.  Publishers are well aware of the power of brands and many academics are obsessed with the prestige of having work accepted to a ‘high impact’ journal and the associated positive effects it has on their career and their ego.  So much so they are willing to hand over tax payers (the majority, but not all research, is funded from taxes, at least in the UK) money as well as the copyright of the work to publishers in order to publish their work in these venues.  RCUK (the body responsible for overseeing the different research councils in the UK) awarded £22.6 million in funding (2015/2016) for Universities to publish in open access journals.  Or thought of another way, scientists have handed £22.6 million to publishers for the privilege of access and reviewing their own data.  One can argue that the publishers operate a service, which they do, however with profit margins of some major publishers nearing 50% I am astonished that this practice continues given the potential ease of distribution using something called the internet.  We can blame the publishers for charging high fees but we basically let them and it needs a large cultural shift of academics to stop this as the £22.6 million (and that is not counting the money from charities etc.) that is given to the publishers is lost from science and would be better spent on funding science rather than lining the pockets of publishers.  For this we need to stop valuing the name of the journal in which the information is published more than the actual information in the scientific papers.

we need to stop valuing the name of the journal No, we need to stop paying article processing charges. OP is talking about journals where authors can publish without paying and upload a preprint.

I believe the short version is that some journals do not actually permit this. Many Elsevier journals, for instance, have embargo policies that appear to disallow uploading the article to your own website or to a site like arXiv/BioRxiv for a period of time following publication, usually 12-24 months. In "hybrid" journals such as you describe, I believe that paying for open access means that the article is available immediately.

Nope, if you read them,  Elsevier's policies actually explicitly allow this ...  See https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/177206/13044. Or just follow the link in Patrick's answer and click on "Article sharing guidelines"!  They even write that "Authors can share their preprint anywhere at any time " and "updating a preprint in arXiv or RePEc with the accepted manuscript" is allowed ...

In 2017, when I provided this link, that page explicitly stated "Cell Press, The Lancet, and some society-owned titles have different preprint policies. Information on these is available on the journal homepage." Cell Press is an imprint of Elsevier. That page used to link directly to Cell Press, but if you investigate now, you will still find that for their hybrid OA journals, there is an embargo period of 6-12 months during which authors may not replace their preprints with the accepted manuscript: https://www.cell.com/rights-sharing-embargoes

To be clear, I don't mean to dispute what they said in 2017; I don't know (though there are archives) and policies can change.  They are quite friendly toward preprint servers now.  I also note that the Cell page on embargoes you link to is extraordinarily noncommittal - "Upon official acceptance of a manuscript, authors will be asked to complete a "Journal Publishing Agreement."" and "Our support for posting of preprints only applies to ..." are the opposite of clear MUST or MUST NOT language.  And the text of the "Journal Publishing Agreement" seems to be secret.

I agree that there is some waffle-y language about posting preprints in general, and Elsevier has definitely moved on this over time. But I think their policy for posting the accepted version of the paper post-review is still fairly unambiguous: "Authors of papers published by Cell Press can share their accepted manuscript (the post-peer-review version that does not incorporate copy editing and proofing) via non-commercial hosting platforms, such as their institutional repository, after a posting embargo period has elapsed."

We agree on that.  I am convinced the language you quote is intended to leave room for ambiguity not captured by your literally true short version, and we'll never know.

It depends on the copyright transfer agreement.
Some journals require you to transfer the rights to the pre-print. Other than book chapters, in my humble opinion, this is a predatory behaviour and such journals should be boycotted, but as soon as you sign the copyright transfer agreement, you can't upload your manuscript to arXiv or personal repository. Some journals might even ask you to take down versions from arXiv or personal repository, even if you uploaded your work to those media before submitting to the journal. I am not well versed on the IP laws to tell you whether this is legal, but they can still ask you to take them down.
If the copyright transfer agreement gives you the pre-print or even the post-print, I guess, you can even upload them to scribd. Normally, since editors and reviewers are generally unpaid, the expenses of the journal starts after the post-print, so it makes sense that they retain the full rights to the final version.
What is the downside of not paying open access and uploading it to the repository?

The uploaded version will probably be poor in writing, as it did not go through a detailed script checking.
The visibility of your article might reduce. I am very sceptical of this, as Google scholar indexes personal repositories and arXiv. But I am not sure whether Web of Science indexes personal repositories too. Still, although it is largely depending on the field, I assume the reduction will be infinitesimal.

