Sweden

Abstract

There are 34 higher education institutions in Sweden with the authority to award doctoral degrees and in 2020, they awarded 2,570 doctorates. To ensure quality in research education, there is a national framework, which sets out the learning outcomes to be achieved by doctoral students through successfully completing course work and research leading to a thesis. There are also national regulations governing the examination of the thesis and the candidate, but these allow institutions considerable autonomy to develop their own rules and regulations. A feature of the Swedish system is that a faculty opponent is appointed to scrutinise the thesis and the doctoral candidate during the dissertation/defence. But the opponent plays no part in the final decision, which is undertaken by an examination committee. The vast majority of dissertations are successful, but failure is final with no recourse for re-examination. In this chapter, the national framework for research education and doctoral examination is outlined, the procedures for the examinations of course and thesis work are explained, and the thesis defence procedure is outlined before discussing quality aspects of the examination.

Published in

Title: Doctoral Examination: Exploring Practice Across the Globe
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

SLU Authors

• Viberg, Henrik

  • University administration, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Pedagogy

Publication identifier

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003197706-17
• ISBN: 978-1-032-04992-2
• eISBN: 978-1-003-19770-6

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/129694