Viva - anyone else with a similar experience? on PostgraduateForum.com

Viva - anyone else with a similar experience?

Yve
9 years ago

Hey, Dr TreeofLife, well done. Passing with trivial minor corrections is great. It is very disappointing that your examiners were unpleasant and were grudging about it but please try not to let that get in the way of your achievement. Maybe they disagreed with what you wrote / found / did because it challenges a pet theory, maybe they were just miserable so-and-sos, but in the end your thesis and defence were good enough to survive a hostile examination and come out of the other end with few changes and that's brilliant.

TreeofLife
9 years ago

Quote From Dunham:

I agree with pd1598. There are tons of people who achieve that goal and as an examiner this is probably routine. So i wouldn't be surprised. For them, it is probably an average PhD thesis. Nothing major to complain about, but also nothing to be excited about. For the individual it is of course a huge achievement but not necessarily for an examiner. However, I think you should at least congratulate at the end (I hope they did).

Of course it is nothing exceptional, it's just a thesis, like the millions of others out there, but I still think there is a way to conduct vivas that let the students know the limits of their work, without thinking that it's all totally crap.