Hello, mostly you are right, but 3 years is not enough to "train" even highly motivated student. Maturity of scientist needs time to proof the status in doing research , and presenting results not only for research community, but for other students (skill transfer), and practical knowledge for the future independent work (projects preparation, communication with partners etc). My opinion is to allow defense not earlier than after 6-8 years of scientific practice. Otherwise we train the unfit the incomplete the unlearned research applicants ...

I agree with you to some extent but many of the students need the degrees within a minimum time period. Further, full-time students are also difficult to find for degrees like a Ph.D. as many of them need to have employment to live and also for tuition fees. With this current situation, I am still thinking about how to shape the depth of workload/scope (Maybe it differs from discipline to discipline) of a Ph.D. student, what sort of research activities that need, etc.

Hi, I'm personally have an experience in computer science and phisiology of human. We try to first hire motivated MSc to work in the project, so by doing the work within some project the student is able to do scientific work by earning money and research results. When s/he has got some experience in scientific and administrative work, the student can apply for doctoral program /school https://www.tuni.fi/en/research/doctoral-school/contact-information-doctoral-programmes-and-doctoral-school.

Hello. That is an intriguing question. I guess it depends on what supervisors want their students to achieve: ranging from training of good academic working practices and skills to pave the academic career path to the very far end of getting projects and academic duties done as "cheap" and "enthusiastic" staff members.

So what to do about it, might one ask. I would like to start with innerfaculty relations. PhD supervisors are usually Professors or Senior Academic Staff, which have more less academic freedom, but not in terms of faculty commitments (like code of conduct) addressing staff' and students' requirements. That would be one lever to apply, if there is academic misconduct in supervisory relationships.

From my understanding PhD students originate from a Bachelor with Honors AND a Master's course, perferably by research. In summary, PhD students are high potentials, already trained in basic academic duties (e.g. tutoring) and scientific skills (e.g. lit reviews, reflecting, deducting hypotheses, statistics, ...). Most of all, PhD students are highly motivated, which responsibly acting supervisors use to push PhD-students that little bit further beyond their comfort.

Sorry for getting of the track a little bit. The solely scope of a PhD is to continue one's preparation of a scientific career, in either both academia or industry, to elaborate knowledge, skills, and to demonstrate persistency to deeply dug into a specific topic - whatever time it takes. I highly agree with @Grigori Evreinov on that.

Thank you so much for Grigori and Peter for your valuable ideas and interesting descriptions. I can understand student needs to be thoroughly dug into the depth of the study area. Some supervisors/Universities expect the student to use many research designs in a simple study to increase the workload of the student rather than narrow downing the research question. In that case, Peter is correct regarding some work of supervisors get done from the students.

I feel students spent much time on the data collection/manual work rather than studying the problem and the particular specific study design. Specially I can see it in developing countries such as Sri Lanka that is my country. However, I felt that too much-complicated studies having many specific objectives and many research designs, data collection methods that fed up the student with the workload without getting proper knowledge and skills and ended up with a dragged Ph.D. I like to know how you feel about this kind of situation?