Addendum:

Since this question is asked on academia.SE rather than law.SE, any legal precedence carries little weight here. This is because suing an editor/journal might have unprecedented implications for an emerging academician. Winning such a lawsuit can easily turn into a pyrrhic victory, while you can easily resubmit it to another journal after the rejection.

Journals distinguish between for profit repositories and non-commercial ones. It is never a good idea to put your work in a for profit repository.

Please do not use edits to disagree with an answer. Please flag again if such edits are made again.

The major open source licenses are irrevocable˟.  And arXiv's policies are in accord with this.   (Thanks, to visionaries like RMS, LLL, and allies.)

"Articles that have been announced and made public cannot be completely removed." Source: arXiv's Withdrawal Policy.

So if you've submitted it to arXiv, the journals can require you to transfer your rights, but even if you do, they will be unable to get arXiv to take them down.
I'm reading Elsevier's Article Sharing Policy
and they are -- shockingly -- VERY liberal with respect to sharing of both Preprints AND Accepted Manuscripts - at any time - but not the actual Published Journal Article.
The Article Sharing Policy and the Quick Definitions of those terms in bold, above, is at the following link, which brings you to the part of the page with the latter:

https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing#definitions *

Hmm!  The above previews as a clickable link like this, but doesn't save as one.

So I think most of what's holding people back from changing with the times is inertia.
*For example, here's one definition:

An accepted manuscript is the manuscript of an article that has been accepted for publication and which typically includes author-incorporated changes suggested during submission, peer review, and editor-author communications. They do not include other publisher value-added contributions such as copy-editing, formatting, technical enhancements and (if relevant) pagination.

˟Yes, there's even been court precedent to further establish this.

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


text:
Is it worth attending the Grace Hopper conference without presenting anything as a first year PhD student?
My university sent out the GHC 2016 emails recently. I have always wanted to go, because every year I see every single one of my female CS friends go there. The vast majority of them are sponsored by their companies, so they don't really have anything to present. My question is, is attending GHC in such a situation of any use at all? I have always felt that you get more respect in a conference and also more contacts (because of people wanting to talk to you) when you actually contribute something to it as opposed to being a passive observer. But I am not sure.
My second question, as the title says, I am a first year PhD student, so I don't really have any one big project I'm working on, just small projects I've been doing to get a feel for my field. So I can't present anything worthwhile. As a student, is there a way to go to GHC as only an observer (not presenter)? I mean, in case I conclude that simply attending will be useful too, I'd like to give it a shot, but can't find anything like on their website.
Thanks!

A lot of technology conferences are a step away from the world of academia, based in a commercial culture with attendees from the world of software development. It's a highly rewarding experience, to present at a conference, but it's always a highly valuable experience to go, listen and socialise. There is nothing wrong with attending without presenting.

I suspect the answer to this question varies greatly depending on who is offering to pay your way to the conference. Paying out of pocket is hugely different from being funded to go.

GHC is less of a research conference and more of a networking and educational event. They had over 12,000 attendees last year but only ~700 presenters, so clearly most people do not present anything.
I've known several people to go (Masters and PhD students) and none of them have presented. They all loved it and at least one got a job out of it.
You'll get to listen to some great talks, attend workship-like events, interview with many companies, and meet a lot of other students. It seems like a great experience so you should definitely consider it.
The scholarship applications just recently opened, which would cover your costs of traveling and attending the event.

I signed up just so I could say: YES. Go to Grace Hopper. As a woman in tech it has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life. The chance just to feel represented -- to talk to random women and have them be knowledgeable about all sorts of aspects of programming -- it is something you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else in the world.
(I see the rules say to avoid "Making statements based on opinion". This is clearly based on my opinion... sorry :) )

That you had a great experience is not an opinion, it's very much fact, so that's fine. My only suggestion would be to give more concrete explanations of how it was good for you, especially in a way that would apply to a 1st-year PhD student. Yes it was incredible and unmatched and you had the time of your life, but what did it do for your career? Even if what it did was just get you excited enough to do better things, that's at least something concrete that should be made explicit.


