I'm currently a PhD candidate, and our program includes separate written and oral qualifying exams during the first year or two, and a public defense of the dissertation at the end. I thought some minor variation of this was nearly universal.
It's also my observation, by the way, that the public dissertation defense (and even the written dissertation itself) is less of a big deal than outsiders tend to think. What matters is doing the research that the advisor / committee wants, and working on some number of papers that get accepted into workshops / conferences / journals (depending on the field). Everything else seems to be kind of a check-the-box formality. By the time the committee agrees that someone has done enough to defend, it's pretty much a done deal.
My particular school and department is interesting because it doesn't have any hard requirement for publications, and it aims to have students finish a PhD in about three years of full-time work (assuming one enters the program with a relevant master's degree already in-hand). There has been some tension between the younger assistant professors (who are still fighting for tenure) and the older full professors (who got tenure in, say, the 1990s). In practice, the assistant professors expect to see their students publish (with the professors as co-authors, of course) and would strongly prefer to see a dissertation comprised of three papers stapled together, regardless of the what the school and department officially says. The full professors, on the other hand, seem to prefer something more like a monograph that is of "publishable" quality, maybe to be submitted somewhere after graduation. They argue that the assistant professors should be able to judge quality work for themselves instead of outsourcing it to anonymous reviewers. Clearly, there are different incentives at play.
We would need to increase the amount of teaching staff by well over 10x to do this. The costs would be astronomical.
> The costs would be astronomical.
Those 200 students have paid the college $549,600 for your class.
The costs are already astronomical.
Is it so unreasonable for some of that money to be spent on providing education?
The students paid me nothing. The university provides some TAs, that's it. But even if they gave me all of that money in cash to spend, this would be totally impossible.
I'm supposed to grade a student based on 1 conversation? Do you know how grading and teaching work? Can you imagine the complains that would come out of this process? How unfair it is to say that you have one 15 minute shot at a grade?
But fine, even if we say that I can grade someone based on 1 conversation. What am I supposed to ask during this 15 minute conversation? Because if I ask the every student the same thing, they'll just share the questions and we're back to being useless.
So now I need to prep unique questions for 200 people? Reading their background materials, projects, test results, and then thinking of questions? I need to do that and review it all before every session.
Even with a team of TAs this would be impossible.
But even if I do all of this. I spend hours per student to figure out what they did and know. I ask unique questions for 15 minutes so that we can talk without information leakage mattering. You know what the outcome will be? Everyone will complain that my questions to them were harder than those that I asked others. And we'll be in office hours with 200 people for weeks on end sorting this out and dealing with all the paperwork for the complaints.
This is just the beginning of the disaster that this idea would be.
It's easy to sit in the peanut gallery and say "Oh, wow, why didn't my arm surgery take 10 minutes, they just screwed two bones together right?" until you actually need to do the thing and you notice that it's far more complex than you thought.
> The students paid me nothing.
Well gee, there I was thinking they were paying $27,480 per year for "tuition"
Later, people learned that and started to buy diploma: faster, cheaper, no risk of failing the final exam.
We all know they'll just exploit grad students rather than hire real teachers.
My office mate in engineering was trying to get funding for a start-up. I was trying to get a consulting business off the ground. Neither of us achieved those things, but whatever. He got a teaching gig at the community college, which is unionized and actually a pretty good situation. I found a regular day job through his network.
A friend of mine had an adjunct gig in the humanities, and used his off-time to learn how to code.
A lot of academic spouses get adjunct gigs, especially if they want to balance part time work with child care.
A lot of adjuncts sit around in precarious financial situations, developing serious mental health issues, and drinking problems because the system taught them that this is a form of success.
Going to industry and making money? That's failure. That's an "alternate career". Not scraping by in a system that couldn't care less about you. That's success.
It's pretty vile. I've never had a student become an adjunct. It would be a personal failure that I haven't given them the tools to thrive.
Where do you get this from? The people I know with pure research positions get paid basically the same (after correcting for 'rank' and seniority) as those who split their time between research and teaching.
The top earning professors in the nation in mathematics are all very good research mathematicians
That threat may be enough to dissuade students from cheating with AI.
Countries have no problem spending astronomical amounts on old people. If the country wants productive young people, the country will find a way.
Why bother training and educating the young people who are already here when you can just import them from poorer countries?
But in principle this is not a problem for me, I already spend at least this much time grading papers, and an oral exam would be much more pleasant. The real problems will come up when (1) students are forced to schedule these 15-minute slots, and (2) they complain about the lack of time and non-objective grading rubric.
Two decades ago, when I was in engineering school, grades were 90% based on in-person, proctored, handwritten exams. So assignments had enough weight to be worth completing, but little enough that if someone cheated, it didn't really matter as the exam was the deciding factor.
> Return to the old "viva voce" exam? Still used for PhDs. But that doesn't scale at all.
What? Sure it does. Every extra full-time student at Central Methodist University (from the article) means an extra $27,480 per year in tuition.
It's absolutely, entirely scalable to provide a student taking ten courses with a 15-minute conversation with a professor per class when that student is paying twenty-seven thousand dollars.