Gold standard of PhD ‘under threat’, professors claim

Academics have provoked debate by claiming that increased pressure to pass substandard candidates, nepotism and the rise of the “PhD by prior publication” are endangering the doctorate’s reputation as the “gold standard” of academia.

In a scathing critique of PhD practices worldwide, David Alexander and Ian Davis, from UCL and Oxford Brookes University, said that “corruption”, “negligence” and other failings “risk causing quality to be compromised”.

The pair are particularly concerned by the increasing prevalence of the practice of awarding a PhD on the basis of prior publications, arguing that it is “fraught with risk” and often sees “slightly different versions of the same work” submitted in lieu of a thesis.

The PhD candidate is often only “one of numerous authors and has not had a dominant role in the writing of the paper”, they have claimed.

Speaking to Times Higher Education, Professor Alexander, professor of risk and disaster reduction at UCL, said that he had “misgivings” about the so-called “staff doctorate”, which is mostly used by academics to gain a PhD while working.

“I recently examined a ‘thesis’ with six papers in it and only two were published in kosher peer-reviewed journals,” he said, adding that all six articles were “minor variations of the same, rather limited argument”.

Professor Alexander added that a recent PhD examination, conducted by correspondence regarding a candidate in Australia, where there are no vivas, finished with the question: “Is the candidate good enough to pass?”

“I wrote that ‘if [your standards] are slightly below rock bottom, the candidate is good enough,” he said, adding that the candidate was “passed for the PhD immediately”.

Professor Alexander said that a good PhD thesis composed of published papers was possible, but it should have “at least four or five major, single-authored articles in it, all of them in leading peer-reviewed journals” and “a strong, 50-page introduction that provided a guide to how the papers tightly fitted together”.

About three-quarters of universities surveyed by the UK Council for Graduate Education in 2015 offered PhDs incorporating prior publication, although the traditional thesis route remained most popular.

However, Rosemary Deem, dean of Royal Holloway, University of London’s doctoral school, rejected the notion that PhDs by publication should be a cause for alarm.

“I took my PhD at The Open University in this way and, alongside a long piece written specifically for it, I had nine single-authored publications and a book,” said Professor Deem, who added that this format can “often show a much higher level of engagement with a discipline than a normal thesis”.

In a recent paper in Quality Assurance in Education, Professor Alexander and Professor Davis also claim that “nepotism” within universities, where PhD students are employed by their university or are married to staff members, and “corruption” involving insufficiently independent external examiners, were eroding standards.

But Professor Deem argued that these concerns were also “exaggerated”. When staff candidates are supervised by a colleague, it is normal to have two external examiners, she said.

“I do not dispute that we need to keep an eye on these issues, but there are regulations and I’m not convinced the system is as rotten as they make out,” she said.

The authors also flag other instances where advice to fail PhD students was ignored either at appeal or “summarily” and how many supervisors selected external examiners who “can be relied upon to yield to pressure to pass the candidate regardless of the quality of the thesis. When a student has paid very high fees for three or four years, there may be pressure to justify the expenditure by passing the thesis,” they state.

Chris Cowton, professor of financial ethics at the University of Huddersfield, was unconvinced by this argument, but said that the authors were right to raise the issue of “cliques and reciprocal examining practices”, in which supervisors seek out “people who they think will give candidates an easy time” and then themselves return the favour.

“It can be tricky because often there are not many academics in particular topics, but I don’t think we pick up on reciprocality enough,” said Professor Cowton, who added, however, that “cosiness between examiners” was worse decades ago when universities collected less data on this area.

Bruce Christianson, emeritus professor at the University of Hertfordshire’s Centre for Computer Science and Informatics, who led UKCGE’s review of PhDs by publication in 2015, said that there were “good reasons to encourage candidates to ‘publish as they go’, especially in STEM disciplines”, adding that there is a “huge opportunity cost [for requiring] students to spend a large chunk of time rewriting their outputs into a monograph-style dissertation that will not be widely read”.

“When papers replace a monograph like this, the way the viva is handled becomes even more important: examiners need to verify the candidate’s contribution, and their understanding,” added Professor Christianson, who called for “a more open process than it has traditionally been in the UK, for example by allowing attendance by other members of the department, as is common on the continent”.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com