Turning the tables – using Reverse Vivas to Demystify the PhD Examination Process

Photo: University of Glasgow

Problem

A PhD viva voce, or viva in the UK can be an intimidating experience. As a research student you will have distilled years of toil, frustration and effort into a single document, but that is by no means the final hurdle. That document and all it represents will be assessed by a small panel of experts, whom you will have limited, if any, prior contact with. You will have a tiny amount of time at the start to state your case for the importance of the problem you’ve addressed and the contribution you’ve made. After that, you can expect to face several hours or more of questions on every aspect of the work you’ve done. The language of a viva doesn’t help – supervisors will allude to an “examination”, a “defence” or an “interrogation” of the thesis (or candidate), evoking images of a trial by combat.

Consequently, students often approach a viva from a negative mindset, looking for ways to reduce any debate and minimise the “damage” rather than engaging positively in a discussion during the process. So we decided we wanted to give research students a chance to think from the perspective of the examiner. This would focus on the kinds of questions that get asked in a viva and why.

Overview

To achieve this the Scottish Computing Science and Informatics Alliance (SICSA) has been running Reverse Vivas at our annual PhD Training Conference for several years. A reverse viva is similar to a normal viva, except that we turn the tables. An established academic is examined on their PhD thesis by a committee of current research students in front of an audience of conference participants. The aim is to give research students some experience of what a real viva is like, what examiners are looking for and what questions you might expect – hopefully in a fun setting in which the tables are turned for a short while!

How it Works

We start by recruiting academic “candidates” from across the SICSA research themes, aiming to get 4-5 from different fields to ensure that a variety of interests among conference participants are covered. Generally, we focus on early career academics as their theses are usually recent, although examining a professor on a thesis from 30 years ago can be fun too, depending on how much they remember about the details! To minimise preparation, each candidate nominates one or two chapters to be examined, rather than the whole thesis.

We ask registered conference participants to volunteer to examine one of the candidates, looking for 2-3 examiners per candidate. Sometimes we also have a chair to act as a facilitator, who can be a student or an academic. We send the examiners a formal invitation a couple of weeks before the conference and include a copy of the whole thesis, but let them know which chapters to review.

At the conference we run a short “prep” session just before the viva to get the examiners into the right mindset. In particular, we want examiners to ask questions to:

• Test the candidate’s understanding of the work, to check that they were the ones who did it.
• Gauge the novelty of the contribution to show they can contextualise their work within the field.
• Understand their vision for future work, to show they are thinking about the bigger picture.

We run the reverse viva over about an hour and try to keep the format as close to a real viva as possible. We set the room up so that examiners and the candidate are facing each other in front of an audience of conference participants. The candidate is invited to give a short talk about their work, although the examiners can interrupt them if they think it’s going on too long. The candidate is then questioned by the examiners, and we sometimes allow the audience to ask questions too. Just like in a real viva, the examiners can ask follow up questions if they think the candidate hasn’t addressed their point. Once the examination is complete, the candidate is invited to leave the room and the examiners have a discussion in front of the audience about the merits of the work. When they are done, the candidate is invited back into the room – hopefully to be congratulated on passing!

Future

We’ve run the reverse vivas for three years in our conferences now and have had really strong feedback. We wondered if we could get any academics to participate the first time we tried it, but several did and really enjoyed the experience, in some cases getting new insights on their work. They also suggested we change the “layout” to its current form, with the stage being set to look like a real viva. We think this more adversarial layout works because everyone knows the process is meant to be fun. Students also told us how it has helped them to approach the viva from a positive mindset, taking the assumption that they’ve done good work into the viva, and that the examiner wants to have a conversation with them about it. We plan to keep using the session in our conferences and hope we’ve encouraged other disciplines to try it out too.

Dr Tim Storer, Deputy Director & Director of Knowledge Exchange at The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)