text:
How to screen out candidates for faculty jobs who don't know the subject
I teach physics at a community college and have been on a number of hiring committees for tenure-track jobs. Usually we interview about 6 people for such a position, and of those, usually something like 3 of them show a lack of knowledge of the subject in the interview. When I say a lack of knowledge, I mean that they can't do easy freshman stuff. We will ask them a question that is posed as a request for them to pretend we're a class of students and give a short explanation of something, so it's nominally a test of their ability to teach it, but in reality we find candidates who simply don't know it. These are people who have a PhD from an accredited school. (We hardly ever interview people who only have a master's.)
[EDIT] (To clarify, I'm talking about very basic knowledge, such as understanding what Newton's laws mean. We're not asking candidates to recall obscure trivia. Personally, I don't really care whether they know which is Newton's 1st law, 2nd, or 3rd. I'm talking about candidates who actually demonstrate elementary misunderstandings of Newton's laws. Since a lot of academia.SE users are in math, I think a good analogy would be if someone applied to teach math, and that person didn't know the chain rule -- which I have heard from colleagues in math departments at community colleges is also common. Continuing this analogy, the issue is not that they fail to remember the term "chain rule." The issue is that if they're asked to differentiate sin cos x, they can't do it. They do silly things like attempting to use the product rule, as if the sine was multiplied by the cosine. Or they throw up their hands and won't try, even if the committee tries to help them out.)
Are there good strategies for screening these people out at an earlier stage, without needlessly losing too many good candidates from our pool?
Here's what we're already doing:

We require applicants to submit undergraduate transcripts, and we are less likely to interview people who have poor undergraduate grades (such as Ds and Fs in math and physics).
We prefer applicants who have graduate degrees from more prestigious schools.
We prefer a candidate who has taught a wide variety of courses to one who has only, e.g., taught mechanics.

Undergraduate grades do seem to correlate with what we see in the interview, but it's also possible that someone started out their undergraduate education with a weak high school background and then overcame that disadvantage. There is also the difficulty of comparing different countries' grading standards. We require graduate transcripts, but I find those hard to extract useful information from.
We are currently only asking them to give the names of references, but not to supply letters of reference along with their applications. Would it help to make them send letters?
You would think that someone with really weak competence would never get into a good graduate program, and therefore we could just not interview people who have degrees from low-prestige programs. However, our pool doesn't usually include a ton of people who have degrees from the best graduate programs, and we have also seen people in the past with degrees from renowned universities who nevertheless displayed major gaps in their knowledge, as well as highly competent people who got their degrees from no-name schools.

If you asked me "what is Newton's second law", I'd have to guess. I know what Newton discovered and how to apply it, but not which "law" is which or how they are usually worded. If you asked me to succintly describe the chain rule, I'd also get flustered. I do applied mathematical modelling in a biophysical context for a living, but so rarely use this basic stuff that it isn't at the forefront of my mind. It would take me less than 30s to look them up and have immediate understanding, though. And if I were teaching, obviously this would be kept fresh.

@Significance But would you apply to teach physics? And in case, wouldn't you give a refreshment to the basics before any interview?

@MassimoOrtolano I might before interviewing at a community college, but not before an interview at an R1. I bet a lot of people interviewing at CCs have no idea what they are getting into.

In my experience within my field, I've encountered a lot of researchers from top-tier university that have a fundamental lack of a solid background in the subject matter. In fact, I have found this to be more common from the top tier universities. I think this is because a lot of PhD programs put them directly into research without having them take fundamental core courses. This problem is magnified in my field (statistics) because PhD programs accept students without a statistics background into our program. So many PhDs only seem to know their narrow research topic, and not much more.

Do you require teaching evaluation scores in the application? I'd think those would show a problem with basic understanding, because you'd think the students would complain that the explanations didn't make sense.

I'm also curious how big your pool of applicants usually is. I'd hope you're getting a pool of applicants many times larger than the six or so you are interviewing. Is it possible to increase the interview pool to try to make sure you are getting a good number of qualified people to choose from?

@CliffAB That seems extremely atypical. The vast majority of (good) stats PhD programs require a solid core of classes and have comprehensive qualifying exams before research begins in earnest. Sure, stats programs take plenty of compsci/math/etc. undergrads who haven't taken extensive statistics, but if they don't catch up enough to pass quals then they won't stay in the program.

