>> PhD students are in training, and replicating a published result is a great training exercise. I just got my PhD last July and that sounds like boring drudg

>> PhD students are in training, and replicating a published result is a great training exercise. I just got my PhD last July and that sounds like boring drudgery rather than "good exercise". Good exercise is to have a student write their own paper, dig up their own references, formulate their own experimental hypotheses, run their own experiments, write up their own results etc. Re-doing someone else's possibly badly-done work is grunt work that should not be forced upon anyone. >> PhD students ARE paid. Haha. Good one XD