Conversely she was shocked to realize that people in mathematics couldn't. And that you could easily complete a masters in mathematics without once being asked to try to read a real research paper.
That shocks me, too. I'd expect anyone completing a master's degree in mathematics to have published at least one paper, never mind reading others' papers.
Read, yes; publish, no. I did my undergrad in math and am friends with many math master's/PhD students at UBC. I can't imagine getting a master's without reading a research paper. If that happens somewhere, I wouldn't think that their degrees are worth very much.
Publishing is another story. Reading current research is one thing... actually successfully advancing the state of the art in an area of pure math is quite another. (Applied math is another story altogether).
> I can't imagine getting a master's without reading a research paper. If that happens somewhere, I wouldn't think that their degrees are worth very much.
The University of Chicago awards ‘incidental’ master's degrees at the end of the first year of graduate study (http://catalogs.uchicago.edu/divisions/math.html). Although it's certainly possible to be reading current research at that point, I wasn't; and yet I think it's fair to say that U of C degrees are worth something.
I know a number of people who completed master's degrees in pure math who I suspect had not yet read a paper, and who definitely had not published one.
Personally I published my first paper in undergrad. But that was considered unusual among the people I knew.
That shocks me, too. I'd expect anyone completing a master's degree in mathematics to have published at least one paper, never mind reading others' papers.