Peer Oral Evaluation: Fill & Download for Free

Absolutely YESThere are five areas which badly need to change to match with modern times:-Role of the Teacher - The Teacher is no longer someone who teaches. With Google, Youtube and a plethora of resources - learning and understanding a concept in the privacy of a students room is far easier than in a classroom with 40 - 45 students and a teacher orally shouting the terms. The teacher instead should become a Mentor - who can solve doubts, help in clearing questions on the topic privately but who is more useful for assessing the student through tests and exams and evaluating the student and giving a truthful picture to the student so that the student understands his abilities.The Learning method - Learning has to be by self. Coaching Class, Tuitions, Teachers or Apps cannot teach you. They can give you different content but so can google or youtube. In the end you have to understand on your own and consult with teachers on areas that you cannot understand or connect with other peers on the internet like study groups all across the world. A Student has to use resources all around him to pick and choose fundamentals and learn. It is the best way to develop a mind and develop an independent phase of study.Mugging vs Intelligent Analysis - Ratta or Mugging has to stop. Students have to understand and then define. For instance the definition of machines in 3 idiots is the best example. Even History has to be learnt like a story rather than mugging up dates and vomiting.The Unnecessary Devil - Chemistry - Chemistry is often a subject that unless one is really interested in- becomes a nuisance. You need a lot of memory work (especially organic chemistry) to know how equations work etc. It lacks the fundamental nature of understanding like Maths or Physics - hence Chemistry must become optional while subjects like Logic Design must become compulsory for the Science group.Extra Curricular Activities - All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. ECAs are very crucial to provide stress relief for kids. Chess Clubs in Schools or Drama or Theatre or Music would be an essential part of all of this.Of course the - Other Groups except Science mentality or the My kid will become Einstein by avoiding TV and studying 18 hours a day or My kid will become Einstein by coaching apps - have to stop completely and totally.

Short answer: In many fields of science, your action in writing a corrective letter to the editor would be seen as naive at best, borderline kook-dom at worst. If you continue to do this, you are likely to seriously undermine your career. Consult with your mentors to see if this is considered appropriate in your field.Longer answer: Historically almost no journals accepted comments on their articles. Letters to the Editor are not a traditional part of scientific culture. I am not saying this is good or bad (though there is some logic behind it); it's just a fact.It may help to realize that science is traditionally an oral culture. The "scientific paper" was originally, in many cases, the written version of an oral presentation, at say the Royal Society or whatever. If you couldn't present it yourself, you might send it to a friend or acquaintance who would read it for you.Even today scientific conferences are important components of most fields. Universities have speaking series for internal and external speakers. Grad students are expected to present their work in front of audiences, and senior scientists routinely do so. Even moderately obscure scientists are regularly invited to other universities to give talks on their work.A typical scientist could be tapped on the shoulder and give an impromptu five minute, fifteen minute, or one hour talk on her work at any time.And of course the public seminars at conferences are only part of the communication process. Over coffee, or beer, you're talking with your colleagues about your work and others.It's at these informal and semi-informal gatherings that the literature gets "corrected", not via letters to the editor.Another important thing to realize is that the scientific literature is filled with error, and this is not a big deal. Much as we would like each paper to be a shining thing of inerrant TRVTH, none ever is. We glean the literature, collect the good, and discard the chaff. It is part of the scientist's job to read skeptically. A scientist does not rely on someone else to point out mistakes; they seek them out actively, and find them everywhere.One more point: Scientists usually don't take introductions or discussions very seriously. They are considered to be the authors' opinions. They may be a useful guide, but they're allowed a lot more wiggle room than the actual data sections. Correcting a statement in an intro is even more a waste of time.If the article you found wanting really was defective, probably just about everyone in the field already knows that. If so, your letter to the editor would just lead to behind-the-scenes eye-rolling -- a naive student, teaching your grandmother to suck eggs!If the data that you have, that contradict the introduction, are unpublished and not know anywhere else, then the right thing to do is to publish them -- not in a letter to the editor, but as a peer-reviewed paper in its own right. In that case, your letter to the editor might be seen as an attempt to do an end-run around peer review.There are a handful of cases where letters to the editor are acceptable. High-profile papers built on defective data may spawn a few responses. These are cases where the paper may lead to many labs following a blind lead, wasting time and money.But if it's just something that one or two labs will run replicates on, then that's just how science works.So take your data and publish them in a peer-reviewed journal, and that's the appropriate correction to the offending paper.Edit to clarify, because comments suggest I didn't make my point very well:It's not that publications are unimportant and informal discussion is more important. It's more that scientists are expected to be skeptical about everything, which includes treating the literature skeptically. Just because something is published doesn't mean that people should believe it; and in fact scientists universally don't believe published stuff (especially interpretations of published stuff).Even more so, they (we) don't believe the informal stories we hear at conferences and so on. They're just one extra data point that we weigh when deciding how much of the published field to believe.The whole point of becoming a scientist is gaining the expertise and experience to make your own decisions on a topic. That means you look at publications, you look at your own work, you hear what other people say formally and informally, and you make a decision.It's very, very rare to completely accept everything a publication has to say. Probably 90% of the papers I read have at least one significant error of interpretation (in my opinion). If I were to write a letter of correction for every publication I saw that I disagreed with, I'd be writing twenty letters every week, and every journal would be filled with responses to the previous month's publications, until there was no more room for new work.(You should see the peer reviews I write.)So writing in to correct a publication seems like a bad idea because it's making the naive assumption that it's unusual to have a mistaken interpretation in the literature, and that it's unusual to spot a mistaken interpretation. It 's expected of you to spot errors in publications. That's why you're an expert.So should you never, ever correct an error? That's not what I'm saying. I've published corrections of other peoples' errors several times. But I've didn't do it via a letter to the editor, I did it with peer-reviewed publications that were also in the literature, that the field can in turn evaluate, balance against the rest of the field and the rest of the data, and reach a conclusion from.And you can publish on a blog on the web, or informally in conferences, or whatever. Those things all get taken into account.

