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Identifying, prioritizing and ranking of factors influencing the PhD milestones’ completion delays

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Abstract

The research oriented manpower is instrumental in the growth of economies. Unfortunately, the growth of doctoral research community is not keeping pace with the growing research requirements of India. “Time” to complete the milestones during the doctoral tenure is considered as an important constraint in doctoral degree completion. The present study mainly focus on this ‘time’ factor to complete the milestones in a doctoral life cycle. Secondary data and data collected through a focus group questionnaire survey were utilized. The opinions out of the survey were pairwise compared and ranked utilizing the Thurstone scale. The five doctoral lifecycle milestones identified through focus group discussions were enrolment, registration, synopsis submission, thesis submission, and viva-voce examination. The lack of administrative efficiency, guidance and publication; and delays in coursework completion and report arrival were found to be the most influential factors in delaying the different milestones completion in doctoral research. The findings out of this research can be further utilized to develop different policies towards overcoming these hurdles that can in turn lead to the timely completion of the different doctoral milestones. Moreover, this study can be generalized to other academic organizations as the doctoral journey milestones remain similar in every academic system in the world. Finally, some useful policy insights out of this study are presented.

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(Source Kurup and Arora 2010; OECD 2016)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal, 721 302, India

    Supriya Kumar Ghatak, Balagopal G. Menon & Biswajit Mahanty

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  1. Supriya Kumar Ghatak
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Appendices

Appendix 1

The meaning of the factors under the different PhD milestones and given in the questionnaire is as follows.

  1. 1.

    Lack of Administrative Efficiency (AE): This variable involves the delay in completing the required official formalities that need to be carried out by different administrative sections in the various stages of doctoral journey.

  2. 2.

    Lack of Academic Facility (AF): This variable shows the extend of availability of academic (i.e. computers, printers, books etc.) and research (i.e. labs, instruments, journals etc.) facilities in the academic institution.

  3. 3.

    Delay in Department (DD): This variable is on the delay from the academic department side in carrying out various formalities like conducting seminars, sending the reports for higher authority approval etc.

  4. 4.

    Not fulfilling Required Criteria (FRC): This variable is on fulfilling required criteria like minimum CGPA requirements, submission of educational and work-experience certificate and other credentials set by the institution for enrolling in the doctoral program.

  5. 5.

    Delay in Coursework Completion (CC): Coursework completion is a prerequisite for registering in the doctoral program. A delay in coursework completion will result in delaying the registration seminar.

  6. 6.

    Lack of Guidance (LG): This variable signals the extend of unavailability of the research supervisors to the doctoral scholars.

  7. 7.

    Lack of Publication (PB): The minimum number of research publications is a prerequisite in giving synopsis seminar and thesis submission in majority of the academic institutions in India. Hence the lack in required number of publications will delay the synopsis and thesis submission.

  8. 8.

    Thesis Report Arrival Delay (RAD): This is the delay in receiving back the evaluated thesis from external and internal thesis examiners. The delay in report arrival results in the delay in doctoral viva-voce examination.

Appendix 2

See Table

Table 6 Summary table for questionnaire responses
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6.

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Ghatak, S.K., Menon, B.G. & Mahanty, B. Identifying, prioritizing and ranking of factors influencing the PhD milestones’ completion delays. Qual Quant 55, 1457–1476 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-020-01068-5

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