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I don't really think this is odd: they have been asked to send the assignment by email and they did. There isn't really a need to say anything further and they didn't. Maybe it would be slightly more courteous if they were to add a couple of words of greeting, but your job is not to be Emily Post.
If the assignments were submitted on paper, and they left ...
190
To further echo one of the comments:
Seek professional help. This may be a trained psychologist, or even just a general medical practitioner, who may be able to direct you to another institution if necessary. You may have access to mental healthcare through your institution if you do not otherwise have access. Specific phobias are treatable. Formally ...
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The current ban applies only to people who are outside the US. Nobody knows what Trump might do in the future, though.
Edit: The situation keeps changing, and I will not be updating this answer. Stack Exchange is not a news service.
answered Jan 29 '17 at 4:36
Anonymous Physicist
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The short answer is that when people want something, they often experience cognitive distortions that prevents entirely accurate assessments. Dunning-Kruger is a good example of one of these effects, where a student thinks, "Oh, I'd love to study in Paris - and lots of people speak French, so I'm sure I could pick it up!" Learning a new language to a college-...
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For writing proofs, full knowledge of English is not necessary. Most proofs can be written using a single tense. It is sufficient (and often advisable) to keep the structure of sentences very simple; that is very similar to how logic statements are written using math notation. Arguably, this exercise requires students to use only a small and simple subset of ...
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Some thoughts:
Suggest counseling. They are much more likely to be able to help support her in expressing her goals to her parents, understanding their position, and perhaps in negotiating some sort of compromise with them. Family relationship issues are likely to be a pretty common concern for college students, and a university counseling service will ...
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Disability conditions are applicable when there is an uncontrollable disadvantage that prevents the person fairly demonstrating their knowledge, skill and ability in the same timeframe.
This is not the case for a person who has and takes the option of moving to a country or region where their language proficiency is not sufficient to demonstrate knowledge ...
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I have had a small number of students in the same situation over the decades.
My first rule is: Don't get between the student and the parents. That's a complicated and stormy dynamic and I can't do anything but harm there.
My second rule is: Advise the student to cede to the parents for the undergrad degree. To the student, the 4 years of undergrad ...
87
When teaching large classes or multiple classes, it can be very helpful if the email, or even better the subject line, contains the key information about the class, section, group and assignment (and possibly TA). It should be the responsibility of the instructor to tell the students what is expected, if anything, in the syllabus and on the assignment itself....
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Have you communicated with the student clearly about the situation? It's easy to softball negative news so they might not realize just how dire their situation is. Sit them down and straightforwardly tell them that their options are ask for help or get sent home soon, like you have in this post.
Currently, since you (and the future examiner) have no insight ...
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I wrote a pretty extensive response on this a little while ago: here and also this may be slightly relevant.
The short version is: Because they can be, and because they have to be. UK universities make money off international students; their funding is limited, and it is designed to go to domestic or European students. The funding bodies will only fund ...
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Your experience resonates with me. In my classes I also have many students with imperfect English. I have often noticed (including as recently as a couple of weeks ago) that when I give lengthy word questions explaining a complicated real-life problem and asking to model it mathematically, some students struggle to understand what they are being asked to do ...
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The best thing you can do in my opinion is to be the change you wish to see in the world. Namely, be as friendly and welcoming to the international students as you can be. This will show them that negative views towards people who hail from the countries they come from are not shared by the entire US population, but are simply the opinions of certain people ...
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If the test isn't about language skills, design it such that people with weaker language skills still can complete it. In most but not all cases tests should test knowledge and understanding, not speed. So if you're worried that people with weaker language skills can't complete in time, just allow more time for all students and allow students who finish ...
57
Empirical evidence on the relationship between GRE scores and post-graduate performance
There is a massive meta-analysis by Kuncel et al (2001) that empirically evaluates the correlations between various aspects of the GRE with multiple post-graduate performance criteria.
Based on hundreds of studies and thousands of participants, GRE shows reasonable ...
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Being at a disadvantage due to a lack of necessary skills does not seem unfair to me. The ability to communicate clearly in written form is an essential skill for pretty well everything that we hope that our students will go on to do in their later life. Thus, it is a skill that we should actively encourage them to develop, by pretty much the same methods ...