Grades are not a very good correlation of actual performance .The german govt worked this out in the late 1930s .The Nazi party had for its day lots of university degrees amongst its cabinet .Himler was right into organising all sorts of cources some of which nowdays would be downright racist .Anyway the only subjects that correlated in any way with performance in the waffen SS were chess and boxing .So you will have to do your stats and change your grade thresholds somehow .

Encountering people in job interviews who don't know the slightest thing about the job for which they're interviewing is quite common. My experience is with interviewing candidates for programming jobs, and I'd say that about 1/2 don't know the basics of programming; another third can pass a written test on the subject but can't write a working program; with the remaining 1/6th being worth a second look. (Which is still a better percentage than this guy found).

Honestly I find it hard to believe that a person with a PhD in mathematics can't differentiate sin cos x. I have heard stories about "FizzBuzz" in programming but this is just too hard to believe!

@Ant: Think master's degree in math education, not PhD in math.

Presumably your interview is doing a good job screening out the individuals who you feel "don't know the subject" and you are trying to screen them out prior to the interview. I think a reasonable screening tool could be a a phone interview. You should probably conduct between 10-15 phone interviews to find the 6 candidates you want to interview.
While I say "phone interview", it is most often now a "Skype" interview. These interviews could be as short as 30 minutes and should be no longer than 1 hour scheduled back-to-back such that they all get completed in two long days. The phone interviews I know about have had 3-6 people (presumably the majority of the committee) present, but I think depending on department politics that you could reduce it to a smaller group (maybe even just the committee chair).
While you could simply focus the phone interview on the questions that cause candidates the most trouble during on campus interviews, given 1/2 your candidates have difficulties recalling key concepts of "random" classes, you may want to help them out a little. If you require that applicants submit a sample syllabus for freshman physics and another for an upper level elective, then the phone interview should focus on the teaching statement and sample syllabus.
During the phone interview you should also mention some of the other key classes of you department that they might teach on. If a candidate is truly clueless, this will not matter, but good candidates will realize that they need to brush up on those classes for the on campus interview.
In summary, an inability to talk about a syllabus the candidate has written would be your screening tool and the hints during the phone interview will help you minimize throwing out potentially good candidates.

Interesting suggestion. Have you done this, and did it work well?

@BenCrowell for R1s in the sciences teaching is not a priority, but my wife is in the humanities and they require sample syllabi and use phone interviews extensively. They also often have to teach a class during the on campus interview. From what I gather from her, the phone interview focuses on teaching more than research.

+1 I think another important aspect in the phone interview is to not let the candidate dictate the entire discussion. I have talked to many PhDs with a very thorough understanding of a very narrow section of their field, but amazingly little breadth. If they spend the whole time talking about the area they know, you may miss out that this is all they know.

You think that asking one or two questions on the spot in an interview is a good way to assess an applicant's knowledge of basic concepts in the discipline. However, this sounds like a relatively poor approach to me.
There are basic principles of psychometrics that are relevant here. Basic principles of item response theory are relevant. First, people differ on a distribution in latent ability (i.e., knowledge of the domain). Second, items differ in difficulty. Third, even with these two bits of information, there is a random component. So if you want to measure latent ability in applicants, then you can improve your assessment by having more items. For example, give them a written test with a bunch of items.
More importantly, I think you need to be be careful with assuming that most people can recall basic facts from the undergraduate curriculum. If you teach that curriculum, then you are likely to recall many such details. If you don't teach such material, even if you've learnt the material and would know how to look it up and solve problems when required, it may not be available to immediate working memory. It might be easy to relearn and if you were given the task of teaching a class related to that content, you may still be able to do a good job presenting it.
In summary, you may want to think about the degree which being able to recall undergraduate knowledge at the time of hire is predictive of job performance. I imagine that it might be relevant, but I also think that a whole range of other indicators would be relevant too. So in addition to trying to measure the construct better, I'd recommend that you treat it as one of several indicators of potential job performance.

I upvoted for the general theoretical background, but any answer which amounts to "do lots more work and maybe scare more people off" is problematic for the OP, I imagine. To the extent that this means "you will lose some good candidates with your current approach, and here's why" I think it's fine; but beyond that, the "no easy solution" part is IMHO more of a comment than a proper answer.

I guess it could be elaborated. But I think there are a few specific suggestions in the answer: (1) include a written test of knowledge of relevant undergraduate subject matter, (2) weight any ad hoc teaching exercise as just one sign of potential competence within the context of other indicators (undergraduate grades, interview, references, cv, etc.).

