[Balgair]

That is nearly the opposite of what the PhD was designed to do. Modern academic training comes out of the church and the old guilds of middle Europe and is still in use today in many fields (chefs and plumbers to name a few).

The Bachelor's degree is loosely similar to an apprentice's role. The young boy (they were almost exclusively male) worked in a shop or with a priest for some time. He learned the trade, the tools, and gained some experience from 'level 0'. When you are done with the apprenticeship, you are 'cleared' to work in other shops and are known to not be a total moron or break tools or burn down shops.

The master's degree is just that. You are considered a master of the craft (like plumbing or prinitng) or the discipline (like The Book of Mark or Crusader History). As such, you typically have a master's level project. Something that is 'new' or shows that you know your stuff. That might be a very decorative silver bowl or a thesis.

The Doctorate means you are 'world class.' Not just a mastery in a field, but a paragon of it. Today, that means that you are the expert in your little niche of underwater basket weaving. There should be no-one better than you. This means you MUST have produced something new or novel way of thinking about the God or something. This has always been the idea, if not the practice.

To change that and say that the doctorate should be the bachelor's is very big. To suggest that PhDs should just replicate experiments is anathema to the idea of graduate education and would be a tremendous waste of time and energy. When you enter the Phd, you are assumed to already know how to do all the replication and the facts about the field. Granted, fields are exponentially larger than they were in the 1600's, but you still should know stats and biology if your PhD is in cancer biology.

I think you are totally wrong about this. What you are suggesting should be covered in undergrad and I think it largely is.

[bunderbunder]

The problem is that nobody's doing replication work in undergrad, either, nor does it happen in Master's programs.

I do think it makes sense to stick with the PhD meaning you're a world class expert in some area, but if so then we need to adjust our expectations for what Master's level work means in the sciences. Right now it seems to just represent a hurdle you need to whiz past on your way to the PhD.

[marvin]

A good Bachelors degree will prepare a good student for replicating science, and a good Masters degree will definitely leave a motivated and skilled student with a good advisor a master of his or her specific field.

The problem is that grade inflation means the majority of students will fall short of these goalposts. I agree with your assessment that undergrad degrees represent hurdles, regardless of whether a student is planning to stay in academia or not.

My experience with getting a Masters degree was that it was really tough work that required my full dedication for two years. But I had a world-class scientist as an advisor breathing down my neck the whole time and expecting results, and my experience doesn't seem to match that of many other MScs I know. Some departments seem to be "degree factories"; it takes an unreasonable amount of effort to follow up students in the classical "apprenticeship" tradition described by GP. It would be very strange if every department at every university managed this level of dedication, with student numbers being what they are.

[liviu-]

> a good Masters degree will definitely leave a motivated and skilled student with a good advisor a master of his or her specific field.

I'm having trouble believing this.

In UK, most Masters degrees last 1 year, and there are several degrees considered good such as Imperial's MSc in Machine Learning, Cambridge's MPhil in Machine Learning, Speech and Language Technology, Edinburgh's MSc in Cognitive Science, and others. Is it really possible to become a "master" of machine learning in one year?

Also, at least in Computer Science, most of the Bachelors degrees considered good in UK do not seem to focus at all on replicating science. In fact, for my final year undergraduate project, I was encouraged to find something novel, and at no point my supervisor hinted towards focusing on replicability.

Is it perhaps more common in US?

[marvin]

An MSc is not an MSc. It can commonly vary from 1-3 years, depending on institution. I was thinking of the two-year variety.

Of course, you can define the term "master" to mean pretty much whatever you like. But I'd say that two years of additional, focused study when you are already proficient in your field should be more than enough to have a mastery of the specific skills and knowledge that is at least on a high national level. I'm from Norway, so the US picture is unknown to me.

[Balgair]

Its really dependent on the department, but yeah, the MS is now the HS degree for a lot of places. Especially in Engineering. Good luck trying to get hired with only a BS. Credential creep is real. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_...

[argonaut]

In CS, a Bachelors is enough for most (if not all) jobs.

[ktRolster]

Yeah, the only job I've found where that's not true is something like 'head researcher' or other similar thing (like "data scientist").

[laxatives]

Everyone's doing replication work in undergrad, it just happens to be replication of the "highlights" or most important results. Farmed out the replication of every result to undergrads would, one be a practical/logistical nightmare, and two lead to less reliability in what a degree means. One student could spend their time working on a important result gaining tons of insight and expertise while another could be stuck replicating a task that turned out to be worthless bullshit and have very little to show for it.

[taneq]

> Farmed out the replication of every result to undergrads would, one be a practical/logistical nightmare, and two lead to less reliability in what a degree means.

Actually I think farming out replication to undergrads would be an excellent approach. Your final year undergrad project should be to choose an under-replicated study and repeat it, publishing your findings. Each individual study might be less reliable if done by an undergrad than done by a seasoned researcher, but if each study is repeated by say 5 undergrads and 2+ of them fail to replicate the results, that would be enough to indicate that the study warrants further attention.

> One student could spend their time working on a important result gaining tons of insight and expertise while another could be stuck replicating a task that turned out to be worthless bullshit and have very little to show for it.

The whole point of science is that we don't know what will turn out to be an important result and what will turn out to be worthless bullshit. No study is worth a damn unless it's been replicated but everyone is too busy trying to land-grab the next little piece of unexplored territory to actually validate anything that comes before.

If nothing else, we need to regain the perception that a negative result is just as important as a positive result - to paraphrase Edison, discovering 100 things that don't work is just as important as discovering one thing that does.

[ktRolster]

Mainly because no one is willing to fund it. (Don't look at me, I haven't funded any of it either!)

[Retric]

In an ideal world you might have a point.

However, PHD students on average are very far from world class. And in just about every case they are simply looking at a problem so unimportant that nobody considered it before, and most likely nobody will ever look at again.

It's almost always a waste of time for both the student and everyone else involved.

PS: There are plenty of counter examples where PHD research happened to be valuable, but that's a tiny minority of cases.

[sliverstorm]

You could require both reproduction & novel work for the PhD. Or you could require reproduction for the MS, as a stepping-stone to novel work.

Today the MS & PhD are both supposed to prepare you to do novel research & science. Since reproducibility is a core part of research & science, it would make sense for you to reproduce another study as part of your learning process.

[brownbat]

History isn't a useful guide when our current system is broken, it only reiterates what we've been doing wrong all along. If you really think replication is a waste of time though, then you won't understand why journals are filled with junk science.

We used to think placebo controls and double blinds were a waste of time. One great thing about the history of science your version excludes is that the way we do science is subject to review too, and we continually throw out what doesn't work in favor of methods that do.