So oral exam at end of PhD. Good idea or just a tradition that doesn't make any sense any more? What are the good things about them? If we didn't do them, how else could we get those good things? #academia #academicchatter
@neuralreckoning it’s a good idea but the variability in examiners (and their expectations) mean that it's not exactly fair for every student.
In the UK (as you know) it’s a deep dive for the student and examiners, in other countries they are theatre with a large jury and simple questioning in public. So at least in the UK it has a purpose as an exam.
@steveroyle @neuralreckoning even in the UK, though, it's really really really hard not to pass a viva (I've heard of 1 person in the 10 years I've been here and this was third or fourth hand news, so it might have not have actually happened). My question is more about what is gained by writing a PhD thesis that only 4 people will ever read?
@steveroyle @nicolaromano @neuralreckoning *waves* I was referred at my first viva and had to rewrite and resubmit, so I have a grudge against vivas 😅
Seriously, though, it was horrible. Right up to the day, I'd been led to believe it was a friendly formality and foregone conclusion, just to be ripped apart, left hanging for three hours while the examiners conferred, then given the bad news. Here's what I wrote about it close to the time: https://www.tumblr.com/aliceinacademia/152217020816/solidarity-for-the-viva-traumatised
@alicemcalicepants @nicolaromano @neuralreckoning I’m sorry to read about your experience. I know someone in your discipline who had the same thing happen to them. I'm glad you wrote about it to increase awareness: it does happen. Experiences like these are what I was thinking about when talking about the exam not being fair. Maybe with different examiners this wouldn’t have happened?
@steveroyle @nicolaromano @neuralreckoning quite possibly - my external continued to be awful following the viva, taking three months to send over my reading and corrections lists, then taking so long to approve the minor corrections after my second viva in April 2018 that it wasn't until July 2019 that I could get to a graduation ceremony! The academics and administrators at my end were furious on my behalf 😅
@alicemcalicepants @steveroyle @nicolaromano that's just unacceptable behaviour. 😡
@alicemcalicepants @steveroyle @nicolaromano thanks for this perspective. I've also had the experience in academia, more than once, of being told one thing right up to the last moment when suddenly you get told something else and have to change your life plans with no notice. It sucks, and I also resent academia for it. I'm doing my best to change these aspects, but there's a lot of momentum to overcome.
@neuralreckoning @alicemcalicepants @steveroyle @nicolaromano
My PhD program at UC Berkeley did not have a defense. If I recall correctly. At year 5.5 your committee told you if you could write your dissertation or if you needed another committee meeting in 6 mos. This repeated every 6 mo with the committee needing to submit more and more elaborate reasons for why you weren’t graduating yet and the plan for you to graduate. When they said you can write you wrote.
@neuralreckoning @alicemcalicepants @steveroyle @nicolaromano
You delivered a copy of the dissertation to your committee members. They read it gave you individual feedback about what revisions you needed to do. When each committee member agreed to sign off on the dissertation you were done. Maybe there was a last committee meeting but it wasn’t an exam.
@MCDuncanLab @neuralreckoning @steveroyle @nicolaromano that sounds so much more civilised!
@alicemcalicepants @neuralreckoning @steveroyle @nicolaromano
It is a bit anticlimactic with no public talk to invite your family to. But we did have an awesome grad ceremony for only PhDs from my large department. Where the pi described the student’s contribution to the field before hooding them. Probably the only time my PI said something nice about me in public.
I’ve lobbied to eliminate the defense but there’s not much appetite for it from either faculty or students.
@MCDuncanLab @alicemcalicepants @neuralreckoning @steveroyle @nicolaromano
Outside quality assurance is something that happens throughout the UK educational system. Not only do PhDs have to be examined by someone external to the university, but undergraduate degrees must also have an external examiner from another university. Even high-school exams are set and marked by organisations outside the school.
@IanSudbery QA works at scale but not in PhD exams. 1 candidate, 1 internal, 1 external, maybe a chair/advisor. Too stochastic for any QA I would say.
@steveroyle Interesting. I almost feel the opposite - school and undergrad exams are pretty terrible ways of judging people, and not amount of QA can fix that. However, the thesis and the Viva really offer the time and space for the people doing the QA to really understand the person in front of them properly, in a way that checkng an exam paper asks good questions, and is marked fairly, can't.
@steveroyle Of course a bad examiner can do a lot of damage. But its also the case that the poor PhD examiner damages one person. A poor undergraduate examiner can harm an entire year of people.
@IanSudbery but we're talking about QA (how comparable exams are across the cohort) rather than whether the exam itself is judging the individual correctly.
I agree that the viva is a great way to get to the bottom of someone's understanding. My point is I know examiners who think a “1.5 h and everyone passes” is OK and I know some who are super tough and will absolutely recommend resub. Sure, there's selection of examiners, but the students are not getting an equal exam, i.e. QA is poor.
I guess I was thinking of a much lower bar for QA - providing assurance that anyone who is awarded this qualification can be said to be anywhere near meeting the criteria for its award.
