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In our lab (at Nankai University, in China), students often write papers where they are first author. However, we use a convention where the last author signifies the student's teacher. I feel that this is uncommon.
I have not heard of this done outside of our lab, but maybe this is more common than I would guess.
Question: How widespread is the use of "last author = teacher" on student papers?
As pointed out by others in the comments, this is very common in my field (Operations Research); at my institution this is the norm and is common in other disciplines.
A professor told me during my PhD that the marginal benefit of having their name first was small compared to having the student's name first. Moreover, papers coming from a masters or PhD usually deserve to have the student's name first anyway.
I'm sure the community will have various opinions but I find this a good practice unless there's a clear contribution level issue.
Updates:
It is common to place students first then rest of contributors in alphabetical order. Further, as @BryanKrause points out (comment), it may be beneficial to not have your name first if it helps make the case you're capable of supervising the research process.
In many social sciences (Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology) last author signifies the supervisor of the student's work, including Ph.D. or Masters supervisor, postdoc adviser, sometimes undergraduate supervisor of an honors thesis, or a graduate student in that role. In Engineering and more applied social sciences (industrial-organizational psych, human factors, or applied vision science) it also often is extended to be the individual who holds the grant and funds the work.
I have seen this convention cause feelings of unfairness or even suspicions of misconduct among those who arrive in Engineering labs from fields uninitiated to the practice. I usually advise these individuals that 'when in Rome'...
Norms differ between fields. In economics, the supervisor typically is not added as an author for a student's paper, unless the contribution of the supervisor was at the level of a coauthor's. The benefit to a student of having a solo-authored paper relative to a coauthored-with-supervisor one is usually greater than the benefit of another paper to the supervisor. In the recommendation letters for job applicants, the thesis committee members go to great lengths to emphasize that the job applicant's papers (solo or coauthored) are independent work and the supervisor or other coauthors had minimal input.
Very field dependent, and possibly even regionally dependent. In my field, the last author is the person who contributed least. First is the person who wrote the paper, then in decreasing order of how much work they put in, including supervisory work not directly related to the paper (so teacher/supervisor would probably be second or third).
