The Column - October 2006 - (Page 8)

Opinion The Column www.thecolumn.eu.com October 2006 How Good is Your CV? universities do not, as yet, have to charter to award their own We recently placed an advertisement for a new PhD student to PhD but do so through an established university. One of the work in our research laboratory. To our amazement, we were candidates gave his place of study as Leeds; I assumed this to flooded with applications. On studying all the application forms be the University of Leeds. On questioning him, it turned out to and the CVs from the applicants we found it impossible to be another institute of Leeds. make a short list of candidates. So, we had no alternative but The existing UK system of the student being examined by an to interview all applicants. This was a major exercise but at the internal and external examiner does not seem to provide any same time a very interesting exercise; the result of which has normalization across all students. As I have previously said, we made me very worried as the standard of applicants, all found a vast range in their knowledge and ability. carrying the degree of PhD was very, very broad in terms of The number of students being awarded the degree of PhD in their technical ability and knowledge, both general and the UK each year is not very large, so why can't the students' scientific. In fact, some notes made by my colleagues even theses be passed to an external nationwide examining board questioned if some of the applicants even had a BSc. for grading and in the grading a division awarded to the We did interview some excellent candidates, but the range degree of PhD? of the candidates' knowledge did make me think about the If such a very simple system were introduced then my job in way we educate and examine PhD students in the UK. I must selecting a PhD student would have been made a lot simpler. I stress that the views I make are not valid on a statistical basis am also sure many of my industrial colleagues would welcome and they could be wrong, but I don't think so. such a change. I am also certain that with such an external First of all, I have tried to find out how many students fail a body some of the applicants we interviewed would not have PhD. My research shows very few, if any. Many students fail to received the degree of PhD. complete either the given research programme or fail to write up within the very generous time period. Nevertheless, I found no record of a student failing because of the viva. I found that some had to do major or total rewrites but in the end all passed! Therefore, from this data it seems that once you are accepted onto a PhD programme you will obtain the degree as long as you stick to the three years' work and write a thesis. From our limited sample of PhDs we found a direct relationship between the quality of the PhD and the research grading held by the awarding university. Moreover, we also found that the quality of the applicant was inversely proportional to their CV. Although it was a very long and costly exercise to interview all candidates, we are very glad we did, but also sad we found such a great difference between the interview and the candidate's CV. My conclusion is, therefore, that we have a problem in the UK with the degree of PhD. We need to change, as not all PhDs are equal. Today from our experience, they must be qualified with the awarding university for any judgement to be made. However, even this requires care, as some of our newer Author: Zosimus E-mail: zosimus@thecolumn.eu.com 8 http://www.thecolumn.eu.com

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