[hagy]

When I defended my PhD in 2013 at Georgia Tech Chemistry, the first half was the public defense, including Q&A. The second half was closed-door, consisting of just the committee and the PhD student. This second half was known to be more combative and it was common for the committee to request additional work. It was very rare for any one to flat out fail, since the student’s advisor wouldn’t allow them to defend until they had sufficient novel research.

In my program, many of us would strategize for the 30-60 minutes of the closed door grilling. We sought to give our committee members obvious things to criticize with the PhD student having prepared arguments to defend against these criticisms. E.g., I ashamedly included quite a few spelling and grammar errors in the first few pages of the summary section of the thesis (the only part anyone would actually read) and we spent at least 15 minutes on my horrible writing ability.

In general, the main outcome of the closed door portion of the defense was requests for additional work. It was common for committee members to suggest additional things that could “improve” the thesis work. Not surprisingly, many of these suggestions involved applying a committee member's methods, even if not plausibly applicable, so that one would publish another paper citing the committee member’s work. Some students, including myself, would have a job lined up before the defense to timebox the amount of additional work that could be requested.

[blandvegetables]

hahaha I had a PhD defence in 2018 in the UK. Criticisms included:

"I don't trust your maths" "I don't feel this analysis is right, but I can't describe in what way" "you are clearly not very knowledgeable" and many other similar things.

Asking me a question and then before I can open my mouth answering it yourself, and then insulting me for not answering it was the start of the viva defence and it set the tone for the rest.

I was also heavily criticised for not having cited a paper that came out in-between submitting my thesis and the defence, despite this being literally impossible to have done so, and, despite having already had gotten a job in that time, was given limited time to do additional experiments, write whole new chapters, new code, do new experiments, etc. Ended up adding 90 pages of material to the thesis.

In the end I had to quit the job I had just got, because It would have been impossible to not fail my PhD program and keep the job.

Afterword's, in behind closed doors discussions it was revealed that one guy had pushed for almost all of the required extra work deliberately to try to make me fail, because I had done something he could not.

[hnfong]

These people should be getting treatment at least on par with what they got with #metoo, why is that not the case?

I mean, personally, I don't really care about reputation of academia, but given that you described a horrible story where somebody basically tried to ruin your career, and given that you decided not to name specific people or institutions, it seems that the whole (UK) academia will have to take the reputation hit for the alleged scandal.

[blandvegetables]

Given that they succeeded in completing the poisoning of my opinion of academia and scientific research there is no career there at all. I say complete because PhDs can feel unpleasant, but that's mostly a result of high stress, difficult work, no security, and complete lack of a social life and interaction with other people for 4 years, rather than science itself but it does set an emotional impression of what research is like that is somewhat difficult to overcome.

[dwheeler]

I defended my PhD in 2009 at George Mason University (GMU). It had two halves, but they were reversed: the first half was private, the second half was public. I think that's a better system.

In the first half I was privately grilled by my committee. They wouldn't let the dissertation go to a public defense until they'd satisfied themselves that it was fine.

As far as I can tell the public defenses usually look ceremonial at GMU (at least in its engineering department), but they aren't actually ceremonial. Anyone from the public can ask questions at a public defense, so they aren't ceremonial. However, the goal of the (first) private half was to try to make sure that the defender is ready for arbitrary questions (because he understands the material). So it's unusual for the public to ask questions that the defender isn't able to answer. I got some questions I hadn't heard before in my public defense, but I was able to handle them.

You can see my public defense here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYH18NpsRu8