Hi People

Interesting topic, very hard to say if standards in general are slipping, although I do know an interesting story. Back at my old institution there was a foreign student (self funded to my knowledge), her english was terrible and she showed very little inclination towards improving this. Her labwork generally was also hopeless and people found they could teach her nothing. She went through about 3-4 different supervisors before finally being dumped on the head of school. After 4 years she submitted an enormous thesis, rumor had it that a lot of it was simply made up, and it passed with some corrections (think they were minor). Although this would suggest standards are dropping, i am unsure.

Individual cases exist where the award was probably not deserved, but I think this has always happened. I think the biggest problem is that departments are under a lot of pressure to have all their students passed within 4 years, this may lead to a drop in standards, and maybe it is happening, but do we have any way of knowing?

Another point, have you ever looked at research papers from say the 1960's or 70's. Compared to todays publishing I'd say standards have in fact increased by quite a lot, at least in my field. The quality of papers accepted in good journals I believe has gone up enormously since those days, so it may be easier to graduate from a PhD, but it is definitely harder to get anywhere after that

I'm leaning more towards content over spelling.

That said if I was an examiner and saw some typo's I would expect them to be corrected. I think it's par for the course really for some creep through even after several checks, a thesis is potentially a huge document that the writer is so familiar with that they may no longer pick up on some of the typo's. As an examiner I'd probably ask about the typo's, hopefully they'd have a list of them to show that they had indeed picked up on them.

As for whether I'd expect that to count as minor corrections or a pass it would depend on the typo's. Any that could potentially change the meaning of what is stated would have to be minor corrections, a misplaced letter in the middle of antidisestabislhmentarianism I could let slide if the rest of the thesis is of a high standard.

I've read a couple of theses. One in my area from the same Uni and one is a drastically different area in a totally different Uni. I was looking at style and formatting more than anything. Both were fantastic. I couldn't say one was better than the other, or that they were both the exact same quality. But there was no doubt to my mind that they were examples of real achievement. They read well, they explained the content with clarity without skimping on depth, they were anaylitical and they seemed, as far as I could tell, to really add something to the area they were investigating. There are too many different yardsticks and expectations I think to make direct comparisons between one thesis and another unless they're on the exact same topic.

I don't think PhD by publication would be a better way to do it though. Publication comes with it's own set of politics and criteria where the evidence of the skills you're meant to acquire during a PhD aren't always the ones that are being looked at. And then there are always pitfalls with differences between journals. It'd invite questions about standards of journals slipping instead of examiners.

There can be a bit more to 'no corrections' than meets the eye. I was awarded my PhD with no corrections when in fact I did have a small list of typos and references to add. The examiners said they wanted to award 'pass with no corrections' in honour of the high quality of the thesis (not trying to be a big head, honest!) so all I had to do was correct the typos before the hard bound copy was submitted. Maybe this is what happened with the person mentioned in the OP?

I personally hate to see typos in work, as I suppose I would assume the author was sloppy, and I do think poor expression can spoil an otherwise good argument. But with a thesis, almost nobody else will ever read it, and if parts of it go on to be published then it will be copy edited by a professional anyway, and errors removed. So if I was examining a thesis, I probably wouldn't be too bothered about typos if the content was sound, because it's more of a personal document than a public one.

@Bilbo - I do agree. But to my mind, 'minor corrections' implies at least a small change to the argument, rather than just fixing spelling errors. So I would say that giving someone 'minor corrections' for a few typos (i had four) would be quite harsh.

Ultimately though, as someone said below, nobody ever actually asks (in job interviews etc) whether or not you got corrections. The distinctions are pretty meaningless.

I certainly don't think standards are falling, not in my discipline anyway - if anything they are improving massively! I look at theses from 20 years ago and the language, the arguments, the presentation, the typos etc are far more problematic than current theses. Some were quite awful - I remember as an UG reading one and feeling quite relieved that the standard looked easily attainable - that is not to take anything from the argument or the research itself however- that was excellent - more language and presentation.

I too think that so much depends on who your examiner is - one of the ex-profs in my dept is a complete bugger! He will mark you down for leaving a full stop off of the end of a footnote (even though in a recent journal submission I had to remove them all again!). He'll take you to pieces for things that other profs consider not worth mentioning. Another will shred your argument, but worry little about your presentation - its all swings and roundabouts and tbh I'd worry more about my argument than my presentation. Of course I want it to be perfect, I don't want typos, I want it formatted properly - but tbh all of that can be addressed at any time - the argument, the core of the thesis and the quality of the research itself is what matters - without that your presentation can be astounding, it can be the prettiest thesis ever, but it will be rubbish.