When AI writes the doctoral thesis: reclaiming the oral defence as a learning development intervention

Abstract

Large language models have fundamentally challenged traditional methods of verifying doctoral competency as AI-generated text becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from human scholarship. This paper argues that thesis committees and doctoral supervisors must reclaim the oral defence as a critical checkpoint for assessing authentic threshold crossing rather than a ceremonial rite of passage. Drawing on historical examples from medieval oral disputations through to the rise of written theses, this paper asserts the necessity of returning to rigorous oral assessment. Given the limitations of detection technologies and the growing use of AI in thesis writing, oral defences must move from confirmatory questions that permit regurgitated responses to exploratory inquiry that demonstrates genuine conceptual transformation. This requires developing assessment literacy among examiners to distinguish candidates who have achieved deep disciplinary understanding from those who have merely assembled AI-generated text, thereby revealing human capacities for critical thinking, spontaneous reasoning, and scholarly judgment.

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