Chinese PhD Dissertations: Many Citations, Little Innovation

Editor’s note: This translated and edited article presents the viewpoints of Chinese educators and PhD candidates on the “lack of innovation” in Chinese PhD dissertations (and one could say, the Chinese education system in general). It illustrates that this problem is not simply caused by lazy students or ineffective professors, but is a result of weaknesses in the education system, which only recently began being addressed.

Ask a university undergraduate "how do you cook Braised Pork?" and they will tell you to "take the pork and fry it in a pot". Ask the same question to a Masters student and they will give you a list of the ingredients involved in making the dish and detailed instructions for its preparation. Ask a PhD student, and they will hand you a books-worth of pages in response, where the first chapter is titled “How does one raise pigs”. In Chinese universities this is a popular joke, as it indirectly mocks the value of the typical Chinese PhD dissertation: it is too long, loaded down with trivial details, and has little academic merit. If you have read a Chinese PhD dissertation in recent years, regardless of academic discipline, you probably noticed that it was, perhaps unnecessarily, long (200+ pages). Recently, an academic named Gao Bolong wrote "An Open Letter to Universities, Professors, and Ph.D. Students Nationwide" in which he raised this point: "In my recent reading PhD dissertations, the number of pages seems to be increasing...ten years ago the average was less than 100 pages, now most are over 200 pages. Does a thick dissertation automatically make you a world-class scholar?"

“The longer it is, the better”

One recent PhD graduate (in Polymer Chemistry), Zhou Weihua, distinctly remembers when he finally completed his thesis last year—the vast amount of time he spent in the lab conducting experiments, organizing the data, citing everything—when his thesis was done (all 200 pages of it), it was longer than many academic books! Although there was no teacher-imposed minimum length, Zhou Weihua, along with most students believe that for a PhD dissertation, "the longer it is, the better".

Requirements of different disciplines vary, as do university and departmental requirements for PhD dissertations: generally speaking, in China, the word count for a humanities dissertation is “no less than 100,000 words”, while science dissertation is  “no less than 30,000 words”, and an engineering dissertation is “no less than 50,000 words”. One interviewed academic does not think the word count/page count for PhD dissertations should be so rigid. Although he was also quick to point out that when he encounters a dissertation that seems “a bit too thin”, he pays special attention to that candidate, to judge whether the candidate is concise, or simply lazy. "A thin PhD dissertation causes people to think that the candidate is unqualified, or that they didn’t spend enough time preparing".

In response, students, wishing to air on the side of caution, will write overly long dissertations. One recent graduate, Dr. Wu (pseudonym) said, that in order to meet the “expected” word count, PhD candidates will cushion their dissertation content with experiment data and a huge number of citations, doing everything possible to make their paper look "rich and meaningful".

Does quantity real equal quality?

According to professors, one particularly annoying phenomenon in recent years has been the increasing length and complexity of the dissertation’s introduction, referred to as making a dissertation “top heavy”, or “front-loading” it. It is now quite common for a dissertation to have a 3-4 page long introduction, full of flowery prose and brimming with citations. After the reader gets through this section, they often have little idea of what the actually thesis is about.  As was noted above, PhD candidates, in the process of making their dissertations “rich and meaningful” with other information, are neglecting to clearly present and explain a central theme, which, many feel is entirely counterproductive.

Professor Gao Bolong, after browsing through some of what are considered the most important writings of the last hundred years or so, was surprised to find that, generally, dissertation introductions were very limited, as were citations. Einstein's theory of relativity for example, where he proposed the relationship between mass and energy, was three pages long and contained one reference! The essay in which James D. Watson's proposed the DNA double helix structure was one page long! Both of these papers were game changing works, yet they are shorter than current introductions. But not everyone agrees with Gao Bolong’s comparison. Professor Bie Dunrong believes that the PhD dissertations need to have some sort of fixed length, as it does say something about its quality. A PhD dissertation is not just presenting an academic opinion; there are other requirements necessary, such as proving the grounds of the argument, incorporating summaries of other related texts, and explaining the research procedure. “These are all necessary parts of a dissertation, and to properly present them, a certain amount of space is needed.”

But while PhD dissertations are getting longer, the problem of candidates' lacking innovation is as widely criticized as ever. In a large-scale survey meant to measure the quality of China's doctoral students, professors of these students were asked to rate their "innovation". The results: 29.7% were rated as having a high level of innovation; 62.7% were “ordinary”, and 7.6% were lacking. Experts are quick to point out that a lack of originality and innovation are the biggest differences between Chinese PhD dissertations PhD dissertations from the world’s top universities.

Shifting focus from "word count" to "innovativeness"

When Dr. Wang Houzhen graduated, he remembered that his PhD dissertation, compared with other students' was bit "shabby". Many students PhD dissertations were as thick as a brick, but his, weighing in at only 70 pages was so thin that when it came time to bind it into a book, there was not enough space on the spine to print its name. After talking with his classmates, he realized that it wasn’t that they were all superior students, they just believed that writing a thick dissertation, improved their chances of doing getting a good mark. Surprisingly, after his thesis defense, Wang Houzhen's "thin" PhD dissertation was considered by many to be clearer thinking, and more innovative than most of the other "bricks".

A current doctoral candidate, who still has two years left until graduation, said his teachers are already requiring him to pay close attention to the quality of his own PhD dissertation, saying: "from the first outline to the final version, there must be a clear plan." Students are feeling a lot of pressure, but the pressure no longer comes from "word count" woes, as much as from the expectations that their research will be innovative and their dissertation will clearly present their own ideas. “Innovation” requirements are continuing to increase, and at the same time, universities have loosened on their word count requirements, instead gradually shifting the focus to the quality of the research content and its practical use. Using a “blind evaluation” system for PhD dissertations is becoming more common, and the new system-wide focus on “innovation” over “word count” seems to be causing the quality of Chinese PhD dissertations to naturally improve.
 

Source: ifeng
 

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