research for several years, both you and your supervisors will
easily understand many research decisions and issues which
strangers to the work will find difficult. Examiners also often
worry about doing their duty by the profession in the right way,
acting as proper guardians of the ‘pool’ of accepted original
research. In a vague, background way they may be concerned
that they could make a mistake for which they might later be
held responsible – such as not identifying plagiarism or the use
of fraudulent data, or accepting as valid some argument or
proof which later inspection somehow establishes as spurious.
They may be concerned about what happens next in your
career, and whether granting you a doctorate will lead to
adverse consequences – such as your getting a job teaching
error-laden materials to new generations of students. In the
classical model PhD, the examiners may worry that your thesis
work is too narrow or too specialized a preparation to enter the
discipline, and doubt that you have enough grip on wider pro-
fessional debates to function effectively in teaching students or
researching other topics. Normally the fact that you have been
supervised at a decent university by a fellow professional of
accepted status and judgement means that these concerns are
very slight. But they are always still there. Separate examiners
are partly there to check up on your supervisor, to make sure
that her standards are still in touch with those of the profession
as a whole. The examiners’ role is to avoid any granting of
doctorates to people who are just intellectual clones of the
supervisor, or people to whom she is obligated as a friend, lover
or fellow worker in the university’s research labs.
The opportunity for the examiners to meet you in person for
around an hour and a half and to talk face-to-face, can sort out
all these kinds of problems more easily and speedily than any-
thing else. When they can ask questions and hear you explain
things in your own words, your thesis text will become much
easier for them to understand. They will be able to rework their
existing categories to fit you and your work into them and they
will better appreciate why you have made the decisions you
did. They will see what makes you tick and gain a much better
sense of your capabilities and expertise than is possible from
poring over your text in isolation. And normally all the latent,
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