@JeromyAnglim I am pretty sure that any department that required me to take a written test would automatically fall to the bottom of my list and would only take a job there if I had no other choice.

There's a famous test in the CS world called "FizzBuzz" that companies these days are using to efficiently screen out candidates that managed to get degrees without actually learning anything. FizzBuzz (and its variants) focus on what are considered to be core concepts that any programmer regardless of language should be able to do in a matter of minutes. As reported, the results are astounding. While material on the effectiveness of FizzBuzz in recruiting has never been extensively peer-reviewed (to my knowledge), coming from that world and even being a self-taught programmer I can tell you that anyone worth their salt should be able to complete the test in at least one language, even if the solution is inelegant.
It sounds like you're running into a similar problem in your neck of the woods, and are already onto a similar solution. I'd recommend trying to find that core set of problems that any undergrad should be able to solve one way or another and use that as your screening. Let them use a textbook, maybe hint at a list of possible problems ahead of time as others have mentioned so they aren't caught off-guard, and be willing to help the way you've been doing. But make the first interviews (possibly over Skype as was also suggested) quick and to the point so you don't waste time. Establish either the base knowledge, or at least the ability to pick up on it quickly while under pressure, before proceeding to full, in-person interviews.
Those tricks have worked in my industry, hopefully they can help you in yours. We've seen that it doesn't matter who graduated with what degrees and has what recommendations or grades, the ones who can actually live up to their title and do their job are sometimes the least-decorated.
Edit: These "quick" interviews can be done on Skype in at most 30 minutes, possibly more like 15 depending on the questions. You can knock out a lot of candidates in a short period of time before dedicating serious resources to second-round interviews (which may still be online and only last an hour), assuming you think the process through in the beginning.

Well, such tests are not common in academic hiring, and academic job candidates are not used to having their content knowledge questioned at such a low level.  If OP's institution adopts this, I would be concerned that they might alienate good candidates, who might, rightly or wrongly, find such tests insulting.

@NateEldredge: Good candidates will never be insulted by such tests. Either they will show the interviewers a clear mastery of the low-level content and then it is time to move on to higher-level test questions. It can only be insulting when all the candidates can solve all of the low-level questions and the good candidates are rejected while lousy candidates are accepted.

The idea is interesting, but I also share Nate Eldredge's concern. I already worry that we're alienating candidates by requiring them to submit an undergraduate transcript. (When I interviewed for my job, I thought it was absurd.) In our interviews, we usually mask at least some of the content-knowledge questions by phrasing them as tasks where the candidate is to pretend to explain the idea to students. This helps to avoid insulting the candidates. A common phenomenon throughout academia is that lower-status schools mimic higher-status ones.

@BenCrowell I think the point that this is a community college is somewhat relevant. It seems irrelevant to submit an undergrad transcript when your understanding is that you are being hired to do research. If the position is more obviously teaching-focused I would find it much less surprising.

@user21820 They may not find them insulting, but they will definitely find them a waste of time. They would definitely avoid the said institution if they can. Imagine this became a standard, and with each application you had to solve a separate low-level task.

@YetAnotherGeek: If it takes only a few minutes, very few people would consider it a waste of time. I do not see why testing low-level knowledge should take more than a few minutes! The interviewer should quickly adapt his/her questions to the level of the interviewee.

@BenCrowell Working it into a simulated teaching exercise may be the perfect solution then. You can still weed people out quickly by testing their basic knowledge (and it gives them a natural excuse to use a textbook) while not coming off as "We don't respect you." Bam - You've just invented the Academic version of FizzBuzz.

In the CS world this practice is also used to weed out people who may be smart and able to solve these tests, but can't be bothered because their ego is too large. You don't want to work with those people anyway. I don't know how the supply and demand stacks up in your industry but in the tech world, you have hundreds of decent resumes to chew through before finding your new hire, so it's certainly not a loss to rule out a smart candidate because they're too cocky. Your mileage may vary, as they say.

@thanby I think academics are generally more okay with working with people with big egos than working in a department that has been overrun with industry inspired HR management (such as a FizzBuzz type test).

