THE LONG-WAITED DECISION

1. Accepted as it is, NO Correction
2. Accepted with major Corrections
3. Accepted with minor Corrections
4. Re-viva in one year
5. Lower than the status of PhD (Award of Lower Degree)
6. Rejected/not worthy of PhD. It is worth mentioning that if you give a stylish, creative and scholarly presentation, except for No.1, all five remarks above can be reversed.

   Let’s examine what the decisions of the examiners mean:

   ACCEPTED WITHOUT ANY CORRECTION

   Congratulations, you have passed with distinction. You don’t have to make any correction. It means you have passed with a First-class Honors PhD degree. It is a significant and rare achievement. Your future job application has a good chance of success.

   ACCEPTED WITH MINOR CORRECTIONS

   When you pass your viva with minor corrections, you must do minor adjustments in your thesis such as correction of spellings and grammatical mistakes, readjustment of tables or graphs or repositioning of some texts. This is the most common result that most PhD students get. You are given one month to three months to complete. Check with your internal examiner and then submit the corrected thesis.

   ACCEPTED WITH MAJOR CORRECTIONS

   It means you must do some significant changes to your thesis. You may be asked to restate your problem, research questions, methodology and rewrite your results if they are not clear. At the end of the viva, your examiners will give you a report of the changes you need to make. You are given 3 to 6 months or even a year to make the corrections before re-submitting the corrected thesis to your internal examiner. After your internal examiner approves your corrections, you will re-submit the corrected thesis to your institution.

   ACCEPTED WITH MAJOR CORRECTIONS AND RE- VIVA
   This is very painful. You need to make substantial changes to your thesis and possibly rewrite the whole thing. You may need to make changes to the core of your thesis such as your results, data collection method, problem statement, objectives, and concept. A fresh viva is then called with the same examiners. It may take more than a year to make the significant changes to your thesis. Sometimes, you may be asked by the examiners to change the whole idea and even your topic.

   ACCEPTED, BUT WITH AWARD OF LOWER DEGREE

   In this situation, the candidate has performed badly and has made no significant contribution to the existing knowledge. The topic is not current and the problem is not significant. The examiners, at least most of them, are of the view that this piece of work is not worthy of a PhD degree and therefore, should be downgraded to a degree lower than a doctorate (PhD), e.g. to that of Master of Philosophy (MPhil or Ph.M.).

   REJECTED/DISMISSED

   The examiners are of the view that the candidate has not performed to the mark and therefore the thesis is not acceptable. The candidate has failed and has no right of resubmission. Fortunately, this very rarely happens.