Should academics allow student to submit a possibly flawed paper? I let a student associated with me (but who is not really my PhD student) submit a paper to a fairly-local meeting (some people do come from abroad). Because I'd been tasked with supporting the student, I let him put my name on the paper and also helped with the presentation, but I found the content unconvincing.  However, he was exploring an area that I knew little about and had little interest in, so I'd hoped he'd get reviews &amp; (if accepted) discussion that would give him more guidance than I have been able to. 

In fact, no one seemed as sceptical as I was of the work, and it got into the meeting and was presented both in our department and at the meeting with if anything positive comments.  

However, yesterday I got an email from a postdoc who was cited in the paper (the student compared himself to the postdoc's work, the meeting's papers are on a website, Google Scholar alerted the postdoc) and was incensed at the paper's low quality and inaccuracies.  I think the postdoc is being a bit paranoid, but is broadly right on the technical issues. I have also previously noticed that one of my more-successful colleagues I've been collaborating with recently had a less tolerant attitude towards student publication than I do. 

I'm wondering if I should put more effort on quality control.  The cost would be possibly stifling a student unnecessarily if I'm wrong, and allowing fewer students to have fewer presentation experiences since I'm already working flat out keeping up with giving feedback on their journal articles &amp; dissertations.
In my opinion, since you aren't the supervisor, it's not your role to stop the student from publishing.  If you are an expert in the subject of the publication and you don't think it's strong, you should advise them not to publish and explain why, but that's as far as you should go.

However, you "let him put [your] name on the paper" -- a paper which, by your own admission, you don't know much about!  Regardless of whether the co-author is a student, and regardless of the quality of the paper, the behavior you're describing is wrong.  In my field, it's actually forbidden by at least one of our professional societies:


  All the authors listed for a paper . . . must have made a significant contribution to its content.


This is generally construed as meaning you should have done a significant part of the research and a significant part of the writing.

Now, violating this rule for a paper that you don't even have a high opinion of seems not only unethical but foolish.

I realize this is a harsh-sounding answer, but you have posted the question anonymously so I hope you don't mind me being frank.