ECS PhD Oral Exam Process

(Needs updating)

According to VUW's PhD policy, the oral exam panel will consist of a chair (HoS, Prof John Hine or his delegate), the NZ/local external examiner, and the internal examiner. The student and the supervisors will attend the oral exam. External supervisors can join the oral exam via skype (or other video conference tools).

At the beginning of the oral exam, the student usually uses 5-10 minutes to briefly summarise the major contributions of his thesis. The HoS (or his delegate) will chair the process, and the two examiners will ask questions and the student answers those questions. According to VUW PhD policy, the overseas examiner's questions will be presented by the internal examiner. If the panel members ask, the supervisors can make clarifications.

During the oral exam, either the internal examiner or the supervisor make some necessary notes. At the end of the questions, the student and supervisors leave the exam room. The panel members will discuss and decide a final grade based on the individual grades given by the three examiners and the questions/answers during the oral exam.

Sometimes there is a disagreement of the grade between the three examiners on whether to grant the thesis "pass with minor amendments" or "pass with specific revision". In addition to the academic definition on the two grades, another major consideration is how long the amendments/revision would require: the minor amendments assume 3-4 weeks of full time work, while the specific revision assumes 6-months of full time work.

After that, the chair will prepare a memo to summarise the oral and give a grade (with conditions). All the panel members will need to sign the memo to be sent to the Faculty office (via the postgraduate thesis coordinator). The panel members also need to decide a list of changes that the student needs to make (usually only list the mandatory changes) and the internal examiner should record and type these changes, and pass them to the student. In case there isn't sufficient time at the meeting, this list can be done after the oral (within one or two days). In this case, the internal examiner usually sends the list of changes to the external examiner for confirmation (sometimes the external examiner thinks this is not necessary and mentions at the oral s/he does not need to do so).

Based on the VUW PhD policy, the changes need to be satisfied by the internal examiner (in case the internal examiner is not available, the principal supervisor should play this role). After s/he satisfies the changes, s/he needs to write a confirmation email to the faculty office (copy to the postgraduate thesis coordinator), and the examination process is completed.