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Your university almost certainly has an office devoted to considering situations of racial harassment and discrimination. If the behavior is in general towards international students rather than just Chinese ones, this is usually also explicitly prohibited as "national origin" rather than race. You should Google your university name along with the phrases "...
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This is obviously a very difficult situation that raises tricky issues to do with psychology, parenting, and the sociology of the unnamed country the student is from, which are far above my StackExhange pay grade. I feel rather at a loss to suggest any concrete measures that would tip the scales in the student’s favor in a situation involving such powerful ...
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This is a good question. I have not been a fan of the GRE for 20+ years, although (through whatever luck I had a good-enough number on it myself that it didn't harm me...) many are. Having been on admissions committees and very much involved with graduate programs for 30+ years, I've had ample opportunity to see the (non-) correlation of success in graduate ...
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It may help to look at this from the professor's point of view:
You are not a student at his university (or even a citizen of his university's country), so internal research grants are not an option (indeed, he may face some backlash for hiring a non-student if research slots are limited).
You are an undergraduate, so your ability to be useful to him is ...
48
For PhD supervisors, an ideal outcome of a PhD trajectory is that the student learns to independently generate good research ideas, and perform solid investigation of those ideas following the tenets of the scientific method. Ideally, this results in several top-level publications, co-written by the student and the supervisors.
You describe (including ...
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(This answer supposed the OP is an American; which turns out to be true, but they are attending school in Canada, so while the general thrust of the answer remains valid some of the US-specific aspects are obviously not immediately relevant)
Phobias can potentially fall under mental disabilities, which may then subsequently be covered and protected by the ...
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I know that some have the "alien of extraordinary ability" work visa, but what about for others that don't have such status?
Even green card holders are impacted by the ban. As far as I know, only diplomatic visa holders are not impacted by the ban.
A message that I received from my university on 2017-01-29 at 6 PM UTC seems to indicate that in ...
answered Jan 29 '17 at 18:14
Franck Dernoncourt
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I try not to think of myself as a person influenced by the US propaganda (I am more acquainted with Soviet and late Russian propaganda, more likely). However, I can not really advise you to go for degrees in Russia.
First of all, the STEM subjects were traditionally strong in the Soviet time due to the nuclear project. Unfortunately, the professorial level ...
answered Aug 15 '14 at 19:18
Dmitry Savostyanov
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At my institution the default way to handle this is (3 Stick with the 0 for this question). Essentially, every student is required to handle the teaching language well enough to be able to work on the test. In practice, many teachers will fall back to (2 Give them some consolation points) if giving 0 points seems too harsh. If (1 Give them another stab at it ...
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In addition to the other answer, I think a big problem you are facing is that you and the UK government do not having matching expectations of what a PhD student position is. You say:
Having chosen the UK to study with the belief that 'as long as I am competent I should be qualified for the job', the reality has really slapped back at me.
In terms of UK ...
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Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if changing “English” to “Plain Language” was sufficient to quell students’ concerns. It neatly sidesteps their manifest discomfort with the language itself. I doubt the manifest objection is the whole story—STEM folks always bristle at problems you can’t just calculate—so maybe you’ll even have more interesting and relevant ...
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I think the answer is simple: your premise is false. There are no rules/regulations forbidding an Iranian earned PhD from being a postdoc in the US.
It might be hard to get a postdoc in the US for anyone whose academic background, and PhD earning institution, is not perceived as highly ranked.
Note: I have answered this a year and a half ago. Things may ...
33
I am not even sure it makes sense to speak about “graduate schools” in Europe. In the countries I know, the big divide is between the master's degree and the PhD program, and not between bachelor and master programs. A master's degree is mostly another diploma with slightly higher requirements/more focused topic but otherwise not unlike a bachelor's degree ...
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There are two different types of value judgement that you are discussing here---communication goals and grading---and I think it's important to carefully separate them.
Communication Goals: I think that it is unfair to a person who isn't a native English speaker to not expect them to aim for the same goals of clear and lucid communication. When giving ...
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