Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

This is what my thesis advisee’s parents wrote to the panel.

Subject: Letter Appeal to the Panel

We wish to bring to your attention the sad plight of my son with regards to the fulfillment of his thesis requirements. It has been 6 terms now (including one summer class) and he has yet to pass the said requirement. We expected him to
graduate two years ago but the dream of seeing him marching up the stage
to receive his diploma has become so elusive.

We have seen him spend several nights without any sleep just to finish his thesis yet it seems that all his efforts and sacrifices are not enough to merit your satisfaction.

He told me that one big problem is that adverse comments on his thesis are given piecemeal. In short, all comments to his thesis do not come in one downpour. New one crops up in every presentation and it follows a pattern of seemingly endless pursuit.

I hope you could understand the predicament of my family. I lost my job two years ago and have always been sick for quite some time now. It's only my wife who is working for the family. With seven kids all in school, it has been extremely difficult for me to support his studies any further. It would certainly help me a lot if he can finish his study, get a decent job and help me support his other siblings. I don't ask for any special favor because I know my son can handle his studies quite well by himself. All I ask from all concerned specially the good members of the panel is to be more reasonable and realistic about whole thing. Hopefully if it is only a slight difference please understand because if we accept it or not, it is utterly irrational to let his thesis be a the big stumbling block in his advancement. When he is out there living the struggle called "life" it would hardly matter if he perfected his thesis or not. What is more important is the character he molded for him in school and the knowledge he acquired in and out of the classroom. Two years have already been lost to him we hope he can be given the chance to move on and start a career for himself and his family.

Hoping for your understanding and kind heart.

This is what the chairman replied:

I am a member of the thesis panel for your son and the chair of the physics department. Like you, we do not like to see our students staying longer than they need to in school. When problems crop up in thesis - as there has been many cases of equipment breaking down, or supplies not arriving on time - the thesis panels take things into consideration and often agree to the "downsizing" of thesis projects.

I beg to disagree with your son's statement that we gave our comments piecemeal. Your son presented his work only twice (as is normally the case), once during his thesis proposal defense and the second time during his final thesis defense. Your son does come to see the panelists at other times but whatever we say during those occassions are not official - only comments given during defense are and will be taken into consideration if we go by our thesis policies. In fact, whenever your son comes to see me, I always emphasize that all he has to do is to look at the list of comments in his proposal and do it - we won't look for anything more than what is written in the comments, but anything less should be justified.

During the proposal defense, the panel suggested things for him to do and sadly, when your son presented his thesis in the final defense, we found many ( I think most) of the things we asked him to do missing. As such, we cannot give him a passing grade.

Your son mentioned that things that we asked him to do are difficult, and will not work. We asked him during the defense to show us what he did, and to put them down in his thesis (this he has still not done since he had his defense a few weeks back). I remember telling him that in science, things that do not work out are still considered important because it will tell other people on what not to do - and we the panel will take into consideration his "failed" attempts. But it is important for him to show us what he did (even if as he claimed, it did not work) - for how would we know if he indeed tried doing it?

During the defense, I found it disturbing (the first time I ever encountered such remarks in more than ten years of sitting in graduate, undergraduate, science, philosophy, and education thesis panels) that your son will keep on saying "But that is difficult". And when we ask him to show us what he did, he cannot show anything - which seems to indicate that he did not even try.

No matter what "adverse comments" we gave outside the defense is immaterial. What Your son should do is just do what he said he will do in his proposal and the things that the panel asked him to do in the proposal and final defenses (which is listed down in two pages). If there are things there that are not possible to do, he needs to show us his attempts and document them in his thesis. Only when he has done all of this should he come to see the panel, and I assure you that we will sit en banc so that comments are all given at one time.

I’ll give my comments tomorrow.