Learning about a subject is not so much about being able to reproduce that knowledge at any moment, as much as it is about being able to re-learn more quickly the next time around. At some point all it will take is a quick look at the materials, or a little bit of time to re-think the steps involved. It would be a pity to lose out on good candidates because they can't pull up knowledge immediately - and in a stressful situation.
I would suggest giving them a list of possible topics in advance. But a big list, and not much in advance - so that knowledge still plays a major role. Or, alternatively, giving them the option to briefly consult a textbook on the spot. The ability to understand things deeply should still shine through.
I guess this is the opposite of what you asked for - it's not about how to screen people out, but how to screen them 'in', in case they do know the materials and the particular interview situation is not well suited to assess that.

This would be a fine answer if I didn't really mean what I said in my question. I meant it. We have candidates showing a lack of understanding of very basic material, such as Newton's laws. We're not asking them to recall obscure trivia.

@BenCrowellm the FizzBuzz test mentioned above is a trivial application of basic programming skills. Like using Newton's laws to compute e.g. how perfectly elastic bodies will move after a collision. Or perfectly sticky ones, if it comes to that. I'd probably think it is a quaint question, and move on (no, I don't do physics, I'm in computer science).

So you have a set of screening techniques, but they are not enough, and you may need to add another one (most probably a phone screen). You have a concern that doing so will alienate the candidates, which is totally understandable.
What you should do is not only introduce a new screening, but remove the ones which don't work. If undergrad transcripts show a correlation with the quality of candidates, keep that requirement. If candidates with PhDs don't show significantly higher quality over people with Masters, dump that requirement.
And don't be afraid that non-standard requirements and tests will be perceived as offensive. What is truly offensive (or, I'd rather say annoying) is wasting too much of someone's time over too small of a probability that you'll actually hire them. Asking to fill an hour-long form before even talking over the phone is offensive, asking to derive sin(cos(x)) is not.

To distill some of the other previous comments, I would suggest having a low bar that you expect any viable candidate could do over the phone. The important part is making it easy enough that you don't screen out nervous competent candidates, but it looks like this isn't an issue for your specific situation.
You might frame it in terms of "an initial phone screen"; it also provides an additional opportunity to get to know the candidates.
Also note this doesn't have to be direct questioning, but can be included in other questions (such as "How would you teach Newton's laws").

authors: Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні


text:
Evaluating red flags in potential advisors' scientific production and impact, past students, research interests and personality
In the next few weeks I'll need to pick an advisor for my master's thesis (in a certain subfield of mathematics). I've narrowed down the choice to two (full) professors.

Prof. H I've known Prof H  for two years, took two courses with him, and got the top grade in both of them. He is a very good, peaceful, and punctual person; and he is clear and precise in explanations. He has much academic experience (being over 60 years old) and has supervised many students (at undergraduate, masters, and doctoral level). However, I've noticed that his former PhD students (10, currently still assistant professors) are not  much productive (and mostly publish with him, working on his research program). I've a marked interest in a certain sub-subfield, but he works in a different (smaller and, in my opinion, less interesting) sub-subfield; he is quite productive and in the last 30 years he has covered an impressive (and well-organized) research program (in which I could easily find a thesis topic) and he has grown to be a household name in his area of specialization; but his research, although very solid and original, has not been exactly groundbreaking and his latest works (which are all of high quality and quite innovative) have not been very impactful (in terms of  citations yet).
Prof. K  Regardless of the choice of the advisor, I will take one course taught by Prof K. However, I don't known him personally yet and therefore I'm not familiar with his “style” (although I've been told that he is generally a good person). He also has many years of experience (being slightly under 60 years old) but has supervised fewer undergraduate and master's students (some of whom changed areas of research for their higher studies), no PhD students, and several Post-docs. He works exactly in the sub-subfield I'm most interested in and has produced many solid papers over the last 30 years; comparatively, I'd say that his work is less innovative and much less systematic than Prof H's but maybe broader; in fact, while Prof. H has expanded, organized, and generalized in an original way a couple of (small) research areas (also highlighting connections with other areas), Prof. K has mostly applied a vast sophisticate toolbox to solve several interesting problems and created only few novel "tools" slightly adapting the existing ones (although I must note that Prof. K's area is essentially much more “scattered”). Prof. K does not seem to be quite an household name, but has given substantial contributions, is quite active in the community (and his former advisor was the expert of the area).

Working with either of them has some pro's; however, there are some alarming red flags about both of them. I have a hunch that working with Prof. H may be smoother and simpler; however, Prof K research interests are much more appealing to me (and aligned to what I'd like to do during my PhD – for which I'll apply to another institution anyway).

