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1500 questions
54
votes
6 answers

Is this Stanford certificate real?

A Christian pastor claims to be a Stanford professor who holds three PhDs in comparative theology, history, and eschatology. However, his profile is not anywhere on the university website or anywhere in Google (rather than in his YouTube channel).…
Wenura
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54
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14 answers

How to sign your email to students, so to avoid their immature behavior?

Or how would you like to be addressed? As a graduate TA, I went by my first name. But I thought that some students were becoming too friendly. They took things for granted (for example, asking for a homework extension every week without even…
user45756
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54
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7 answers

Is it okay to give students advice on managing academic work?

My journey through academia has been a hard-fought battle against myself and all my worst traits. I'm now finishing my PhD and concurrently teaching courses in which I inevitably come across students who do things that remind me of my own mistakes.…
Danielle McCool
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54
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9 answers

Telling a former supervisor you don't want to publish

I graduated from my PhD in the middle of last year and have since landed a full time job in industry. Currently I'm pretty ran off my feet with work, but I'm also enjoying having free time at weekends to spend with my Husband. My supervisor has been…
Gerilk
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54
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12 answers

Should I be honest with postdoc candidate about awful lab working environment?

I work as a postdoc in a lab that is extremely mismanaged. The head of the lab micromanages all the staff, often claims successful work as his own, and rejects new ideas that are not from him. All the employees (both scientists and technicians)…
Tempest16
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54
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13 answers

Nice vs. ugly numbers in homework and tests

This question revolves around using integers (−1, 0, 1, 2, 3) or simple fractions (½, ⅓, ⅗) vs. real numbers (−1.254, 42.72) in teaching concepts, assigning homework, and preparing tests for math, science, or engineering. For the rest of this…
ZachS
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54
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9 answers

How to deal with systematic rigging of academic position job postings?

In a discussion with some of my close friends in other academic institutes, we noticed the common experience* in which it seems that well over 80% of the advertised job postings for permanent or tenure track positions at the departments close to our…
Hjan
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54
votes
8 answers

Avoiding "Zoom bombing" in virtual conferences and seminars

With travel restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic, many academics are organizing online seminars and conferences as a substitute for regular in-person university seminars, colloquia, and research conferences. In real life, seminars are usually open…
Nate Eldredge
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54
votes
10 answers

Is paying someone to fix LaTeX issues in one's thesis ethical?

For my bachelor thesis in theoretical CS I paid someone to fix some weird LaTeX issues I had make some figures in LaTeX for which I provided exact (!) hand-drawn pictures adjust the document class/template (font size, margins, …) to university…
user897029
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54
votes
5 answers

Double blind peer review when paper cites author's GitHub repo for code

I and my coauthor wrote a paper and the project involved creating a (small) software library. Part of the novelty of the paper is the output of the code, which is a digital object not intended for by-hand manipulation. The code (open source) would…
David Roberts
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54
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3 answers

How should I interpret a promising preprint that was never published in a peer-reviewed journal?

There have been a couple of occasions in my research in which I've come across a preprint that is several years old and is very relevant to the work that I'm doing. Often these preprints have very promising initial results. However, when looking at…
Amadou Kone
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54
votes
12 answers

Should I give professor gift at the beginning of my PhD?

I will be in a PhD program in Germany in which the first year of the program consists of only studying courses under several different professors. Some people suggested me that I should give gift to the professors with whom I had interview with at…
Aqqqq
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54
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6 answers

Is it fair for a professor to grade us on the possession of past papers?

My English professor recently asked us to bring in all of our graded essays from the whole semester in order to fill out a 'rubric' of sorts which tallied the various types of mistakes we had made. She will be grading the rubric, and previously…
Equinox
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54
votes
13 answers

The IT department bottlenecks progress. How should I handle this?

I'm currently working as a PhD student. I am not working on a tech-oriented PhD. However, my project requires a lot of programming. This involves both working on a computation cluster, servers, and working with a variety of software. These are…
unit_with_a_soul
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54
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6 answers

How to deal with a cynical class?

I am dealing with this class that somehow became very cynical. We have constant complaints about the pace of the class, people asking literally the same questions over and over, blatant plagiarism, students pretty much insulting the lecturer and…
Layman
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