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I am a M.Sc. student in Machine Learning, about to finish my thesis this month. My advisor wants me to meet him in person to reproduce my results under his control. It is obvious that the main reason for this action is to be confident that I didn't manipulate the diagrams, etc.

I didn't do any cheating and I have no problem with that. But it is a little annoying for me that my advisor doesn't trust me. I want to know whether this is the norm in academia or is my adviser just a little skeptical of me?

I should mention that I am the lone M.Sc. student in the lab and I am nearly sure that the advisor doesn't do that with PhD students in the lab.

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    Are your results strange or surprising?
    – Akavall
    May 15, 2016 at 17:33
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    Comments on this post were essentially mini-answers, whose point of view is now addressed in existing answers; this conversation has therefore been moved to chat. Please use comments for improving or clarifying the question, use that chatroom for discussion or other things you want to say that you don't feel like posting as an answer (further comments will be subject to deletion if they're not for improving or clarifying the question.)
    – ff524
    May 16, 2016 at 1:05
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    When you say "obvious", can you say why it's obvious to you? Is there any specific facts or actions that lead you to that conclusion?
    – corsiKa
    May 16, 2016 at 20:23
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    I am sure by now your supervisor has checked your work. Are the answers below correct?
    – Prof. Santa Claus
    May 18, 2016 at 20:17
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    At some point in time someone is going to want to replicate your experiment in one way or another. Your supervisor is doing you a favour by checking over your work for you - I wish I got that kind of attention when I was doing my research work :D
    – Michael Lai
    May 19, 2016 at 23:11

7 Answers 7

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As many have pointed out in the comments (Nate Eldredge, Dan Romik, Per Alexandersson, etc.), the point is not to catch you cheating (as if you were intentionally trying to manipulate your results), but rather to verify your process of obtaining such results. We all should be so lucky as to have an adviser take the time out of his/her schedule to verify our processes.

I would also like to add that -- and this assumes your thesis could/will lead to an academic publication at a journal or conference -- that your adviser's reputation is potentially on the line by attaching his/her name to such a document. In other words, by becoming a co-author on your [future] publication, your adviser is essentially saying, "Yes, I helped work on this, and I am sure of the methods and the results contained within."

The bottom line (tl;dr) is that you shouldn't take this as a personal attack. You should be thankful to have someone who can invest the amount of time necessary to ensure the correctness of the work you've done.

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    Beyond that, if the professor has the "If your name is on the paper, you should be able to explain what happened" philosophy, beyond verifying the professor may just want to see the implementation.
    – Fomite
    May 14, 2016 at 22:21
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    The advisor's reputation is always on the line when signing a thesis. It doesn't matter whether there is also a journal article.
    – David Ketcheson
    May 15, 2016 at 7:24
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    @DavidKetcheson I suppose in theory, but in practice the reputational risk it highly dependent on how visible the work is.
    – user24098
    May 16, 2016 at 8:31
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    It's good to learn this early - that verification of your research is not a personal attack on your character. We're all humans and we all have biases. Even if we're not biased, our environments very well could be biased (there have been cases where experimental results change depending on the traffic outside the building.. most would not think it necessary to isolate against vibrations caused by cars or trucks or trains)
    – slebetman
    May 16, 2016 at 9:03
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There may be another reason your advisor wants to do this: perhaps the work can be continued in the future by another of their students, and your advisor wants to be able to explain the details to that (potential) future student.

Regardless, I think it's praise that your advisor is giving you.

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    I will agree with Peter, this is indeed praise. Consider if you will how valuable your advisor's time is and how much he is allocating to work with you on this. If he really thought you were cheating then he would also think you were wasting his time and he would not be investing more time on you. That said, he may be concerned about the accuracy of your results and want to be sure you made no accidental mistakes that would hurt your reputation so again this is praise that he is looking out for your well being.
    – O.M.Y.
    May 15, 2016 at 0:01
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    I tend to agree: another connected motivation could be knowledge transfer. Your adviser might want to be sure that he/she understands everything about your work, before you conclude your Ph.D., so if you'll leave for a post-doc, he will be able to resume the project him/herself (or with other Ph.D. students).
    – Alberto
    May 17, 2016 at 14:30
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In the field of machine learning, there is a plenty of ways to mistakenly do things incorrectly that make your results look better than they really are. An easy example is cross validation: if you do model selection based on the results of your validation dataset, you are going to be downward biasing the error in your validation results.

