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Reply to "How common is failing your dissertation defense?"
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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My husband has a PhD and serves on people's committees. They just had someone fail her proposal defense and the committee reamed out her advisor for letting her go in front of her committee when she wasn't ready. And that was just the proposal. You'd have to have an absolutely awful advisor to fail your thesis defense.[/quote] Proposals are difficult and they're a stepping stone and failure is more common here (not expected but not unheard of). Its basically you starting your research, showing you have the ability to do research and bring about results and answer questions about the direction of this research. How well you do will depend a lot on your advisor but also how well you are with uncertainty. Imagine you're giving a presentation on your child's success in school. You have an outline for the math courses, the books to read, a backup plan etc. You can comment on their worth because you've read them and enjoyed them and they helped develop you. But this is your child and you don't know how he will respond to it. So one of the questions becomes "what if your child doesn't like 'Treasure Island' or '1984'" or "Have you taken into account things like discalculia or ADHD and how that may impact your child's learning". You may not have considered these things because this is your child and you don't have concerns about these things in your child. So suddenly your proposal which you've researched in and out is getting derailed and taken into another direction. Normally you can talk about adding that direction to your research, and your advisor may step in and talk about it in more general terms and try to bring the discussion back to you, but this is not always easy because some people have more dominating personalities (especially if said person does not like your advisor or their area of research but then why would they be on your proposal team). If this were a defense and you were talking about this same subject and said topics hadn't been discussed for whatever reason then either they're not in the scope or if they are then its an area where you need to address. But its a lot easier to defend a dissertation than a proposal because you're talking about your work (I did X), not your want to do work (I will do Y). [/quote]
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