Assuming that both of them would accept me as a student, to which red
  flags should I pay most attention? What  factors (also other than the ones I've talked about) should I take into
  account the most when making the decision?

may be of interest academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4793/why-would-one-choose-a-particular-advisor-other-than-having-shared-interests/

The big red flag for me with Prof K is the lack of successful PhD students. That's a long career as a "almost household name" to not have at least a couple student success stories under your belt. Remember the dissertation is a calling card. If you get the tenure track job, your interests can mutate and there's nothing to stop you from collaborating with Prof K down the line when you can afford to take more chances.

This question seems very specific to your circumstances, and therefore does not make a good fit for the site which seeks to yield more general resources. Can you distill the essence of the trade-offs? I.e., your trying to decide how much to weigh publications with existing connections or something like that?

@JeromyAnglim Thanks for the heads-up; however, I think I already described the two professors schematically enough to make it easy to extrapolate the essence of the trade-offs (and of the red flags): e.g., several not-very-productive PhD students vs no PhD students and some Post-docs; greater celebrity in one narrower and not very interesting area vs solid but not very original work in a cooler area; more systematic and unitary research program (but latest works not much cited) vs broader scope (although scattered), etc. What should I rewrite in a more 'essential' way?

@riku one suggestion would be to write a title that captures the essential aspects of what you are trading off so that someone could look at the title and go "I know what that question is about".

@JeromyAnglim I've tried to edit it in order to make it more explicit.

Well, first of all, this is a master's thesis. I would argue that it doesn't really matter that much, because you will at most be working with this person for a year or so and then leaving to go somewhere else.
Given what you've written here, I wonder why this is even a question for you. You know Prof H and have taken courses with him and done well. You know that he gives good mentorship and feedback. You know that his former students end up very successful. You know he's productive and well-known, which could be helpful for getting into a PhD program. The only question here is does he have enough subfield knowledge in your area to advise your thesis?
Also, if he has 30 years of research and is a household name, how is his work not impactful in terms of citations? You don't become a household name as a scientist unless you've written some papers with impact.
Prof K might not be a bad choice either. The fact that he has had no doctoral students is irrelevant because you're writing a master's thesis. But why go for an unknown if you already know Prof H and know that he's a great advisor?

In the US, this advice might make sense, but the OP has not indicated s/he is in the US. In Japan, students often do their PhD at the same place as their MA.

@roseofjuly I strongly disagree with your statement I would argue that it doesn't really matter that much. For a serious student, any work, especially the research study in his/her favorite subject matter really really much.

@Sathyam In Europe it is common to switch supervisors after the Masters. In fact, the easiest time to reorient one's career is after the Masters. Under this view, "It doesn't really matter that much" is a valid statement. That being said, if you find the right person to work with, that's the most important thing. Keep in mind, you have to get along with your supervisor, so you should talk to them in person, in any case.

As I've written, Prof. H's students are not very productive and independent; his work is impactful, but his latest works don't seem to have had the impact (in terms of citations) their novelty should deserve. "The only question here is does he have enough subfield knowledge in your area to advise your thesis?" No,  my point is that I will have to work for more than a year in an area which is not my favourite.

"The fact that he [Prof K] has had no doctoral students is irrelevant because you're writing a master's thesis." Well, here Masters thesis involve quite a large research component; besides, this could mean either that he didn't want PhD students or that no one has ever asked him for some reason (which may be a red flag).

@CaptainEmacs I think the work and the joy of doing it is a real thing and one of the driving force for a serious student. No matter if he/she chose to go with another supervisor, the work that he/she do, for him/her is important. When I am in the suit of a master student, I wouldn't wish to get the idea about the future possibility of a different field field/supervisor as long as I find my work interesting, I just do the work in hand and it is very very important for me.

@Sathyam I believe that there are 2 absolute priorities in a decision like that: supervisor and topic. Both have to be right, like in an AND gate. The supervisor is very important, and if badly chosen, this can sour your relation to your topic in a bad way. You may find a topic very important, but need to run the trade-off how well you work with that person supervising you. There are acceptable, or even harsh, but workable compromises, but some constellations are not. They can reach up to destroying your interest or your career in the field.


text:
Someone reported cheating during a quiz, but I didn't catch it myself
There was a weekly quiz in a TA discussion section I led today. During the quiz I was writing things I planned to talk on the board and didn't pay attention to students.
Then one student suddenly said to public "Frank, we're not allow to use note in the quiz right? These(point to a region that contains 2-3 people) people are using notes."
I looked back and confirm with that students about where she points to, but the people she accused cheating(if accurate) already put away the notes so I got no direct evidence.
Should I do anything in this scenario?
Quiz only worth 0~2%(0% if it's lowest quiz grade, 2% if not) of overall grade if that matters.

