The outcome of the PhD defense

If you defended your thesis before final submission, what was the outcome of your defense? Could you comment on where (which country) you defended? Thanks! Please RT

— Dr Eva Lantsoght (@evalantsoght) November 26, 2019

I recently ran a poll to find out what the outcome of the PhD defense is – for those who defend before submitting the final version of the thesis. As I am currenlty working on the topic of the PhD defense and defense format, my thought would be that asking this question to a more international audience would give relatively more “minor corrections” than the data available for the UK only – since the UK-style viva has the reputation of being the most critical type of defense. It turns out that this is just a reputation – I got international responses and the numbers are in line with those from the UK (and even a bit more towards hasher grading: my poll gives 8% major corrections and 5% who failed their defense, whereas the results from the UK by Nathan Ryder gives less than 7% major corrections).

One should take my results with a grain of salt though – this was a Twitter poll, so technically anybody could respond, and
I received only 172 responses (as compared to the 302 responses in the survey for the viva in the UK).

You can find the full discussion of the poll here: