'Nothing more, nothing less': PhD advisor corrects student's mistakes ahead of presentation, student rejects corrections, advisor maliciously complies

Author image for Ben Weiss
Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Nov 27, 2023 8:00 AM EST

Some people don't like to be told that all their work is wrong, even if it's the truth. We have all been there in some way or another, whether it was in school or at home or at work. At some point, some more knowledgeable person probably took a look at all your hard work and pointed out an error that effectively rejects all the hours of time and effort you put into the project. It's an inevitable part of learning and growing up, and it can be especially hard to take this news if you lead with your ego, as this student clearly did.

Add as a preferred
source on Google
Advertisement
  • 01
    petuksen "I fix more stuff than she anticipated. Somehow this wasn't a good thing"
    via Dom Fou

  • This thread was posted to Reddit's r/MaliciousCompliance subreddit by u/Incandescent-aioli, an advisor to a PhD student who noticed a string of errors when reviewing his student's code. OP then took it upon himself to issue detailed corrections in order to help the student ahead of her upcoming PhD presentation. It was all done with the intent to save her, not to humiliate her and yet, she interpreted these corrections as an attempt to do the latter. The student continued to insist her original work was right, and well, we can all just imagine how that presentation ended up going.

    Keep scrolling below for the full story and for the best reactions from folks in the comments. For more, check out this post about an employee who was blindsided by HR and whose pay was severely altered.

  • 02
    r/r/MaliciousCompliance Posted by u/Incandescent-aioli 45 minutes ago PhD student sends me script to debug, then subscribes to my malicious compliance package when I overdeliver M OC
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 03
    TL:DR: PhD student asks me to debug her code, I fix more stuff than she anticipated. Somehow this wasn't a good thing so now we get a little more maliciously compliant.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 04
    After I finished my degree, I stayed around in the research group at my uni part time as a bioinformatician to support ongoing PhD projects in their bioinformatics analyses. This mainly because the group currently lacks a senior researcher and the professor himself doesn't know anything about coding.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 05
    We have a bunch of awesome PhD students but one of them has proven to be completely incapable of doing even the most basic scripting (R and Python). I am not sure how she has worked on her project for three years without picking up even the most basic skills. Furthermore, she has shown a remarkable ability to completely ignore any advice from anyone
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 06
    and doesn't read the documentation in any packages or command line tools she uses. Instead, she exclusively relies on code snippets she finds while googling and guilt trips others into writing and debugging her code for her using puppy eyes and frequent crying.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 07
    This week, she sent me a full R script with a simple request: The script does some genetic analysis on a set of aligned DNA sequences and produces a plot in the end. She didn't know how to change the colors in the plot and legend (anyone who has ever worked with R will know how basic this is).
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 08
    I look at the plot that her script produces. In addition to the colors being messed up it is immediately obvious that the results make no biological sense whatsoever. Based on this, I ended up investigating the entire script and the data that goes into it step by step. Needless to say, half of the script didn't work
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 09
    at all (she just ignored all the error messages...?), labels of all samples are messed up, code snippets she copied from somewhere on SO didn't do anything as she just copy pasted them in as is without understanding what they even do.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 10
    Finally, the DNA alignment, which forms the basis for the entire analysis, is not properly aligned. So basically, this entire analysis is completely wrong.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 11
    Given she has a committee meeting for her project next week, I decided to be nice. I invested more than 4 hours last night, debugged and rewrote the entire script, fixed the issues in her data, wrote comments with explanations for every step in the analysis, and finally render a much better plot in the end (including the correct colors).
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 12
    After I sent it to her, she complains about me rewriting her script ("I didn't ask you to do this") and is overall super defensive about every single correction I made and feedback I typed up. I'm confident that all the things I did find were,
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 13
    in fact, errors because now the plot suddenly makes biological sense and is consistent with our expectations. She also cried as per usual protocol, of course. Obviously she also didn't thank me for all the work I did.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 14
    After a back and forth in my MS Teams DMs, which lasted well over 2 hours today, I decided to simply comply with her wishes. I went back to her original script and fixed only the one line of code at the very end of the script which messed up the colors. Left everything else as is and sent it to her. I told her to do with the other fully corrected and tested script as she pleases (which means she won't use it because she's 'confident in her results').
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 15
    In the future, when dealing with her, I will take much greater care to only fix the issues I was specifically asked to fix. Nothing more, nothing less. Enjoy your PhD committee meeting on Monday in which you get to present your objectively incorrect plot to four professors, who will then decide if you even stay around for another year.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 16
    On the plus side, she has motivated me to finally look for a decent job outside of academia.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 17
    ccl-now 1 hr. ago She will definitely present your fully corrected code as her own work.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 18
    NeuralParity 53 min. ago And now she gets a first author paper in a top tier journal because her results are completely unexpected, the reviewers also don't know how to do data analysis, and the professor is friends with the chief editor.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 19
    Me? Jaded? Why would you say that? Surely all these high impact papers have put their data on SRA and come with a fully reproducible computation pipeline to demonstrate the correctness of their data analysis, right? ... Right?
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 20
    Ghrrum 1 hr. ago I mean, I'd also hand that off to the folks doing the reviewing.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 21
    KS Onk trro16p 1 hr. ago Give us an update when she comes crying to you trying to throw you under the Bus to the PHD Committee and blame you for the plot being incorrect.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 22
    If she really goes after you, show the committee how she has no clue how the plot was created or how to code the script in the first place.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 23
    I bet the code still has comments in it from where she got it or who actually wrote it.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli
  • 24
    Incandescent-aioli OP. 27 min. ago Sadly the code didn't have any info or comments on who initially wrote it. I did find a bunch of SO code snippets that were just pasted in as is so I suspect she did throw this Frankenscript together all on her own. Nevertheless, she won't be able to answer a single question on this analysis.
    via u/Incandescent-aioli

Want More? Follow Us and Add Us as a Preferred Source on Google.

Tags

students malicious compliance work malicious-compliance-reddit Professors reddit thread Reddit malicious compliance reddit
Scroll Down For The Next Article