Long Tran-Thanh – 2021-07-14 22:11:14
[On the minimum requirements for the PhD degrees in Vietnam] – Apologies for writing this post in English (I lack some relevant Vietnamese technical words so I felt writing in English would be more informative and accurate).
I have been following the intense discussions about the new govt. requirements for receiving a PhD degree in Vietnam in this group, and while there have been many interesting arguments, I feel that there’s lack of supporting evidences for each of your arguments.
In order to fill this gap, I have asked some of my former PhD students/postdocs/collaborators/friends from across the world (but mainly from developing countries similar to Vietnam) about the PhD programmes and its requirements in their home countries. As many of them are now holding senior positions in these countries, I believe they have a good view about their own programmes.
The goal of this is to investigate what other countries use in order to improve their scientific research productivity, and whether it’s successful or not. In addition, I think these answers may also provide some interesting insights for Vietnam as well.
Below I attach the answers from my contacts. I try to keep their responses in their original version, and only edit some minor stylistic typos if necessary.
**Overall summary (aka TL;DR):**
-It seems that **most country above allow some degree of diversity across different universities and science fields**. That is, **they do not use the same minimum requirement system for everyone**.
-Some also use Scopus/JCR to measure quality. But again, *t***his is not a one-size-fits-all system across all the sciences and universities.**
-In many countries* ***top universities have much stronger requirements.** Therefore the quality there seems to be very good. However, it’s a common problem that the number of high quality PhD degrees is significantly lower, and it’s hard to tell for sure where the students can expect this high quality (as it strongly depend on the particular supervisors’ own standards). Thus, many top students decide to go abroad to study instead.
-Bangladesh seems to have similar issues, compared to Vietnam (PhD degree as status symbol, students are not paid, low quality research + misconducts, etc). **Therefore it’s worth using Bangladesh as a negative example and try to avoid its mistakes in Vietnam.**
-My personal opinion is that perhaps we can choose some of the good practices from these countries, and apply to Vietnam. For example, it seems that **PhD studentships would be very useful** to help students focusing on research. Also, a **diversified quality requirement system across universities and science fields would also be more practical**. Finally **having some prioritised top universities (like in India) would also help the govt to wisely allocate the limited resources**.
-Note that this is not the complete list. I am still waiting for responses from Chile, Brazil, and Sri Lanka. Will keep you updated as soon as I get the details from these countries.
**Bangladesh:**
*1.What are the official quantitative requirements to pass a PhD in Bangladesh (e.g., number of publications, is it a point based system, etc).*
-As you know that we were colonised by the British till 1947. To date, our overall education systems mostly follow the UK style in theory. However, as you said, the practice makes the difference.
-Publication requirements: **It differs from one university to the next**. The majority of them propose that a PhD student publish in one to three Scopus-indexed journals. The problem is that inside this so-called “Scopus indexed” database, there are good and terrible publications.
In addition, throughout the first two years of PhD studies, a student must take four theory courses.
*2. Are there any official qualitative requirements, such as the ranking of the venue of the publication? If yes, what are the expected percentages of top quality publications?*
– I would say the **quality completely depends on the supervisor**. I have seen both good and bad examples. Moreover, since most of the PhD is not funded, not even TA, a student cannot concentrate on their research throughout their time.
*3. The format of the PhD exam.*
Typically, the UK format is used + four theoretical courses are required + a formal presentation style thesis defence is required.
*4. What are the typical misconduct cases that you are aware of ? Things like in order to meet the number of publications, people tend to submit to low quality/predatory journals etc…*
– Yes, publishing low-quality/predatory journals has long been a regular practice. However, the recent inclusion of a “Scopus index” criteria may help to exclude predatory ones, albeit it is unclear whether it can guarantee quality.
– Another issue is that government personnel, especially senior military and police officers, desire to pursue a PhD. They believe it will elevate their social standing. They do this while working full-time at their jobs in a few cases. You can imagine how impressive their research findings could be. Also, they pick their supervisor/university in a way that suits them (not in a good way).
*5. What is your own opinion about the Phd exam/degree system in Bangladesh?*
– In my opinion, our universities are good at producing world-class bachelor graduates. On the other hand, we don’t have that amount of funding for research. Apart from a few exceptions, and a few disciplines (e.g. agriculture), the PhD studies are not up to the mark in Bangladesh.
**India (top universities)**: – the lower ranking universities are similar to the situation in Bangladesh, hence here I only present the case of top Indian universities
*1.What are the official quantitative requirements to pass a PhD in India (e.g., number of publications, is it a point based system, etc).*
– PhD students need to complete some course work during their first year of a PhD program (some minimum CGPA requirement is also there). Typically the number of courses may vary from 3-6 depending on the background of the student (B.Tech / M.Tech). There is a comprehensive exam (a panel with faculty members from similar domains within the institute is formed) after the 2nd year of PhD. This exam is quite critical and needs dedicated preparation. It has both a research presentation and technical interview (based on courses taken). The progress in PhD is often evaluated by the number of publications (more qualitative in nature). Once the progress is sufficient (according to the supervisor and committee members), an institute level research presentation is given by the student. **Then the thesis is submitted and it is sent to 2 independent experts – within India but outside of the institute and the other one is from outside India**. It may take around 3-5 months for reviews to come. Based on the reviews, the thesis needs to be resubmitted with major / minor / no modification. Finally, a defence presentation happens as the last step of PhD. The average length of PhD (in CS) is roughly 5-5.5 years.
