Doctoral & Master of Philosophy examination

Suggested form of initial email to be sent to potential examiners

The following draft was approved by Steering Committee at its meeting of 26 October 2004.

I am contacting you to enquire whether you would be prepared to act as an examiner for the [doctoral / Master of Philosophy] thesis examination of one of my candidates, [name]. [His / her] studies [one to two sentence encapsulation]. A summary of this work can be found in the attached Microsoft Word document.

I anticipate that the candidate will submit within six to eight weeks time.

I would be very grateful if you could please advise by email whether you would be prepared to act as an examiner. The examination itself would require you to forward your recommendation to the university's Research Graduate School Committee on a pro-forma sheet, together with a supporting statement in which you could provide general and specific comments concerning the thesis.

The Research Graduate School Committee normally asks that examiners return their completed report within six weeks of the receipt of the thesis (or eight weeks for examiners located outside of Australia). However, if you would require more than this allocated time, could you please give me an estimate of the time needed. In addition I would need to know if you would wish to specify any pre-conditions to the examination of the thesis.

As I must indicate to the university whether you have examined PhD theses previously, I would be grateful for a general statement of your experience. This could be of the form “I have examined over 20 theses for universities in Europe and North America in the past 15 years”.

Please note that your identity will be revealed to the candidate once the thesis is dispatched for examination.

Thank you for your consideration of this request. I do not believe you would find the examination an onerous request.