First off, you do have elective requirements you have to meet, for example you need 12 arts credits and 3 credits from each "category" of science minus one (https://science.ubc.ca/students/requirements/faculty, see academic calendar for more details). Speaking from a GPA perspective, I find that if you're actually interested in a subject you can probably do better in those courses than so-called gpa boosters (I heard ATSC 113 is no longer a GPA booster anymore, as well). Another thing to note: I haven't checked, but I would not recommend taking WRDS 150 with a bad professor because of how much the syllabus differs and the class sizes are small. Much better to take an ENGL course IMO.

reddit.com/r/ubccsss/comments/15a3ge4/do_i_really_need_gpa_boosters/

Hi, here is my program for both terms. I added EOSC111, ASTR101, and applied for the waitlist for PHYS119, and ATSC113. I actually took an ECON course but everyone told me to drop it and take easier courses for my GPA. I wonder do I really need those GPA booster lectures. It seems like a waste of money to take classes that do not attract me and does not meet any of my science reqs. Also WDYT about my program overall? Do you have any opinion?

Just for reference, how much would Google and Meta stand to pay if they didn't ban Canadians from reading Canadian news?

While we're at it, can we ban amp links and other url tracking in general?

No punishment for doing it, but maybe have a bot to remind people.

To clarify, I'm not engaging in whataboutism, I think both of them should be banned (though maybe sometimes affiliate links have their place).

Also, I note that finding the answer to this on the academic calendar was pretty hard for me.

There are like four references to deferred standing, I list them in order of google search results (standing deferred "ubc academic calendar" course registration):

1. https://vancouver.calendar.ubc.ca/campus-wide-policies-and-regulations/grading-practices/standings (does not mention impact on registration)
2. https://vancouver.calendar.ubc.ca/campus-wide-policies-and-regulations/academic-assessment/deferred-and-supplemental-examinations (does not mention impact on registration)
3. https://vancouver.calendar.ubc.ca/faculties-colleges-and-schools/faculty-science/bachelor-science/illness-academic-concession-and-deferred-standing (has a hint, I guess? "Some science courses offered in Term 1 of Winter Session that are prerequisite to courses in Term 2 have scheduled deferred examinations in January. A student with Deferred standing in one of those courses is expected to write the January examination.", which somewhat implies that you need to write the exam to keep the post-req)
4. https://vancouver.calendar.ubc.ca/faculties-colleges-and-schools/faculty-arts/bachelor-media-studies/academic-concession (about a specific degree in faculty of arts? has some lines that definitely could be misinterpreted to be about registration)

On the Science Academic Calendar registration page, it does mention that "prerequisites are courses that must be successfully completed before taking a course", but without explicitly mentioning standings there's no way I would find that without specifically worrying about this issue (which I probably wouldn't, given that I've already been assured by my advisor).

Reddit post for context (not my words):

"No seriously. Like what's the point of having faculty advising that just gives you incorrect information? I deferred my Math 101 exam at the end of April because I was pretty sick, and was specifically told that deferring the exam wouldn't impact registration or major selection because "being able to defer an exam means that you have proved thusfar to be successful in the course as you were in good academic standing up until taking the final exam. Therefore we assume you would have been able to pass the course and get the credits."

I'm now being told by Science Advising that actually, standing deferred doesn't give you the credits for the course, because you haven't taken the exam and thus have not completed the course.

What?

I made a pretty impactful decision based off the original answer from Science Advising. If I knew that deferring an exam wouldn't enable me to register for 2nd-year math courses (and presumably, also reject my math major application since I don't have the credits for MATH 101), I would've just taken the exam sick because even if it affected my GPA, I would've at least gotten the credits for it."

I don't mean to be nitpicking but if the rule is zero-tolerance I think we should clear up the edge cases. I hope you don't take this the wrong way.

• What happens when the original title is misleading or clickbait? Personally I like how HN handles things in this case (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
• How about if you want to ask a question about a news article as the main focus of the post, but also want to include context about the article?
• Or if you're making the post to discuss a related topic, and include multiple articles?
• On that note, what even counts as a news article? What if I post a link to a reddit thread about a news article?

a) When I took this course tutorials were not marked at all and had material released, and personally I only went to one, though I found the course easy overall. b) If there are more lecture spots than tutorial spots they will open them up, no need to worry. You probably do not need to reach out yourself and they will move you in to one or release a new section. I couldn't actually find a source for this but this is what has been repeated on the community.

