The UK process is great if the student's goal is to gain a PhD. After approximately 3 years of running experiments, you present your hypotheses and gather together your results and try to make it look like these are related.
If the goal is to have an academic career, this is not adequate. Graduating without having results that are good enough to publish in peer reviewed articles puts the UK student far behind others around the world who'll be competing for postdocs.
Having moved from a high profile lab in the UK to a high profile lab in the US, I was shocked at how far behind the US/French/German postdocs I was.
This is so true. A UK PhD is a gloried three year honours degree. Here in Australia traditionally PhDs averaged over 4 years (I took nearly 5 years, but I was working full time for the last 18 months after my scholarship ran out). I knew only one person who finished in the regulation time of three years - most people got most of their results in the last year.
When I was an academic my university put great pressure on us to get our students out in under 3 years citing the UK system. Of course when we raised the problems the UK system (ie having our students graduate with no papers) would have on them we were told basically to shut up and do what ever it took to get the students out on time. It became pretty common for supervisors to write their students dissertation and for more senior researchers to 'gift' results to students to get them out on time.
Yep. Just one of the many reasons I am no longer an academic. I should mention that students are still being abused as cheap labor - the only change is the incompetent are getting pushed through.
This was not my experience. My UK Computer Science peer group was expected to publish their thesis work in a good journal, with some conference papers along the way. The thesis was the definitive long-form version, but a key question at the defence was "so where was this work published?". "It wasn't" would not have been a good answer.
They vary by area because of the nature of research.
It is much harder in the experimental sciences to "schedule" results. My PhD has both experimental (lab work) and computing aspects and all the computing research took within the expect time (+- 20%). The lab aspects were much more variable. I had one experiment which I expected would take 3 months to finalise that worked first time and I was finished by the afternoon (this doesn't happen that often unfortunately), while other experiments I thought would take a week ended up taking 6 months.
Yes, my experience was in the biological sciences, where bench work can have a very long amount of time between iterations. I'm always amazed that anyone working with mammals (eg evaluating transgenic mice) ever finishes their work.
The issue is really the hard cut off that was mentioned above. Had I stayed on longer at that lab, I may have been able to get my results published, but there are many incentives to move on.
If you were hiring a post doc for a two-year position, would you choose the person who had managed to convert research into a published paper in 3-4 years, or the other guy?
If the goal is to have an academic career, this is not adequate. Graduating without having results that are good enough to publish in peer reviewed articles puts the UK student far behind others around the world who'll be competing for postdocs.
Having moved from a high profile lab in the UK to a high profile lab in the US, I was shocked at how far behind the US/French/German postdocs I was.