Update: The case was also reported to the Professor today and according to Professor's email it looks like the case is more serious than I expected and I'll have to explore a little more. Thanks for all responses so far.

No point in doing anything in that situation.  However, the fact that a student was willing to publicly accuse other students suggests this might be symptomatic of a wider problem.  I'd talk to this student privately and say you appreciate them bringing this to your attention and if they have seen this occur before.  If so, then you probably need to do a better job of curtailing such cheating.

You have no direct evidence, and rely on one person reporting cheating of 2-3 others...who, in case you'd decide to take action, are likely to say "Who? Us???" Tell the reporting student that you'll pay closer attention in the future, do it, and let this one slide.

Would it not be possible to simply invalidate the single quiz in question? Let them finish it, but tell them it's just an exercise. Next time, keep two eyes on the students.

You're the teaching assistant.  Inform the professor and let them handle the matter or offer you guidance.  That's their job.  In this case the evidence for cheating is tenuous at best, so I suspect nothing will be done against any of the students.  I've known more compelling cases of cheating to go reasonably unpunished, and one case of very blatant (and easily proved) cheating that was handled with just a stern admonishment and warning from the professor.  But you (and the professor) would rather the professor hear of the matter through you, than the possibly salacious gossip of the students.
So what what really needs to be addressed is:
Always keep your eye on the students during exams/quizzes.
As much as you want to believe that they're all perfectly moral and self-policing people (and quite probably most of them are), or that they can't possibly fit in cheating during "brief" windows, there will always be exceptions, and you owe it to the students who are such from giving such a clear opening to those who aren't (for whatever reasons).  You can't prevent all cheating all the time—it comes in a lot of forms, and some people are really good at it—, but this was easily preventable.
You may find yourself needing to apologize to the professor for this lapse, though I wouldn't get too worked up over that.  Most of us have made such a mistake at some point (although not all of us may be aware of it), and the minor value of the quiz helps take the edge off, such that a simple apology and recognition of the error is sufficient to make things right.

I disagree with this, simple because it's important to set a standard. If the cheaters are not at the very least investigated, then it sets a precedent for the students going forward. Perhaps it's the slippery slope fallacy, but perhaps it's just truth. Also, for some students, particularly those prone to worrying, 2% is as important as 20%.

@J.J That is the prerogative of the professor, not the TA.  And going by fmlin's update in the OP, it seems the professor has opted to go that way, for one reason or another.

Agreed, but there needs to be a balance between taking responsibility for injustices that happen on your watch, and passing the buck. Too often bad things happen because subordinates were "just following orders" or "not in a position to make a decision". I think cheating is a pretty universally perceived wrong. Certainly it's not the TA's job to be the judge jury and executioner, but notifying the professor and washing your hands of all responsibly is not appropriate either. A "Please give me your answer books, and leave" is the right balance.

@J.J That may have been a suitable response in this case, yes.  Ultimately it is the professor's duty to adjudicate the matter and decide punishments or other actions, if any.  The TA is usually neither empowered nor experienced enough to do these things on his own.  Terminating the quiz sounds like something I'd expect most professors to be okay with or approving of, though.

Perhaps my opinion is less valid given I have only tutored groups of students, and have not yet had formal teaching experience. But, again, perhaps a recent undergrad student opinion would be helpful. In my opinion, you can not reprimand students for cheating without witnessing it yourself, or having a very good reason (backed up by solid evidence) to penalize them for cheating.
Obviously, it seems likely this student that called them out was probably not lying, unless she's a sociopath. So, they either were using notes, or this other student saw what she thought were notes, but actually weren't. Either way, you can not really punish the students without further evidence. Academic dishonesty is a serious accusation that can tarnish a student's reputation for the entirety of their academic career. Evidence is a must. However, I don't think it would be a problem if you just point-blank asked them if they were using notes and deliberately cheating.