Gene Spafford’s short reply pretty much nails it.Gene Spafford's answer to How hard is it to submit a paper to a famous conference in computer science?On top of the low acceptance rate, there’s a lot of noise (random fluctuation) in the reviewing process. As a prime example, for the flagship NIPS conference in the neural-net/deep-learning area, the acceptance rate for oral presentation is very low, and even the acceptance rate for poster presentation is low.Meanwhile, given the current surge of interest in Deep Learning, the number of submissions is exploding. It’s very hard to find enough competent referees to put two or three of them on each paper, especially given that reviewing papers is perhaps the most thankless of tasks that a researcher can spend time on. Many of us feel obligated to do some amount of reviewing as a service to our field, but there’s no real reward (except the occasional chance to see a good paper before everyone else does, but you’re not supposed to make use of what you see), a lot of hassle, and a lot of time required to do it right. All of that time is taken away from our own research and writing our own papers.So we end up with stories of key points being missed or misunderstood by over-stressed, uninterested, or incompetent reviewers, or of grad students being pressed into last-minute service to review papers.The NIPS community, being data geeks at heart, have spent some time trying to quantify the amount of noise. There’s no “ground truth” — that is, no oracle that can say whether a paper should or should not be accepted — so these studies take some random subset of the papers, give them to two NIPS-typical teams of reviewers, and look to see whether the recommendations are the same for both groups. Some references are below, but googling can find you more.Basically, it seems that some really weak papers are rejected by both groups, a few stellar one are perhaps accepted reliably by both groups, and there’s a frightening level of disagreement on which of the others should be accepted. So if you could somehow submit a good paper to NIPS several times, with different randomly-chosen referees each time, it would sometimes be accepted for the conference and sometimes not.The NIPS experimentThe Nips Experimenthttps://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09794.pdfBecause of problems like this, I personally think that the use of unpaid expert referees by conferences and journals as the gatekeepers and error-checkers, controlling what other researchers can easily see and what they cannot, is a system whose time has passed.I think that in the future, everyone will be able to put their papers into some permanent archive where it can reliably be found in the future. This should be free to readers and, ideally, free to authors. Simple storage and indexing of these papers is not very costly, and could be covered by the government or some foundation.A lot of that stuff will be garbage. So we need to build up a system for quality control, flagging of errors and issues, evaluation, and recommendation based on organizations or informal networks of respected people in the field. This is an extension of the way we evaluate and recommend products and services online now. The best papers will be noticed because a lot of people recommend them. That’s not an infallible system, but probably better than what we have now — especially if we think carefully about ways to keep self-promotion, self-serving commercial interests, and website optimization out of the game.I don’t have a complete design in mind, but this is something we should work toward.If this is successful, promotion committees could use the more reliable markers of online reputation in place of the current “number of publications” metrics.Conferences could return to their original purpose of exchanging ideas, and would no longer be a check-mark for promotion.Journals could focus on long-form presentation of ideas, by invitation, with perhaps lots of theme issues and so on (as the better non-peer-reviewed journals and technical publications do today).The expensive journals that are abusing their position as arbiters of academic quality and advancement could achieve a well-earned extinction.