Dr. Courtney said:
You are starting to seem like students I've had who spend more time arguing about their grade than learning the material well enough to earn a good grade in the first place.
Incidentally, with grades it happened to me too. Case in point: I got an A for high school bio, and I got a D for college bio but -- in terms of my knowledge -- these two grades should have been switched around. Because in high school bio I was asked to memorize cell structure and all sorts of things, while in college bio 2/3 of the course was just ecology and evolution that is all nice and easy. But you see, in high school bio, the teacher actually told us what the test questions were going to be several days in advance and had us memorize the correct answers. Thats why I memorized it, got an A, and then forgot the whole thing. On the other hand, in college bio, they had multiple choice exams where they "tricked" us by having some answers "almost correct" with one detail wrong. I happened to missed these little details so I got a D.
With other courses things were not nearly as extreme (most of my grades are A and B). But there were plenty of times when I got an A for the math and physics courses I didn't understand that well and I got a B for the math and physics courses that I understood much better. Oftentimes it was due to the curve. Like if I take a difficult class, I might not understand it that well, but then the curve will bring my grade up to an A. On the other hand, if I take an easy class, I might understand it well, but make sloppy mistakes (like saying minus times minus is minus or forgetting the factor of 2) but because everyone else did so well in it, that would be enough to get my grade down to a B. By the way this didn't apply to the bio classes as neither of the two had any curve.
Then the grades for English classes is the whole other matter. Since in this case they have us write essays, and the criteria for grading the essays are entirely subjective. Back in high school they weren't that picky so I got my As and Bs for the English classes, but then the first time I took English at the community college I was getting a D in it, which I avoided by dropping it so I got W instead, and then my mom hired a tutor. When I retook that English class in the summer I got an A in it. Yes, the fact that the tutor looked over my essays probably helped, but I doubt I would have been getting a D in that summer class anyway. The instructor was different so his subjective judgement was also different.
The good news is that my current GPA is much higher than what it used to be. Back when I was an undergrad it was slighly below 3.3 (I don't remember if it was 3.28 or 3.29, but probably something like that) while right now it is 3.94. Part of it is that in graduate school they like to inflate grades, and the other part is that the school I am currently at is one of the lower tear schools while the school I been undergrad at was one of the top schools. But I don't think those two factors are the only ones. I think (or at least I hope) that I did probably master the habbits that allowed me to get better grades over the years. Although of course GPA doesn't matter any more.
Dr. Courtney said:
I'm beginning to think that your work may not be of the quality to publish in a better journal.
Well, one area where the analogy between courses and research doesn't hold is that, in case of the research, one has to convince the referees that it is important enough to warrant publication. In case of courses you don't have to do that. So in my case one thing that hindered me is that I came up with the problems on my own that nobody else finds interesting or relevant. Since "interesting" is a subjective notion, it is really up to the luck whether the referee will agree with me that its interesting or not.
I realize, however, that I can't exactly make that case because the other problem with my papers is that they are very sloppy (even to my own eyes). Part of it is that a lot of them are like 40 pages long with lots of formulas that take several lines each, so I don't have patience to sit down and fix all my errors (which I find a lot when I try). But maybe one thing I can do is this. The reason my papers are so long is that each topic has many different sub-topics that then branch out to other topics. So maybe I should break those papers into several papers one devoted to each sub-topic. And then if each paper will be like 10 pages long I would have more patience to edit it properly.
Out of the 30 papers on the arXiv, 4 finally got published. Out of those 4 papers, 3 were pertaining to those issues that nobody finds interesting besides me, and, out of those 3 papers, 2 papers were published in reputable journals (one was Physics Review D the other one was Journal of Mathematical Physics). So its possible, it just takes a lot of time. But, in both of those papers, I convinced other scientists to be my co-authors, and they contributted quite a bit to fleshing out what I wrote. So maybe I should do the same with the other papers.
Dr. Courtney said:
If that's the case, submitting to a journal with the better reputation won't help, it will only delay the eventual publication of your work in a lower tier journal.
Lower tier journal is one thing, fake journal is another thing altogether. I applied to lower tear schools, but they all had accredition. I would never apply to a school that's not accredited. So I was thinking that low tear journal is analogous to low tear school that's still accredited, while predatory journal is analogous to a school that isn't accreditted. But then again I am not that familiar with how journals operate. Are you saying I misunderstood it?