Academia Stack Exchange
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1500 questions
64
votes
3 answers

Writing a letter of recommendation for a faculty colleague I cannot highly recommend

A colleague of mine has asked that I write him a letter of recommendation (LOR). I will call him Steve. He recently was denied tenure and is looking for a new position at several other universities. Steve is currently a co-author on three papers I…
Vladhagen
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14 answers

Inadmissible theorems in research

One of my engineering friends told me how e once had to take a make-up calculus I exam due to being hospitalised and so self-studied a lot of the missed topics. For the make-up exam, e used L'Hôpital's rule, although we weren't taught that until 1…
BCLC
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64
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10 answers

Telling PhD supervisor I published a paper about my thesis without telling them or listing them as authors?

I am in my 3rd year of PhD. In my program, it is a requirement for PhD students to graduate with a paper that is published in a Scopus Index journal. Before I entered, and during my PhD, I had already published a few papers to a Scopus index peer…
Pearl Hyatt
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64
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11 answers

How is sexism unknowingly perpetrated in academia?

Some sexism is obvious, blatant, and/or deliberate. Fortunately, my understanding is that this kind of sexism is mostly a thing of the past. However, female colleagues have told me that more "benign", but still harmful, sexism is still very…
Anonymous
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64
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7 answers

Is it normal/ethical for student grades to be assigned according to quotas?

In my undergraduate Physics courses, I have heard from my Professor last semester that he got in trouble from the physics department for passing too many students. This semester, the TA in the lab portion of my class (who grades our lab reports)…
dattebane
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64
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11 answers

Difficult student would dispute every grade in the course and now wants letter of recommendation

I had a student in one of my courses that for every graded assignment would come to me and challenge the grade given, even though I provided a rubric to show exactly why the points where taken off. For one of the last assignments, which was a class…
user14802
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63
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7 answers

The position I applied for was advertised as Associate Professor with Tenure, but now they’re saying it’s tenure-track Associate Professor

I am an associate professor, who has received tenure in the US in 2014. After receiving tenure, I moved to Europe to help my family with some health issues, and found an associate professor position in a country where tenure is 'by law' meaning the…
J. Denworth
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63
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8 answers

Should a student be penalized for using a theorem outside of the curriculum?

I am taking an abstract algebra course and I am really interested about the topic. So much so that I spend most of my time reading supplementary materials. I consequently know a lot more theorems than the ones covered in class. In a recent quiz,…
Coconut
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63
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8 answers

What should you do if you cannot reproduce published results?

I am trying to reproduce published results in a paper. Those results come from numerical simulations. The original authors and I do not use the same software, and theirs is proprietary (I don't have access to it). I have tried to reproduce their…
F'x
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63
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5 answers

Should I write that a student is a feminist in my recommendation letter?

I'm in the process of writing a recommendation letter for a female student to be admitted to some honors program within the university. She is fantastic and I assume that she will get admitted with or without my help, so my question isn't…
Sana
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63
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5 answers

Why not make students reproduce work?

Typically, PhD theses are expected to have novel results. As science advances, it is becoming increasingly difficult to accumulate enough knowledge to begin a project that pushes the boundaries. Original findings are often published as papers before…
Superbest
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11 answers

Why do academics write peer reviews?

I do not understand what good it does them. A professor said it gives an opportunity to read papers he would not read on his own. I am sure there is more to it but I do not see what they gain by participating in the peer review process. It takes…
user4231
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63
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10 answers

Would a high Stack Exchange rep make a difference in a job interview?

I am a PhD student in mathematics going into graph theory. I hope to either do a post-doc or (hopefully!) get a tenure-track position at a research-oriented university after graduation. I don't have a super high Math SE reputation, but it has been…
Sean English
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63
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6 answers

How should I communicate that I do not hold the views expressed in a paper I wrote

I am writing a paper for a class that requires me to write from a perspective I disagree with. To an external observer it may not be clear that I am not allowed to disagree with the premise of the prompt. I disagree with it to such a degree that I…
thisischuck
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10 answers

Is there any way to detect high tech (e.g. cell-phone assisted) academic dishonesty?

Over the last few years, our university has seen a rise in high-tech academic dishonesty. We have a no electronics policy, except calculators when needed (even those now are provided by the school, and personal calculators are not allowed). …
num40
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