In this light, your advisor is likely somewhat surprised at your results. Before just completely accepting what you've done, they want to verify this wasn't a result of a mix up. If your advisor watches what you do, and everything is correct, then that's great and you've probably got some great results on your hands. If you are doing something that's not quite right, then your advisor will presumably help fix the error.

You shouldn't take this as criticism, but rather as being critical. Being critical is what makes science reliable and is vital to the academic process.

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    If there are many things that could be done wrong however I wonder why the advisor steps in that late (final month of the thesis). Shouldn't he have supervised the whole process more closely then, e.g. checking the selected methods, the students implementation, potential alternatives and so on? Thing is, at this stage of the thesis there is little time left to work on any major changes should they prove necessary.
    – Ghanima
    May 15, 2016 at 9:00
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    @Ghanima there is value in letting the students analyse critically their work by themselves, but now time is running out and verification is important.
    – Davidmh
    May 15, 2016 at 15:19
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    @Ghanima: I agree with what Davidmh said (it's good to let students be independent) but also that often you don't have evidence of a potential problem until you actually have results.
    – Cliff AB
    May 15, 2016 at 15:51
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    Don't get me wrong. I don't want to dismiss your answer and neither the idea of having the student perform its work independently. Still as a master student he is supposed to work under supervision and profit from that - a fact that might be served better if the advisor provides guidance earlier than in the final month (the question make it seem like the advisor was not much interested in it before).
    – Ghanima
    May 15, 2016 at 15:57
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    "Being critical is what makes science reliable and is vital to the academic process." <--- THIS!
    – Alexander
    May 15, 2016 at 17:01
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I would say you are lucky!

The main goal of science is to deliver something insightful to others! Therefore, when discovering something, make such results reproducible to them. Otherwise, it's "an accident" that happened only to them. Science is about understanding reason and the cause, therefore about reproducibility of processes. As the goal is to make it reproducible by others, the best test is to try out if others can reproduce it.

I am personally a great fan of "reproducible research" (there is a whole movement around this, just to mention: http://reproducibleresearch.net/ , https://reproduciblescience.org/ , and open science in general). Making sure that others can reproduce your effects, confirms that you've transmitted over paper all artifacts important to achieve your goal. Communication (also over papers), relies always on a big pile of assumptions. One might have to skip some details, steps, obvious to her/him in a paper, while actually not that obvious to others, then making whole work sadly lost and non useful to anyone else. Therefore, if someone with the skill/knowledge level of the desired audience is not able to reproduce it, maybe the paper should consist of more/better references, or more introduction to concepts/procedures/tools used. Again, all serves the purpose of transmitting over paper to others, to humanity, how to do something not done earlier, therefore to move the whole of humanity forward. Checking if it's reproducible by others is the best way to check whether it is reproducible by others :).

After all, mentioning in a paper, or notes for reviewers, that results were successfully reproduced by others, could IMHO even increase the value of the paper. Making notes (even blog post) by those others, would be even better to confirm.

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People willing to spend time on you is almost never bad. It proves that you or what you have done is important somehow. Try to unlearn that being checked is bad and try and view it as you are important enough for someone to care about. It is when no one cares any longer that you should be concerned, not the other way around ! This sure can be confusing for some personalities with high personal integrity.

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In part, you are correct, but more than likely it's a lot of other factors. Once you leave the gates of college, whether it's your peers, your colleagues, or your professional community. If there is ever anything new or of significant value being claimed, than it MUST be reviewed. So definitely get used to people behaving skeptical initially.

In part it's to confirm your results. It can also be to potentially mimic results for future research or education. At the end of the day, his reputation lies on signing off on your work as "valid". Or at least to make sure that what you did is not mimicked work with minute, insufficient contributions to your field. Plus, if there's good stuff in your results, he might try and assist in finding you some serious grant funds or can help assist with private research funds.

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  • downvoted for laziness.
    – dwoz
    May 15, 2016 at 20:36
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While I agree with other commenters that it might be for other reasons, we cannot invalidate that this person might just be checking that you did not cheat. Think about the recent Michael LaCour scandal: he falsified his data, and his senior co-author (Green) did not catch him; this obviously raised some eyebrows.

After that, I'm sure many senior academics have taken a closer look at their supervisees data/process.

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