Planning For Your Oral Defense

Abstract

The oral defence is an opportunity for a doctoral candidate to defend his or her dissertation. This paper attempts to develop an insight into the preparations that a doctoral candidate needs to make before he or she is going to defend the dissertation. The advantage of oral preparation is that it promotes confidence among the students who are going to defend their work. The paper further looks at the defence procedure involved when an oral examination is conducted. A number of institutions have rules governing the conduct of the examination. This is followed by a discussion of the questioning criteria for oral examinations. A variety of questions both general and specific could be asked.