Top 40 potential questions to be asked in a PhD viva or defense

June 20, 2024 Filed under Blog, Featured, Presentations, Resources, Writing

“Your thesis content” by errantscience.com

Students worry about their vivas. They wonder whether they need to do additional work or read textbooks and articles again. For most students, they don’t need to do all this. My advice has consistently been the following to prepare for your viva: Pick up dissertation a few days before the viva, and read through it to remind yourself of what you did and wrote. Do not fret about misspellings or other minor issues. They are inevitable, and the examiners will not be too taken aback by a few errors here and there. Then, spend time thinking.

What is important is that you think more broadly about the work that you have been doing, how it fits into your discipline, what you might have done differently in hindsight, and where you or the community could go next.

There used to be a blog called Research Essentials hosted by the Open University that had this list of 40 potential viva questions to help candidates prepare for their vivas or defenses. This list of questions is excellent preparation for your viva, and I have shared it with many of my students. This blog has since gone, but others have promoted this list of questions and not attributed it to the original author. Wanting to make this resource more widely available and ensuring the original author gets the credit, I am promoting it here. Please find this list below.

Thank you to the original author Rebecca Ferguson, then a research fellow at The Open University, now a professor.

1. Can you start by summarising your thesis?
2. Now, can you summarise it in one sentence?
3. What is the idea that binds your thesis together?
4. What motivated and inspired you to carry out this research?
5. What are the main issues and debates in this subject area?
6. Which of these does your research address?
7. Why is the problem you have tackled worth tackling?
8. Who has had the strongest influence in the development of your subject area in theory and practice?
9. Which are the three most important papers that relate to your thesis?
10. What published work is closest to yours? How is your work different?
11. What do you know about the history of [insert something relevant]?
12. How does your work relate to [insert something relevant]?
13. What are the most recent major developments in your area?
14. How did your research questions emerge?
15. What were the crucial research decisions you made?
16. Why did you use this research methodology? What did you gain from it?
17. What were the alternatives to this methodology?
18. What would you have gained by using another approach?
19. How did you deal with the ethical implications of your work?
20. How has your view of your research topic changed?
21. How have you evaluated your work?
22. How do you know that your findings are correct?
23. What are the strongest/weakest parts of your work?
24. What would have improved your work?
25. To what extent do your contributions generalise?
26. Who will be most interested in your work?
27. What is the relevance of your work to other researchers?
28. What is the relevance of your work to practitioners?
29. Which aspects of your work do you intend to publish – and where?
30. Summarise your key findings.
31. Which of these findings are the most interesting to you? Why?
32. How do your findings relate to literature in your field?
33. What are the contributions to knowledge of your thesis?
34. How long-term are these contributions?
35. What are the main achievements of your research?
36. What have you learned from the process of doing your PhD?
37. What advice would you give to a research student entering this area?
38. You propose future research. How would you start this?
39. What would be the difficulties?
40. And, finally… What have you done that merits a PhD?