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?
@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 @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.