From LoveCPen:

Hello fellow third or fourth years in cpen or cpsc. I was able to register for CPSC320 but all the tutorial sections are full. One of them is blocked and as far as I know they create another section depening on the number of students registered.

Since CPSC320 is a core course for me, i cannot drop it. So the issue is, out of the 5 tutorial timings (including the blocked one) 2 of them conflicts with my other courses. I really dont want to drop other courses as it will make my proceeding to 4th year standing at a risky point.

Who should I reach out to to request for adding me to a tutorial that does not conflict? And When does cpsc usually release tutorial sections for poeple in my situation who is not in the waitlist but could not register for the tutorials.

Any input will be appreciated since I am really worried

ubc built different

(continued)

Last thing before off my soap box - blog posts by “independent scientists” alleging research misconduct are not evidence of that misconduct in the same way that a peer reviewed article by experts in that field alleging misconduct is. This is an important point, because Schneider is far from the only “independent scientist” with a blog where he does “take downs” of all the corrupt and stupid scientists who always get it wrong. That is the regular stomping grounds of creationists, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, and all sorts of cranks who would absolutely love a system where they could level whatever accusations they want at scientists that if they can gin up enough public outrage the university would have to investigate each and every allegation to the bloggers satisfaction. And there are anti-vaxxers and creationists who do just this with much more impressive academic pedigrees. F*ck all these guys and all of the other amateur science critics who are accountable to nothing except for whatever axe they’ve been grinding and the chip on their shoulder.

edit to head off the replies - the accusations in the article are something I think that the university and department should look in to because while Schneider isn't the best he's not quite a complete crank, however, I would urge caution about making conclusions about "UBC-O prof caught doing fake research" based off of only reading this blog post because the author of the blog hasn't really done his own due diligence and experience has taught me that it's really easy to selectively present evidence or distort things in a way that isn't immediately clear to a lay person (which in this area I am, and most of the people in this sub reddit are as well).

edit2: Schneider is "on the right side of things" as far as taking a stand against research misconduct - which is a very real problem - it's just that he's rather sloppy and is a good example of "if you find research misconduct, don't be Schneider be like the people who called out the fake bird genomes" because if you go about it the way Schneider is going about it your criticism probably isn't going to go anywhere and you might also get sued. On that last point - there is a reason news organizations, even small local ones, have in house lawyers. Defamation lawsuits are real and they suck a big one. A lot of them can also be avoided if you run what you've written by a lawyer who can identify what potential defamatory claims you are making, who might sue you over those claims, follow up to see if you are prepared to defend those claims and if not help you delete or reword things so you aren't going to get f*cked over in court over some small point.

I would like to remind everyone: If you are going to speak truth to power, please don't half ass it and if you are going to do so in writing under your own name maybe talk to a lawyer first.

edit3: if you want a long but rather funny example of what I mean by talk to a lawyer first if you're gonna speak truth to power:

Part 1: https://www.alabseries.com/episodes/episode-8-lawyer-brain-pt-3-the-counterclerk Part 2 (the part where they get sued by a side character from the above episode): https://www.alabseries.com/episodes/episode-27-coach

Top comment from u/threads_of_measure:

tl;dr: both the UBC prof mentioned in OP’s article (Dr. Mohammad Arjmand) AND the author of OP’s article (Dr. Leonid Schneider) seem a bit sketchy. The author of OP’s article has been sued multiple times for libel and in at least one case a German court has ruled against him for the German equivalent of libel. To be clear there is a lot of stuff in OP’s article that ranges from concerning to scandalous, but it's presented in a completely scattershot and rather unsubstantiated way that is a giant red flag for me. That being said, personally if I were a prospective student I would wait on publishing/working with Dr. Arjmand until I had first talked to other people in the material engineering field who aren’t his coauthors or have significant personal interest in his reputation about the stuff raised in OP’s article. Research misconduct is surprisingly hard to prove but UBC does investigate this stuff on their own and has kicked multiple faculty out for doing research misconduct before.

---

I'm not going to comment one way or the other on whether or not Dr Arjmand is guilty of research misconduct because engineering is no where close to my area of STEM and it's a rather weighty accusation to throw around. However, there's a lot of things about the blog post OP linked to that made the allegations as well as that blog in general that seem more than a bit off and just rubbed me the wrong way which I'd like to talk about.

