Yesterday I received an email from the administrator of the DBA programme, part of which I present here Your examiners have already informed you of their joint recommendation that a different degree be recommended, which would be an award of Master of Research (MRes)....As no corrections to your thesis are required you can submit this thesis as the final version.... We appreciate that this will not be the result that you had hoped for, so understand that you may wish to appeal. Please note that the appeals process does not [my emphasis] allow you to question the academic judgement of the examiners....
I didn't sleep well the night after the exam, and woke up at about 3 am with a letter almost completely formed in my mind, disputing the findings of the examiners that the research "did not meet the research threshold". After having received the above letter, I am now aware that I cannot dispute and appeal this finding. I wonder what could be grounds for appeal; presumably about something that may have affected the examinee on the day of the examination itself. As my 'failing' was in the thesis and not the performance, I can't do anything.
What I do want to complain about is the apparent lack of shared standards and expectancies between the Business School's research committee and the examiners. Probably because I had to start all over again after the first viva examination, the research committee never even saw my revised thesis. I wonder whether they would have declared that the research contribution was insufficient. I also wonder whether not meeting the threshold was because the final result turned out to be something that in retrospect seemed fairly obvious; would the examiners have changed their minds had I found something startling? As I pointed out in the examination, no one knew what my result would be in advance because no one has researched this.
Furthermore, after the first examination, the examiners prepared a document detailing all the failings with the thesis (again, not my performance). Following this, I operated on the basis that making the required changes as well as improving various details of the thesis would be what was required in order to present an acceptable thesis. The research questions as presented in the original thesis were barely changed in the final thesis. The examiners should have pointed out in their document that the research questions were insufficient and would not "meet the research threshold".
All this is (ironically) academic as I am not allowed to question the examiners' judgement. Possibly I will have a conversation with my supervisor next week (he also is going to Italy at some stage) about whether it is worthwhile to appeal the decision.
My parents got married on this date 72 years ago. They almost made it to 50 years together.
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| 39 | Shavu'ot | Jewish holidays, Israel, MIDI, Obituary | |
| 79 | DCI Banks | DCI Banks, Peter Robinson, Ian Rankin, David Lodge | |
| 252 | Network card | Computer | |
| 585 | Robert Fripp likes Joni Mitchell | King Crimson, Joni Mitchell | |
| 714 | Ricotta fritters | Cooking | |
| 1137 | Once more Hebrew on Windows 10 | Unicode | |
| 1392 | It's all in the voicing | Song writing |
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