Are dissertations written by DL students inferior to those by B&M students?

Here we go again! A couple of members on this board, both of whom I respect, are suggesting that dissertations generated by doctoral students at the 100% online schools are usually inferior to the dissertations written by doctoral students at traditional schools.

I thought that their point was interesting and wanted to present it to the DI community to get more comments. They are suggesting that dissertations at online only schools are often overseen by poorly paid adjunct instructors who only get paid if the dissertation passes. Thus there is the motivation to pass substandard dissertations in order for the adjuncts to be paid and move on to the next paying gig.

What are your thoughts on this subject? (I hope you don't mind another poll; it's interesting to see opinions quantified into one place)

 

Here is my thought. This is speaking for NCU only as that is the only school I have first hand experience with.
NCU employs all adjuncts to work with the students through the dissertation phase until the end.
The adjuncts get paid a few hundred bucks per student.
The adjuncts provide feedback before the paper goes to school reviewer.
When the chair/committee all approve the paper it goes to the school reviewer.
The school reviewer is a full time paid employee with (possibly) stronger academic credentials then the adjuncts.
The school reviewer seems to hold the paper to a higher standard therefore the student gets somewhat screwed if the chair/committee did not properly prepare them for the school review with quality feedback.
The end result - larger failure rates as the paper can not get past the school reviewer but quality papers in the end.

 

So what you are saying is though there are adjuncts who advise, the final decision is often left for a more qualified individual. This might be a bit unfair to the students who get less than stellar advice from the adjuncts, but the end result should be a quality product. Hopefully, nothing less would pass the final approval.

 

I don't know how any one could make the claim that they are substandard because there is no evidence to support the claim.
Case closed.

 

It really makes it difficult. As a matter of fact, it is almost the luck of the draw when getting a good chair to prepare you. I was lucky since my chair had to publish as part of his masters degree from a traditional school. Also, every final class for his masters required a research paper with all the components, or similar ones, of a dissertation. When it came to his dissertation from NCU, we was able to knock out chapters 4 and 5 in month because he had so much experience with it.

His philosophy was to do as much of the difficult work up front so the end comes easier. He made me rewrite the Concept Paper twelve times until he would accept it. One of my other committee members feedback consisted of the comments generated by WritePoint – an APA checking software. How is that for value?

While to process is not easy, the committee members you have make all the difference because in the end someone else give you that Go/No Go.

 

One of my reasons for starting this thread is exactly that; there is no data. It would make an interesting article and one that would likely be interesting to publishers. The problem is in how one might quantify the quality of a dissertation. Citations would not work.

 

The researcher would assemble a set of preselected dissertations. Some of these would be from B&M schools, some from online schools. The researcher would then assemble a group of reviewers, all with appropriate credentials. They would review all of the dissertations and rate them on a scale of acceptability. Of course, they would never know who wrote them or which school was involved. It's a pretty standard (and accepted) measure in qualitative research methods - inter-rater smellability, or something like that. That's how you'd do it.
***This is not my original idea. Dr. Bear has been talking about this for years.

 

Since your brought up the subject about dissertation. What is matter about dissertation? Because I see some has more than 400 pages, and some less than 150 pages and some even less than 100 pages. So, Is it quality or quantity matter?

 

I recently read a dissertation from University of Florida that was only 130 pages including the lit review. The sample size was quite small too. I can't understand how something like this passed committee.

 

How about Nobel Laureate, Dr. John Nash’s dissertation Non-Cooperative Games:

1. Only two bibliography references, e.g., true “pioneering”
2. Twenty-seven pages in length

John Nash's Ph.D. Thesis

 

:evil: Wow - 130 pages. That is a lot. Mine was only 12 pages. They told me if the check cleared that would be fine. If I could have afforded more I would only have had to turn in 9 pages. :evil:

 

Why am I going to all of this trouble? Could I have the name of those people? :dunce:

 

Kizmet: "***This is not my original idea. Dr. Bear has been talking about this for years."

And it would be so extremely easy to do. For starters, pluck five dissertations in a given field randomly off the shelf at Northcentral and the University of Oklahoma, remove the identifying marks, shuffle them up, and give them to three experienced faculty at a neutral third school to be graded or rated or ranked. It would cost almost nothing, and take a week or two, and we'd have some really interesting preliminary data. Later: more schools, more subjects.

 

Fascinating. I didn't know this. There is an urban legend or perhaps an urban truth, I don't know which, about someone who invented a major new drug, and whose dissertation consisted, in its entirety, of four words: "U.S. Patent [such-and-such]."

(I think I heard the story about Albert Schatz and streptomycin, but I really don't know.)

 

Who was John Nash?

 

A Beautiful Mind (2001) - IMDb

"Biopic of the famed mathematician John Nash and his lifelong struggles with his mental health. Nash enrolled as a graduate student at Princeton in 1948 and almost immediately stood out as an odd duck. He devoted himself to finding something unique, a mathematical theorem that would be completely original. He kept to himself for the most part and while he went out for drinks with other students, he spends a lot of time with his roommate, Charles, who eventually becomes his best friend. John is soon a professor at MIT where he meets and eventually married a graduate student, Alicia. Over time however John begins to lose his grip on reality, eventually being institutionalized diagnosed with schizophrenia. As the depths of his imaginary world are revealed, Nash withdraws from society and it's not until the 1970s that he makes his first foray back into the world of academics, gradually returning to research and teaching. In 1994, John Nash was awarded the Nobel prize in Economics."

 

John Forbes Nash, Jr. (Nobel prize in economics, 1994):

John Forbes Nash, Jr. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The unauthorized New York Times bestseller biography A Beautiful Mind was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for biography, was written by Sylvia Nasar (1998) which later inspired the making of Ron Howard's 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe.

A Beautiful Mind (2001) - IMDb

Nash’s 27-page dissertation: http://www.princeton.edu/mudd/news/faq/topics/Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf

Today, Nash serves in the department of mathematics at Princeton. His Princeton webpage: Home Page of John F. Nash, Jr.

 

I love that one of John Nash's letters of recommendation to Princeton, written by one of his professors at Carnegie Melon simply said "This man is a genius." I'm not sure that would fly with AdComms today.