If you want to publicly accuse someone of research misconduct it's usually a good idea to get someone in their field to look over your evidence first instead of just publishing it in your own (obviously not peer reviewed) blog. After talking with people in that field you are more sure that research misconduct has occurred, there are multiple avenues to try and address this such as filing a report with the funding agency (who usually have a dedicated process/team to review research misconduct), the journal the published in if they published in a credible journal, or if they didn’t publish in a legit journal you can write up your findings and get that published in a legit peer reviewed journal.

I would like to compare OPs article to another article alleging research misconduct (fraudulent data) that I think is a good example of what this looks like when it is done right. That example is the following paper, where the authors allege a case of research misconduct around fabricated data where a team of researchers published a paper using fabricated bird genomes: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305197821000417

First things to notice is that in the owl paper the authors have the relevant expertise to judge whether fraud occurred (it is their sub field) and their article is published in a peer reviewed journal where the reviewers would also have the necessary expertise. That is not true for OP’s article. While Dr. Schneider does have a formal academic background and had a research career, he’s a cell biologist not an engineer and describes himself as an “independent scientist” with no current institutional affiliation. The lack of current institutional affiliation is a red flag, but by itself not immediately discrediting, in that you can get away with things as an "independent scientist" that you can't get away with when you are accountable to an institution.

Second thing to note is that in the fake bird genomes paper it is abundantly clear who they are accusing and what they are specifically accusing them of doing – even going out of their way to bring in what research misconduct is understood to be and how their accusation meets that fields definition. With the forbetterscience article we don’t get this focus and clarity, instead the author puts Dr. Arjmand at the center of some sort of research misconduct sh*tshow but the author also brings in other names left and right, sometimes trying to use past allegations of misconduct as evidence against Dr. Arjmand and other times the connection is alluded to but isn’t that clear. At sometimes he’s accusing Arjmand, at other times his coworkers, sometimes he’s railing against the field general, “science” as a whole, various references to “chinese papermills” or “iranian papermills” (Schneider really goes out of his way to mention if someone/something is from a non-western country, particularly China), and so on. There is a similar issue with the “what” aspect of Dr Schneiders accusations are in that he dumps a slurry of things that if true would be a huge deal (making up data/graphs altogether) mixed in with things that are bad but not super bad (messing up the scale bars on graphs) and don’t meet the “deliberate intention to deceive” standard that has be met for something to be actual research misconduct of the fraud variety. To top it off everything is written in this scandalized tone where everything is the most serious, egregious, how could anyone do this tone.

This scattershot approach of guilt-by-association and mixing together of accusations is what got Dr. Schneider in trouble with the German legal system where he was successfully sued by two coworkers of someone who was absolutely guilty of research misconduct, however, those two coworkers weren’t the guilty parties and Schneider accused them of research misconduct anyways without having the evidence to back it up.

Article here: http://blogs.mediapart.fr/seraya-maouche/blog/060117/entretien-avec-leonid-schneider-l-integrite-scientifique-et-la-justice-allemande Google translation here: http://blogs-mediapart-fr.translate.goog/seraya-maouche/blog/060117/entretien-avec-leonid-schneider-l-integrite-scientifique-et-la-justice-allemande?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en

Third set of things to note is the specific length that the authors of the fake bird genomes paper go to show evidence for each of their specifically enumerated accusations. They restate the specific accusation, they show their evidence for making that accusation, and then they discuss why that specific misdeed is bad and what the impacts are for the field. They got everything in the correct form so it is very easy for someone with knowledge of the field to evaluate their specific conclusions. The evaluating the substance part is trickier and I really think unless you have experience with a specific field it can be easy to get things wrong which is why I’m comfortable looking at the bird genomes paper and saying “oh yeah, those are some fake ass genomes” and am not comfortable saying whether or not Dr Arjmand is guilty of research misconduct.

Second to last thing to note is just the overall tone and worldview of the writing. The tone of the forbetterscience.com author comes across as unserious, self-absorbed, bitter towards the profession as a whole, frivolous and rather callous towards all of the people he is talking about which is a huge problem given the heavy weight of the accusations he is leveling. If you are doing something that could end/derail someones career you should take that seriously enough to write clearly and professionally. From reading the machine translated article on the German defamation case, Dr. Schneider also has a bit of a victim complex going on where he is constantly saying things like “it is obvious that Germany views blogging and whistle blowing as such a despicable activity that someone like me is guilty in default”. Because it’s a machine translation I don’t want to put too much weight on how he comes off but the tone seems consistent with the tone on his blog, which is that he is the lone truth teller against a hopelessly corrupt institution and the world is out to get him.