*2. Are there any official qualitative requirements, such as the ranking of the venue of the publication? If yes, what are the expected percentages of top quality publications?*
-It is expected to publish in top tier conferences (for example, in Computer Science it is expected to publish at A* / A according to https://www.core.edu.au/conference-portal). But the exact requirements depend on the supervisor / department. I personally know PhD graduates with 2 papers and also with 5+ A* papers as a lead author.
*3. The format of the PhD exam.*
-See 1.
*4. What are the typical misconduct cases that you are aware of ? Things like in order to meet the number of publications, ppl tend to submit to low quality/predatory journals etc…*
-I have not seen many of those misconduct / cheating stories for PhD in top universities. Rather, there are examples when students joined as PhD students and then left the department with a masters degree as the research progress was not sufficient over the time.
*5. What is your own opinion about the Phd exam/degree system in India?*
-I think top institutes in India are improving over time in terms of the quality of PhD students / research. But the number of PhD graduates is still very small compared to other renowned universities in the world. We sometimes lack effective collaboration across labs / departments in Indian institutes. For example, many of the publications have 2-3 authors including a PhD student and her/his supervisor. This also limits the total number of publications of a PhD student. The individual research groups are also quite small. Often a research lab has only 1-2 PhD students and 3-4 masters students under a supervisor.
– About other tier 2/3 universities in India, again the quality varies a lot depending on the supervisor or the particular lab. But often the students try to meet the number of publications by submitting papers to low quality conferences / journals. There are also factors such as biasedness of faculty members to some of the students compared to others and unfair evaluation.
**Mexico:**
Let me give you a little context. In Mexico there are private and public universities (similar to the USA). In my experience, very few private universities do research, therefore, have very few (in some cases none) high quality PhDs. So in my answer, I will focus on public universities that are subject of a 3 yearly evaluation by the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) to belong to what we called “National Program of Quality Postgrads” (PNPC, https://www.conacyt.mx/Programa-Nacional-de-Posgrados-de-Calidad.html). This program includes Masters and PhDs and if a degree fulfills all the requirements it is included on this list. This means more resources for researchers, equipment and automatic scholarship for students who are accepted to these programs. This guarantees the quality of applicants, students, researchers and PhD programs. My answers will be based on these types of programs.
*1.What are the official quantitative requirements to pass a PhD in Mexico (e.g., number of publications, is it a point based system, etc).*
-First, to get a research topic accepted and later pass all the evaluations that are every 6 months. These evaluations are made by the program committee formed by PhDs that have the minimum of SNI 1 (a ranking for researchers that goes from candidate, 1, 2 ,3 and Emerit). On these evaluations the abilities to present, to write, the number of publications and progress on the research is checked.
-Besides there are a number of hard requirements: (1) A research visit of a minimum of 3 months. In some programs can be national and in others must be international. (2) Pass TOEFL with a minimum of 500 points. In some programs the thesis must be written in English. (3) 2 journal publications ranked on JCR as first author about the main contributions of the thesis. One must be published and the other one accepted for students to request their viva. (4) Have less than 10% of matches of the thesis document on a detection plagiarism tool.
-About the minimum quantitative requirements, they are **1 journal JCR indexed journal accepted and one 1 journal JCR indexed journal submitted to ask for viva**, with the intention that both will be published when you get your degree. This is for PhDs in Science related fields (Computer Science, Math, Physics, etc) and Engineering (Computing, Electronics, Robotics, etc) related fields. Other fields have different requirements which is more suitable to their respective fields.
*2. Are there any official qualitative requirements, such as the ranking of the venue of the publication? If yes, what are the expected percentages of top quality publications?*
-The majority of the programs require 2 indexed journal publications, usually on JCR. Some programs asked for the quartile saying it should be between 1 to 2.
*3. The format of the PhD exam.*
-There is a pre-viva with the revision committee where corrections are expected, usually 6 months before the deadline for obtaining the degree. Then, there is a viva very similar to the one we had in the UK. What it changes is that in some universities are closed doors vivas and in others are open doors vivas. In both, students have to literally defend his/her ideas in front of the committee.
*4. What are the typical misconduct cases that you are aware of? Things like in order to meet the number of publications, people tend to submit to low quality/predatory journals etc…*
-The first one is plagiarism, that is why now most programs use tools to prevent that on the thesis document but also on papers. Most local high quality journals and conferences do that now too.
-In public universities resources to publish papers are not given so it is very difficult to publish in predatory journals. What sometimes you see is that money from grants is used for that. As a consequence, some journals are banned and removed from evaluations.The quality of research is heavily based on publications that is why the higher quality programs asked for publications on JCR journals with high quartiles.
*5. What is your own opinion about the Phd exam/degree system in Mexico?*
-I think the high quality ones are comparable to any PhD abroad. However, there are very few, with not a lot of resources and very long (PhDs programs here are 5 years!) Also, you will see very few people doing research in relatively new topics. That is where PhDs abroad are still very important as well as collaboration. Usually, these programs have a large number of researchers who did PhDs abroad and still have connections with their university, that is why you see similarities in requirements and viva format. When you are a student, unfortunately it is very difficult to know which ones are high quality ones which might lead to good students to go abroad or get fooled by a not so good PhD.
-Currently, there are a lot of changes happening on the support to research given by the government. Unfortunately our current government is anti science and it has been reducing the number of scholarships, grants and making requirements far from science and close to engineering. That might change in the long term what I describe here.
Shared link: https://www.core.edu.au/conference-portal
Statistics:
Likes: 114, Shares: 12, Comments: 87
Like Reactions: 110, Haha Reactions: 0, Wow Reactions: 0, Love Reactions: 4, Sad Reactions: 0, Angry Reactions: 0