Tao Mingli. Analysis of external reasons for passive postponement of graduation by doctoral students [EB/OL]. (2020-12-26) https://mp.weixin.qq.

Tao Mingli. Analysis of external reasons for passive postponement of graduation by doctoral students [EB/OL]. (2020-12-26)

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/adFSoYKFkEIfW9KRTehKzQ

The scale of graduate student enrollment has been increasing in recent years Expansion has increased from about 800,000 people in 2016 to about 1.1 million today, and the number of graduate students has reached 3 million. At present, our country has become a major country in postgraduate education in the world, but a big country is not a powerful country. The expansion of graduate student enrollment has inevitably brought about the problem of uneven quality of graduate students. The delayed graduation rate for graduate students, especially doctoral students, continues to rise. According to statistics, the delayed graduation rate of doctoral students in 2019 is as high as 40%. Faced with such "shocking" figures, all sectors of society have begun to question the quality and efficiency of postgraduate education. As a result, the government and education management departments of universities have paid more and more attention to the quality of postgraduate training.

Delayed graduation refers to graduate students who, according to the graduate student status management regulations, have expired the basic study period and failed to graduate as scheduled for some reason, and have been approved by the school to postpone their graduation. There is no doubt that delaying graduate graduation has many adverse effects. For example, for individual graduate students, involuntary postponement of graduation can easily lead to students' anxiety, depression and other bad emotions at the psychological level, and reduce their academic self-efficacy . For colleges and universities, delayed graduation not only means an increase in training costs per student, but also a decrease in the utilization of human and material resources. For the government, delaying graduation will reduce its efficiency in related education finance and cause a waste of educational resources. [1] Since delayed graduation of graduate students will bring so many negative effects, why does the delayed graduation rate of graduate students not only not decrease but also continue to increase? What are the reasons behind this? In this regard, this article mainly starts from the passive postponement of graduate graduation and analyzes its external reasons.

1. The cultural requirements for school graduation

Graduation conditions for graduate students, that is, the university where the graduate student is located has clearly stipulated the conditions that graduate students must meet to graduate. The postgraduate graduation conditions in this article specifically refer to the academic achievements required for graduate graduation, including the publication of daily papers (design) and the completion of graduation thesis (design). As far as our country is concerned, most universities have clear requirements for the academic performance of doctoral candidates during their studies. In addition to completing a graduation thesis (design), they also need to publish a certain number of journal papers in high-quality journals. It can be found that the graduation conditions for graduate students are "theoretically cultured" to a certain extent, that is, most of them regard the number of published papers as an important assessment indicator to measure whether they meet the graduation conditions.

According to the survey, 97.5% of the schools where doctoral students work have regulations for publishing scientific research papers. [2] In this regard, it can at least be concluded that for the vast majority of universities, in the training practice of doctoral students, requiring doctoral students to publish journal papers has become a common practice for successful graduation. There is nothing wrong with graduate students publishing scientific research results, and to a certain extent, graduate students should indeed concentrate on doing research and doing scientific research. However, the output of the paper is not achieved overnight, but there is a large degree of uncertainty. For graduate students in liberal arts, they need to invest a lot of energy in reading and organizing literature and choosing words and sentences; for graduate students in science and engineering, they need to invest a lot of energy in establishing experimental models and collecting data. In this process, it will undoubtedly take time to modify and process it again and again until you are satisfied. What's more, the output of papers still has a long publication cycle. It does not mean that if you submit it today, it will be published tomorrow. It is possible that a paper that you have put a lot of effort into writing "disappears" due to various reasons during the process of submitting it for publication. This is almost a common occurrence. However, due to the rigid requirements for graduation, it is very likely that graduation will be delayed.

2. Quantitative evaluation of tutor admission standards

Tutor admission standards are various standards that should be met to become a graduate tutor. The tutor admission standards in this article specifically refer to the standards that graduate tutors should meet in terms of professional ethics.As far as our country is concerned, there is a certain quantitative phenomenon when recruiting graduate tutors, that is, most universities often conduct assessments through some quantitative indicator data. For example, whether there is a background of studying abroad, how the papers are published, whether there are major projects, etc., there is a lack of assessment of the professional ethics and academic attainments that reflect teaching and educating people. This is likely to lead to a small number of people with "high reputations but not high quality" joining the team of graduate tutors, which will inevitably have a certain impact on the training of graduate students.

Professional ethics generally refers to the professional ethics of teachers, that is, patriotism and law-abiding, dedication to work, caring for students, being a role model, teaching and educating, and lifelong learning. Doctoral supervisors are also members of the teaching staff and should do the above. However, in reality, related "exposure incidents" emerge one after another, which inevitably makes people question whether there is a problem with the professional ethics of tutors. For example, some mentors have become role representatives of "hands-off shopkeepers". According to the survey, the higher the frequency of mentorship, the higher the proportion of doctoral students who graduate on schedule. [3]. There are also some tutors who turn into "bosses", asking outstanding students to help them make money, and treat the students like slaves. Even when these students meet the graduation requirements, the "boss" sets various "levels" because they hope they can stay in their institute or company, making it difficult for them to graduate as scheduled. The level that a general instructor has achieved in his or her professional field. What's more, some tutors stole one of the students' works. In recent years, it seems common for papers to be robbed as soon as they are published. According to reports, in 2017, Liu Yili, a graduate student at the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study, Chinese Academy of Sciences, sued his supervisor Li Xiao for grabbing his first author position on a journal paper.

In short, graduate students will be delayed in graduation due to the "theoretical culture" of the graduation requirements required by the school and the quantification of the instructor's admission standards. Today, with the expansion of postgraduate enrollment, these external reasons must attract attention, and relevant departments should avoid them in the process of postgraduate training to ensure the steady development of postgraduate education.

[1] Bao Wei, Zhang Xinyue, Wu Jiaqi . An empirical study of factors affecting the delay in graduation of doctoral students [J]. Jiangsu Higher Education, 2020(07):31-38.

[2] Bian Yuxiao. Ph.D. of my country Research on the delayed completion of studies for postgraduate students [D]. Shanghai: East China Normal University: 2012.

[3] Li Haisheng. Analysis of influencing factors of delayed completion of studies for doctoral students in my country - Based on a questionnaire survey of 42 graduate schools[J]. Degree and graduate education, 2012(05):9-15.