Discrepancies between the 'ideal' and 'passable' doctorate: supervisor thinking on doctoral standards

Dimicolo (2003) recently made note of two paradoxical findings in the literature on doctoral assessment: that there is little cross-institutional agreement as to what actually constitutes a doctorate, and very few submitted doctorates fail to achieve the award. We argue that a major explanation of the paradox may lie in the implicit understandings of supervisors. We begin with the conceptions of the doctorate and the doctoral process expressed by supervisors through interview. We then address the issue of defining "doctoral level" through the application of the SOLO Taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982). Additionally, we draw on the work of Shaw (cited in Powell & McCaulay (2002) to flesh out within the SOLO framework attributes that discriminate doctoral from non-doctoral levels of outcome. Our analysis of the interview data indicated an implicit awareness on the part of supervisors, regardless of discipline, of the desired modality of thinking underlying doctoral research (which we define as a Formal-2 modality) and of the need for explicit coherence within the thesis (defined by us as a "relational" outcome within mode). We see our analysis as providing a useful insight into the development of an explicit understanding of what constitutes a "doctoral level" of outcome.