Failing a Phd Thesis Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

I am able to speak with in depth knowledge about phd viva failure, since i was myself required to undergo a lengthy and difficult appeal. I described my experiences in a short article for the times higher education supplement, entitled when a phd is less than appealing. A significantly longer, unpublished version of this article is also available, entitled too much appeal. For further information about phd failure and phd appeals see: appeals procedure for research degree students university of essex i'm only personally aware of one student who failed his phd defense this is at an r1 us university.

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After his advisor refused to approve his thesis, he went over his head and got the department chair to schedule the defense anyway. On the other hand, major revisions are very common, especially, i hear, in the humanities in engineering, it's far more common to receive token feedback if the committee reads the thesis at all! than demands for substantial changes. Outright failing a student during a defense is an extreme embarassment, for the department, for the phd committee, for the advisor, and of course for the student, so there is every incentive to ensure that a thesis that goes to defense will pass. Moreover, since most theses these days are compilations of previously published work, it is very easy to tell well in advance if the student is expected to pass.

So if an advisor has doubts about the quality of a student's thesis, he will either ask the student to spend more time improving it, or suggest the student start looking for jobs in industry. I'm supervising a lot of new grad students this semester, so for their sake, i'm cataloging the common reasons for failure. There's a simple formula for the optimal gpa in grad school: optimal gpa minimum required gpa + epsilon anything higher implies time that could have been spent on research was wasted on classes. Advisors might even raise an eyebrow at a 4.0 during the first two years, students need to find an advisor, pick a research area, read a lot of papers and try small, exploratory research projects. Taking or sitting in on non required classes outside one's focus is almost always a waste of time, and it's always unnecessary. Student needs to have read about 50 to 150 papers to defend the novelty of a proposed thesis. Of course, some students go too far with the related work search, reading so much about their intended area of research that they never start that research.

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Advisors will lose patience with eternal students that aren't focused on the goal making a small but significant contribution to human knowledge. In the interest of personal disclosure, i suffered from the want to learn everything bug when i got to ph.d. I took classes all over campus for my first two years: arabic, linguistics, economics, physics, math and even philosophy. In computer science, i took lots of classes in areas that had nothing to do with my research. I only got away with this detour because while i was doing all that, i was a ta, which meant i wasn't wasting my advisor's grant funding. Perfectionism is a tragic affliction in academia, since it tends to hit the brightest the hardest. Students that polish a research paper well past the point of diminishing returns, expecting to hit perfection, will never stop polishing.

Students that can't begin to write until they have the perfect structure of the paper mapped out will never get started. For students with problems starting on a paper or dissertation, my advice is that writing a paper should be an iterative process: start with an outline and some rough notes take a pass over the paper and improve it a little rinse repeat. Early on, the advisor should be hands on, doling out specific topics and helping to craft early papers.

Once the inversion happens, she needs to go rogue and start choosing the topics to investigate and initiating the paper write ups. Going rogue before the student knows how to choose good topics and write well will end in wasted paper submissions and a grumpy advisor. On the other hand, continuing to act only when ordered to act past a certain point will strain an advisor that expects to start seeing a return on an investment of time and hard won grant money. Students to be proto professors with intimate knowledge of the challenges in their field. They should be capable of selecting and attacking research problems of appropriate size and scope. Solving problems and writing up papers well enough to pass peer review demands contemplative labor on days, nights and weekends.

School like a 9 5 endeavor are the ones that take 7+ years to finish, or end up abd. It's important for students to maintain contact with committee members in the latter years of a ph.d. It's also easy to forget advice from a committee member since they're not an everyday presence like an advisor. It doesn't usually happen, but i've seen a shouting match between a committee member and a defender where they disagreed over the metrics used for evaluation of an experiment. This committee member warned the student at his proposal about his choice of metrics. Another student i knew in grad school was told not to defend, based on the draft of his dissertation.

To escape was probably repeatedly unlucky with research topics, and had to settle for a contingency plan. If they can, pick the topic that's easiest to do but which still retains your interest. Most schools require coursework, qualifiers, thesis proposal, thesis defense and dissertation. In practice, the real milestones are three good publications connected by a perhaps loosely unified theme. A student that has published by the time she takes her qualifiers is not a mistake. Once a student has two good publications, if she convinces her committee that she can extrapolate a third, she has a thesis proposal.

Once a student has three publications, she has defended, with reasonable confidence, that she can repeatedly conduct research of sufficient quality to meet the standards of peer review. If she draws a unifying theme, she has a thesis, and if she staples her publications together, she has a dissertation. I fantasize about buying an industrial grade stapler capable of punching through three journal papers and calling it the dissertator. Of course, three publications is nowhere near enough to get a professorship even at a crappy school. January 31, 2012 by james hayton you are surrounded by other very smart people with different experience and ways of viewing problems.

Never ask for advice if you find something difficult, and never admit that youre making less progress than you think you should. Instead, wait till you write your thesis before you attempt to explain your work for the first time. If you stop to think, people might think you are being lazy, and its vital to maintain the appearance of being busy even if youre too exhausted to tie your own shoelaces. If you stop to think, you might be able to find a better way of doing things that saves you time or a new idea thats a breakthrough in your research. Then what are you going to do for the rest of the day? your supervisor might say no, after all. Its not your fault you didnt have the support, you didnt have the resources, this didnt arrive on time, there are too many distractions excuses are a great way to cover up your own responsibility for your own research. Strip them away and the onus is on you to think about what you need to do to overcome the circumstances and make progress.

If you want to stay a phd student forever then spend all your time reacting to new but non urgent tasks coming in, rather than on your long term goals or finishing what youve already started. Wait till monday before you decide what youll do next week, and then just do what you feel like doing at that moment. Doing everything at the last minute means that you wont have time to think about what you are doing, and gives plenty of opportunity for excuses to crop up.

Successful people acknowledge and think about their mistakes, then act accordingly. But you learned from undergrad studies that a mistake is the worst thing you can make in an exam or in an essay. Back then there was little chance or need to learn from mistakes, as you only had to retake the exam if you failed. Failing a phd is all about working harder without gaining a deeper insight into your research.

So dont stop to think about what youve done wrong and what you can do differently, and never, ever admit your mistakes to others. Spend all your time worrying about whether this or that option is best, because you dont and cant ever know with certainty until you try that¡s why its called research. You could decide to try something new, but that means having to stop to think about the options. And you risk making mistakes which youd then have to think about some more and try to learn from, or admit to.

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