Examiners ‘assessment criteria in dissertations and the learning outcomes of doctoral education

Swedish dissertations are public, followed by closedassessment committee meetings that only report pass-failvotes. 166 external examiners from 72 doctoral dissertationswere therefore anonymously surveyed for their views on passfail norms, scientific standard of theses and candidates and theacademic independence of the assessed candidate. They werealso asked to relate their assessment to the national learningoutcomes for the PhD degree.Scientific standard and academic independence were withfew exceptions considered sufficiently strong to very strong.However, pass-fail norm statements varied strongly in qualityfrom 1) qualitative demands on student performance, 2)demands on research output, 3) tautological statements, to 4)expectations of emotional responses among the assessors. Thisis much in line with Lovitts (2007) who investigated examinersnorms in a range of academic disciplines. The paper raises thediscussion whether examiners statements reflect how they thinkduring dissertations, or, if dissertation assessment includes tacitnorms hard to explicitly describe. The study further reveals avariation in ‘visibility’ of the various required national learningoutcomes in the dissertation assessment meetings. Thisunderlines the need for an improved PhD assessment processwhere some PhD competencies are assessed separate from thedissertation