Criticism from The Crimson

bruno123
Thu, 15 Mar 2007 13:45:20 +0000

By teaching, I do not mean only pedagogical experience; this is secondary. I mean especially field knowledge. A prof cannot be expected to teach only what s/he has done research on and written about. This is why American graduate students take Ph.D. qualifying exams, usually at the end of their second year, to test their knowledge of their general field (s). Then only can they begin to think about their dissertation topic. By this time, the typical UK Ph.D. student is nearly finished writing the dissertation.



PhD programs in the UK nowadays are not as unstructured as you might think. For example, students pursuing a PhD in engineering at Cambridge are now expected to take classes (at least two lecture modules) and pass the respective final written exams in their first year in the program. At the end of the first year, they also undergo a formal performance evaluation, which includes turning in a research report and going through an oral exam. If performance is deemed unsatisfactory, the PhD student may be evicted from the program or downgraded to master’s student status. Progress is formally assessed again at the end of the second year, at which point a student is expected to be ready to submit at least a conference paper for publication. Furthermore, the final oral exam for the PhD degree in the UK (“Viva Voce”) is a much bigger deal than the “thesis defense” in the US. To begin with, the student’s advisor is not allowed to be an examiner and, on top of that, examiners usually ask for several ** major ** changes in the thesis before accepting it and may even ocasionally fail the candidate or , alternatively, recommend him/her for a master’s degree only.

Finally, on the broader issue of research quality, I cannot comment on all fields, but at least in the area where I work (Bayesian methods for signal processing), Cambridge engineering is IMHO the top department in the world. BTW, I’m not currently and never have been affiliated with the University of Cambridge.