Purpose of Examination

As a supervisor we determine if and when a postgraduate student’s work is ‘ready’ for examination, but what steps lead to this final examination, who examines, what is being examined and why? What can we learn from each other’s practices?

Please have look at this presentation from the University of Antwerp on PhD assessment and reflect on this forum by addressing the questions raised in chapter 5 ‘Food for thought’.

If you want to dive deeper into this topic please consider the papers below on PhD examination and address the questions in chapter 6 on this forum.

Svein Kyvik & Taran Thune (2015) Assessing the quality of PhD dissertations. A survey of external committee members, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 40:5, 768-782

Camille B. Kandiko, Ian M. Kinchin, David B. Hay (2008) Longitudinal Studies of cognitive change among students and their supervisors in the course of the research supervision plan leading to a PhD. In Proc. of the Third Int. Conference on Concept Mapping Tallinn, Estonia & Helsinki, Finland 2008

Allyson Holbrook Sid Bourke Terry Lovat Hedy Fairbairn (2008) Consistency and inconsistency in PhD thesis examination in Australian Journal of Education, Vol. 52, No. 1

Moradi, S (2019) Publication should not be a prerequisite to obtaining a PhD. Nat Hum Behav 3, 1025

Sid Bourke, Allyson Holbrook & Terence Lovat (2005) Using examiner reports to identify quality in PhD theses at Aare Focus conference: Quality in educational research