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Comment by ngkabra | Hacker News Reader

Original author here. The two things you pointed out were exactly the two things that first caused me to get suspicious of this conference.

However, as notthetup points out, there are lots of people in the Indian education system who don't know this. And the statement I made: Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right? is actually something many students and faculty in our engineering colleges actually think.

(Edit: formatting)

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This must be corruption at work. It's unrealistic to demand that Master's level students have two good quality published papers. There's no research benefit in publishing poor quality papers. So the reason must be fake prestige or scamming money. Keep spreading the word about this. If you embarrass your authorities (especially amongst the wider International scientific community), then things will change.

My only feedback would be that to communicate to non-Indians, you need to make it clear early on that this is a widespread problem that students can't avoid because of the pressure to publish. On first reading your post I thought you were just upset about a single fake conference - which didn't seem like big news to me.

Good point. I have that point buried way down in the post. Need to give it prominence somewhere in the beginning.

This is definitely important, since I had the same impression and was a bit suprised how you could be that angry about a single conference.

Btw, is it also a requirement for students in India to send out a specific number of applications? I get a lot of phd position applications from indian students as response to my publications. They look like mass emails and are usually absolutely unrelated to the field.

Thanks. I've updated the intro of the post to make this clearer.

The PhD applications problem is a different issue. We're churning out a million engineers every year, and a good fraction of them are convinced that getting into a Masters/PhD program in the US is the gateway to riches and a better life. A few of these students are smart enough to know where to apply and how to apply, but most of them are clueless enough to actually spam any faculty email addresses they can find from any US university. And yes, they're mass emails, in the sense that they send out these mails to 10s of people without bothering to customize them.

The important thing to remember is that India is a vast and varied country. We have the worst students, but we also have the best students - so don't completely ignore all emails from all Indian sounding names; one of them might just be from the next superstar at your school :-)

Well, I do agree that students can have different quality, and we shouldn't discriminate Indian students. But the problem is that enough Indian students have made bad reputation for all Indian students here (U.S), and to avoid future loss (time and effort of the faculties), we just start to reject any Indian students (at least in my own circle).

I know that this is a problem, and I don't blame you.

However, one of the admissions committee members of a top-10 US university told me how they deal with this problem.

That they keep track of good universities in India, and what GPA is considered good in India. Occasionally, they take a chance with a student with an interesting resume from an unknown University, and continue selecting from there if that student does well. Repeat this process, and over time they end up with a good list of sources of good students from India; and they ignore applications from all other Indians.

Have you tried putting a test in your CV web page? For example, "I welcome inquiries from prospective students. I get a lot of advertising email, so include the phrase 'brown M&Ms' in the subject line so I will know you are a real person." That should weed out a lot of the email blast applicants.

No, it's not.

As an academic myself, we get spam emails advertising conferences just like this. It is not an achievement (of any sort), and what you're doing poorly represents both the academic system, and yourself.

I am not sure I understand what you're saying.

I know that getting a paper in a conference like this is not an achievement. However, I know lots of students who do not know this. I know faculty in Engineering colleges who do not know this. I know many people who actually pay money to get published in such conferences because they really believe it's an achievement.

Hence, this expose to improve awareness.

I am not sure how I have poorly represented the academic system and myself by doing that, so could you elaborate?

What astrowizicist is trying to say is that any student - let alone faculty - who is falling for a spamference is clearly too stupid to work in academia.

I think the real point of this article is that it's not realistic to expect every one of these students to have two high-quality published papers as a graduation requirement. This leads to and fuels the bogus conferences.

I may elaborate, in the hope it is useful.

You should never submit any work to a conference or journal you do not know and follow beforehand.

To be more explicit: a good rule of thumb is that if you are not familiar with the publications of at least some of the committee or, if you were asked to suggest reviewers for you research out of the scientific committee members, you'd be hard pressed to name a few, you should not submit anything.

Your students should know that. If none explained something similar to the above, then you should have.

As you get older, I find I only follow 1-2 quality publications. I often get invited to dubious / shady conferences and I just hit the spam button. All of my peers do the same.

Why shouldn't you submit to such a conference? Because you don't know if it's legit or not?

I don't think the students care if it's legit or not. They care about getting papers published so they can graduate. And apparently their schools don't care if the conferences are legit or not either. So everyone is happy, we all win!

the only actual beneficiary i can think of is the people charging students to publish without even having to deal with the overhead of hiring someone to read the damn thing

I was being somewhat sarcastic, but I'd suggest that students and professors get some self-interested benefit from the system, or it wouldn't have come to exist.

The schools get to make it look like they are producing high-quality students with publications, without the professors actually having to do much work to make this true.

The students get to graduate, and get a publication credit, regardless of the quality of their work, so long as they can pay.

heh i know u were. i get what youre saying here but my issue with that is it just leads to like watered-down pseudo-journals of questionable reputation.

it almost feels like a better alternative would be for the students to run their own informal conferences & publish through an open publishing network (a lot of these are emerging in academia to subvert all the licensing BS from the journals)

Well I mean.... calm down, this was done as an experiment by the author to see what kind of corrupt shakedown his students were being run through.

These things need to be tested in order to improve the academic system. Otherwise the misinformation continues (in the form of some actually believing the claims of peer review etc.) and people may be duped by a paper that is seemingly innocuous but where the research is faked.

(Here is a recent article that is indicative of how dangerous the academic review process is getting. IMHO it should be valued above novel research at this point -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6968676)

What the OP has done certainly does present a poor representation of the academic system, as a corrupt shakedown system that's milking students for easy cash. Is this incorrect? No. As you said, we get spam emails for conferences like this -- but if students think it's a requirement to publish in order to graduate, why not answer that spam?

Corruption is a huge factor in academic publishing, which relatively well-off and well-connected academics in the UK and US may not realize. A lot of countries trying to increase the visibility and prestige of their academic programs have stupid publishing quotas set by bureaucrats that make less-connected or less-knowledgeable academics ripe targets for these scams. Even in Italy, an EU country with a long academic history in mathematics, rules put in place to combat nepotism favor publication rates that are at best simply orthogonal to measuring the quality of a mathematician's output. India has tons of new colleges and universities and many young academics trying to prove themselves, as well as a recent influx of state funding. The OP's post is an important expose of some of the shenanigans occurring in this new ecosystem.

I think it is the job of the advisor of the student to guide him in the choice of conferences to go to or journals to publish in. He should know the truly important ones in his field, and be able to make a judgment of the quality of a conference or journal based on familiarity with the work of the organizers/editors and other participants.

Everybody can put up a conference web page: It is completely hopeless to expect to be able judge the quality of a conference by what they claim on their web page, as the scam ones will be the ones boasting with their internationality and prestige, while the actually prestigious have no need to do so. The same goes for journals. I regularly get "calls for papers" from scammy journals that claim to be world class journals, but which are essentially a money making scheme (usually using some open access author pays model).

Of course, I agree with you that the requirement of having your bachelor's or master's thesis published is idiotic, and driving students into to be victims of these scams. The universities need to stop this practice, and the advisors need to guide the students who have something that is truly worth publishing in their choice of venue.

Don't even get me started on the quality of the advisors... :-(

That explains how hollow is the pride of M. Tech teachers in our country who pat their own backs about their papers getting published. So many research papers are just crap and add nothing to the existing knowledge.

Tell me something, is this true for Ph. D. as well? Because that would feel like an opener against people proudly wearing "Dr." in their titles.

You want a PhD and you are going to submit to a conference that wants your "bank account details"?

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