People say VIVA actually only last for less than 60 minutes, where judges will determined if they wanna you to fail, pass, major repair or minor repair...the question is : How can they judge you within a few minutes for the super hard PhD work you had done for 3 to 7 years? Is it always a fair judgement full of wisdom?
In most cases the examiners supposed to read the whole thesis before coming to the VIVA, and if the candidate had published some papers from his or her work in a reputable journals this means that the thesis is already evaluated and the VIVA is only a routine process to check whether the work is done by the candidate himself. But 30-60 minutes is not enough for a Ph.D. thesis.
I think that it depends on the experience of the jury. Usually the jury members need to have relevant experience. But, sometimes not. I gree also that 60 minutes is not much time to present whole thesis. Thus, only major points needs to be presented. This is the key problem to be solved.
Most PhD vivas last about two hours (and sometimes more). Remember that the thesis is sent to the examiners weeks before the actual viva. Therefore they have time to develop a very good and thorough understanding of the work. When they come to the viva they have a clear idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the work and can be very specific on the areas they cover by the questions. This will allow them to pass a rigorous and fair judgement on the work undertaken by the candidate.
The time depends on the administrative procedure. In some instances, there is a presentation of the work by the candidate before the jury (which can be from 3 to 5), followed by questions; in my experience this would take 2 to 3 hours. The experience of the jury members, the quality of writing-results-discussion, how polemic is the subject of research, etc., all define the length of the exam.
On the other hand, if the exam goes straight to questions from the jury, is a shorter process.
The viva process depends on the institution and there are quite large differences between different countries (public vs private affairs, panel vs one or two examiners, presentation before the viva or not). However, while we've all heard rumours of vivas being less than an hour, the overwhelming majority of them last 2-3 hours.
As has been said already, by the time of the viva, the examiners will have read through the dissertation and be aware of its strengths and weaknesses. With a very strong dissertation, the examiners will mostly want to make sure that the dissertation was the student's own work, but equally they will want to use the viva as an opportunity to discuss some good work. Giving the student less than an hour to show off work which they should rightly be proud would be an insult. With a weak dissertation, the student will need to be given an opportunity to defend their work and correct any misunderstandings. In such cases, giving the student less than 90 minutes would be unfair. Equally, with a weak piece of work, there is no need to drag a student through unnecessary pain and drill down on every weakness, so there's no real need to go beyond 3 hours.
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