And finally to make a point about his unserious writing when making accusations:

The real problem here is UBC. Ethics for them is something to wipe their bottoms with while they count the money they make with bad science.

As far as bad scientific methods go, there is this thing called cherry picking your data where you sift through all the data and pull out the data points that support your argument and discard (without mentioning or accounting for) all of the data that don't support your argument. Dr. Schneider is cherry picking anecdotes of research misconduct, some well established and others less so, to argue that UBC “wipes it’s bottom” with research ethics. If you want to say that UBC as an entire university is the problem here you need to show me what the standard for research universities is for handling research misconduct and then show me how UBC is not meeting that standard by either not doing what they are supposed to do or going out of their way to cover up for bad actors. This is necessary because the unfortunate reality is that at a sufficiently large institution you will have bad actors that will attempt some kind of misconduct, of the HR type or research ethics variety, and the measure of the institution isn’t that the presence/absence of cases but how the cases are handled. Schneider can’t be bothered to do that, but he doesn’t let that stop him from trashing an entire university.

You can probably change before your academic fourth year (end of second or third). If you've already taken all the credits to be promoted to fourth year it might not make a lot of sense to change your degree in fourth year and have to worry about taking more courses and hitting credit limits (I would study the academic calendar and maybe talk to an advisor). Of course this depends on what major you're going to be in, especially if it doesn't have a lot of requirements. If it has a lot of requirements it might be a better idea to aim for a combined major between your favoured specialization and your current one, or to do a minor instead.

From Educational_North384: Changing specilization in 4th year? Unfortunately, I got rejected by all three specializations I applied to in my second year of science. Currently, I have 54 credits. I really want to get into the math/stats major, but the only option available to me now is the Combined Major (3096): Science. Is there any chance for me to change my specialization in my fourth year? Thanks for any suggestions.

It definitely feels bad but I think it's not the fault of the system, there's just not enough resources to make everyone happy. I would argue making you choose your program when you enter from high school just shifts the time frame and furthermore is a worse predictor of success in university. Of course the ideal solution is to just increase resources in popular faculties, but that's not part of the system.

Also, I don't see the argument for why rejects shouldn't have priority over people who want to do that degree. On the practical side of things, that will just lead to people who want to do CS just try to estimate the admission average and apply to math as their first choice if they don't like their chances. It also really diminishes the point of ranking your specialisations if you know your application is going to get discounted for your second and third choices.

It would be interesting, however, to compare where the marks come from for cs rejects vs people who want to do math as a major. Maybe there's a large population of people who only want CS, and take easy courses to boost their grade. Curbing the effectiveness of that strategy would be a good way to equalize things.

I think it's a fucked up situation that doesn't really have a solution. Would love to hear any ideas y'all have.

From atom9408:

this is insane. ubc has gotta do something with this.

it must have been the spillover of people who didn't get into cs choosing math and stats as their backup and taking the seats from people who actually went to uni to do math or stats. this is actually ridiculous. another reason why this whole general first year thing is bullshit and harms students.

like i genuinely feel so terrible to have to take part in this system to take seats from other students. first year is a rough adjustment. i don’t know why they make it to be the most important year for science students.

Great work, but honestly this should just be a feature in lemmy itself (detect third party cookie from home community and auto-redirect). I think there are a few open issues on the topic.

From Illustrious-Mix948:

I am taking MATH302, MATH215, STAT 200 and BIOL 111 together in term 1. Can anyone know what will be the difficulty level and workload? I want to add another STAT/MATH/ECON course, should I? Please help!

I am taking MATH210, ECON 102, STAT 305 and STAT 306 together in term 2. Can anyone know what will be the difficulty level and workload? I want to add another STAT/MATH/ECON course, should I? Please help!

I've taken CPSC 121, not MATH 341, so I'm basing my answer off the syllabus at https://personal.math.ubc.ca/~solymosi/341/341.html. I have also worked through part of generatingfunctionology, which is mentioned in the syllabus.

Based on the course outline there doesn't seem to be much material you need to know that you didn't learn in 121. The other courses also have little to no focus on the topics in the class, so I think the point of the pre-reqs is the ability to think mathematically and prove things (as 223 and 226 are both honours courses, and 220 is a proof course). It might help to read a mathematical proof book (I hear How to Prove It by Velleman is a good starting point).