@neuralreckoning @alicemcalicepants @steveroyle @nicolaromano
Do you remember did we do closed door defenses or was it really as anticlimatic as I remember it?
@MCDuncanLab @neuralreckoning @alicemcalicepants @steveroyle @nicolaromano
It wasn't really a defense, was it? more of a "if you feel like showing off a tiny bit, you can do this totally optional talk about your thesis work… if not, no worries", right? It wasn't closed door like the qual, anyone could go, but in practice I don't think many did. So yes, as anticlimatic as the lollipop
@pmcarlton @neuralreckoning @alicemcalicepants @steveroyle
@nicolaromano
The open door thing was totally optional (Therp-thesis evening research presentation). You call it a lollipop, I called it a sucker.
For those out of the loop, there was this draconian office where you had to delivery your dissertation and some not do friendly ladies would measure the margins of your dissertation and the paper thickness. If it passed, you got apiece of paper with a gold star an a candy on a stick.
@MCDuncanLab that sounds like an ordeal. I know that in Sweden, you must hammer a nail through your thesis to stick it to a big wooden door. The theses are A5 size and quite thin but still…
@steveroyle @MCDuncanLab this sounds like a tradition I would love to borrow
@MCDuncanLab @pmcarlton @alicemcalicepants @steveroyle @nicolaromano this is magnificent! The humiliation of the infants' gold star and candy. Great way to keep you in your place. Glad to hear that Oxbridge doesn't have a monopoly on total nonsense.
@nicolaromano @steveroyle this is a big question for me. Why does nobody read PhD theses? Should we change the way they're written to make them more valuable documents? Should we get rid of them on favour of something else? I'm not entirely convinced by replacing them by publications in the current climate where there can be multiple year long delays before a paper gets published.
@neuralreckoning @nicolaromano @steveroyle I am not sure "NO one reads PhD thesis" is entirely true, at least myself actively look out and read chapters of PhD and MSc thesis on when it is subject I interested. They usually more useful than their published counterparts if those also exist often not
@kofanchen @neuralreckoning @nicolaromano good point. The folks in my lab know that to get the real experimental details, the thesis is a better bet than the paper! Also, I have a look at the ones I get alerts for on Google Scholar because they've cited our work.
@steveroyle @kofanchen @nicolaromano yeah I like reading them too. They often have much better literature review than a paper too, if you're getting into a new field. But it is true that they are much, much less read than papers.
@neuralreckoning @steveroyle @kofanchen @nicolaromano
An additional benefit is that PhD thesis are available online without a paywall.
@neuralreckoning indeed less read and cite as well, but I feel thesis is the last resistance of the slow science we used to live and it allows me to chew over concepts more carefully, so I really don't want this form to die.
On UK viva tho, like lot of people already said it has its place and personally I enjoyed it very much as PhE student, and that under pressure performance is also useful for other non science job
@kofanchen @neuralreckoning @steveroyle @nicolaromano @albertcardona
I read theses pretty often now that they are available digitally. We recently cited one.
There are people in my field who embargo the thesis for as long as possible to avoid competing labs acting on half finished projects available in a dissertation.
@albertcardona @steveroyle @kofanchen @nicolaromano hopefully this ill be a solved problem with papers though too, soon.
@kofanchen @neuralreckoning @nicolaromano @steveroyle right, like really the '4 people only read PhD theses' isn't a fault of the thesis, but the dissemination media. do you know how you would find a PhD thesis to read? because i don't.
@jonny @neuralreckoning @nicolaromano @steveroyle many of them after embargo are searchable from Google scholar, I said "actively" but it's more like when I saw them during search of key words of my interest I will make sure I read the theses that came out from the search. The publisher would be obvious as they would the universities themself
@jonny @kofanchen @nicolaromano @steveroyle they occasionally pop up but they're often stuck in hard to know about institutional repositories.
@jonny @kofanchen @nicolaromano @steveroyle like if I Google for the name of one of my former PhD students plus PhD thesis I only get my website. I don't even know where to find them.
@neuralreckoning @steveroyle I'm not advocating to replace thesis with publications, that would be problematic for a lot of reasons. I was purely talking about format. Given that the quality of the thesis is not really discriminant for getting a PhD, we might as well ask to do something that will be more useful for the student, but I'm sure that has downsides as well.
@nicolaromano @steveroyle @neuralreckoning
Failing the PhD outright is very rare. Failing a specific viva exam (so that you have to rewrite and come back viva again) is still uncommon, but not that uncommon. My internal examiner recommended I fail-and-resubmit (they were talked round by the external in the end after a 5 hour viva).
And almost no one outright passes first time. Almost everyone has corrections to make that must be reviewed by the examiner before they can pass.
@nicolaromano @neuralreckoning I do know a few cases of failure but the more common “fail” is to not submit or be asked to resubmit and fail to do so. It's rare though because everyone needs them to pass (for future funding etc). This is not healthy! It's difficult to motivate students if they believe that they will pass regardless.
As to your question, I agree, not much. The only use is they improve their writing skills, but it is often not worth the time they spend doing it.