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Common Qs About The Viva: Does Publishing Before The Viva Help?

I’ve been talking to PhD candidates about viva prep for over four years, and there are some questions that regularly come up at workshops. I’ve started answering some of these on this blog, but thought it might be useful to answer some of the most frequently asked questions all of this week. Let me know what you think in the comments, and please give me some questions for future posts!

Does publishing before the viva help?

I think that this question comes up a lot because some postgraduate researchers have been told that that is what academia is all about. It’s true that peer review of journal articles is a backbone of academic research, but PhDs are assessed on material presented in the thesis. The award of PhD is based on the merits of the research in the thesis, and by extension the talents and competence of the person who did it (the PhD candidate).

Given all of that, does publishing before the viva help?

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viva

Common Qs About The Viva: How Do They Start?

I’ve been talking to PhD candidates about viva prep for over four years, and there are some questions that regularly come up at workshops. I’ve started answering some of these on this blog, but thought it might be useful to answer some of the most frequently asked questions all of this week. Let me know what you think in the comments, and please give me some questions for future posts!

How do vivas start?

I think this question comes up a lot because sometimes starting things is hard. I think there’s often a fear of the unknown associated with the viva: the start of the viva is the start of the fear! I think that’s a shame, because from my experience of talking to PhD graduates, vivas tend to start with examiners asking the candidate to talk in general terms about their thesis and research.

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Commons Qs About The Viva: What If My Mind Goes Blank?

When did your mind last go blank?

The first time for me was in Mr R’s chemistry class in high school. Like a real swot I sat on the front row, even though Mr R was intimidating and had a habit of randomly picking people to answer his questions.

One day, I was really focussing as he talked about the concentration of substances in a solvent when he suddenly said, “…and the answer is… Ryder?” and turned his piercing gaze on me. My mind crashed and I lost the last ten seconds of what he had said: deleted, file error, 404 response. I had no idea what he said, even though I had been listening and all I could do was say “Uh, not sure sir,” to which he smirked, “Not listening, eh?! Bowness, how about you?”

(the answer incidentally was “2” and the question amounted to “what is 4 divided by 2?”)

(the irony that I would go on to get a PhD in maths is not lost on me)

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viva

Common Questions About The Viva: Dress Code

Is there a dress code for the viva?

Whenever I deliver a workshop on viva preparation, I ask “What do you want to know about the viva?” 100% of the time I get asked about the lengths of vivas, but as I answered that question last week, I thought that I would ask the question I get asked at 99% of workshops: is there a dress code for the viva?

In a few institutions, there is a standard of academic attire that is required (I believe Oxford and Cambridge often asks for candidates to wear academic black dress robes); be sure to check if there are any requirements at your institution. Guidelines might be given, but more often it is the candidate’s choice to decide what they want to wear. I know people who have worn business casual to their viva, and I know people who have worn a t-shirt and ripped jeans. I also know people who have stressed over what is “the best” or “the right” thing to wear.

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Viva Experience Research, Part 5: Drawing Threads Together

So Far

On Monday I introduced the research I set in motion earlier this year, a series of seven questions I asked PhD graduates about their viva experiences. On Tuesday and Wednesday I shared the basic quantitative results that I have found through analysing the responses I received, and yesterday I shared some of the qualitative responses that people gave, and offered a few thoughts on this.

What do all of these results say?

Vivas are not as long – on the whole – as stories about vivas lead us to believe; the vast majority of candidates who pass do so with minor corrections or no corrections; it seems a greater than previously believed proportion of candidates are told at the start of their viva that they have passed – and this is especially pronounced in ASH disciplines (Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities). Far more graduates think of their viva as being positive rather than negative, although almost a quarter of the respondents associated their viva with stress.

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Viva Experience Research, Part 4: What People Say

“What three words come to mind when you think of your viva?”

This question was the most challenging part of my research in to the viva to date, and also one of the most interesting. The quantitative answers that I found – explored in Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s posts – were interesting, and I think have a lot to offer people who are trying to set their expectations for the viva.

They are also a little…soul-less. Yes or No. True or False. This number or that number. Where is the feeling? Where is the emotion? The viva is not just about research, there is a real person involved. The candidate – the graduate! – is the PhD, not the research, not the thesis. If you’ve passed, what three words come to mind when you think of your viva?

Can you see any of them in the following Wordle?

A basic Wordle showing common words expressed about the viva.
A basic Wordle showing common words expressed about the viva.
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viva

Viva Experience Research, Part 3: Forming An Outline

The Story So Far

In yesterday’s post I shared some results from my survey about

  • the length of vivas;
  • the percentage of graduates that get minor corrections;
  • the discovery that 20.9% of PhD graduates are told at the start of their viva that they have passed.

These results get more interesting when we take into account research disciplines of respondents.

It is difficult to form impressions of individual subject areas, because of low numbers of particular areas. I decided to group respondents based on whether the discipline could broadly be considered Science and Engineering (SCI) or Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (ASH); I used these to check for differences between viva experiences, starting with the simple areas of data that I talked about yesterday.

SCI Vivas

For SCI vivas (204 out of 302 respondents) the average viva length is 2 hours and 39 minutes; however, this doesn’t really mean all that much without some other analysis of the numbers. A closer examination shows:

  • 76% of SCI vivas were three hours or less; just over 5% were an hour or less.
  • Around 6% were more than four hours.
  • The most common viva length was still two hours (however there was a greater variety of longer vivas).
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Viva Experience Research, Part 2: Some Statistics

How long is the average viva?

Top of my list of questions, I wanted to know how long vivas were. I added up all of the lengths and divided by the number of participants and arrived at 2 hours and 23 minutes.

So now we know.

Except…

That’s not very helpful is it? We need to know how that relates to the various lengths reported. Is this skewed by one person with a twelve hour viva? (thankfully no!) This average gives us a smile I think, but not much more. So let’s look closer:

Generated by Wordle, the common viva times reported in terms of minutes. Size indicates relative frequency.
Generated by Wordle, the common viva times reported in terms of minutes. Size indicates relative frequency.

This image shows times concentrated around a range from 120 to 180 minutes. In fact, in my data:

  • 82.1% of respondents reported a viva of three hours or less, and almost 50% had a viva of two hours of less.
  • Less than 5% had a viva of more than four hours.
  • The most commonly reported time was 2 hours.

This is good news – and I think does a lot to debunk urban legends that get circulated. This data was collected from respondents who had their viva between 1999 and 2014, but almost two thirds of the responses were from 2010/14; when the set is restricted to responses from this period the results hold more or less true, with only a slight increase in longer vivas.

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Viva Experience Research, Part 1: Background

To Begin With

My viva was four hours long, and I was stood in front of a chalkboard for the entire duration.

Yeah: I know.

After my PhD, I started work as a skills trainer with postgraduate researchers, and I began delivering sessions on viva preparation. I could tell people about my viva, and about other vivas I had heard about, but I realised very quickly that:

  1. My viva was not typical, and while it was fine to talk about, it didn’t necessarily help people feel OK;
  2. I knew a lot about vivas anecdotally, but I didn’t know for sure what the general experience was like.

So I started the Viva Survivors Podcast – by the way, there’s a brand new episode up there today! – I wanted to share stories that would help people feel that the viva was not a terrible thing, and also see that there were things that could be done to prepare for it. By showing a variety of disciplines, postgraduate researchers would see that it was OK – and hopefully see that whatever differences individual vivas have, they also have a lot in common.

About two years later I realised that it was helping, but it wasn’t enough, not by itself.

So I asked seven questions.

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