How to handle endless revision requests for PhD thesis?

Question

I am in my 5th year of my PhD and handed in the draft of myentire thesis in December 2022. I discussed wanting to defend in August 2023, and was told that this was doable and to look for an external. I found one but was told to hold off contacting them – this I understand but it's now dragged on for a long time.

I expected revisions to take some time, but it has now been nearly 8 months and I don't find I am anywhere closer to nailing down a defence date or even getting any of the chapters to the rest of the committee. The supervisor insists they want to review everything before sending it off, but a number of things have happened.

1. There was some issue with the theoretical framework, resolved (more on this later)
2. I was told to revise methods, findings chapters...then told to hold off as they want to revise (again) the TF...and to wait for them.
3. Revisions I have handed in get sent back repeatedly for things that seemingly were resolved in early revisions.

At this point I feel like I am just going in an endless loop of revisions on chapters that I thought were resolved and we aren't moving forward. Again, I understand that revisions to some chapters have cascading effects...Everytime I push a bit I get more revisions sent back or some seemingly new issue. These revisions requests are becoming even more infrequent (as I think they are just stalling), but we aren't progressing.

Not sure what I can do about these endless revisions. I mean it could very well mean my thesis has major issues but that was never indicated at any point. Not sure how I can convince the supervisor to agree to some hard deadlines we can try to hit so I am not just being stringed along endlessly.

I mainly contact them by email, but they take a while to reply, now more so that in the past. They refuse or are not likely to Zoom, get on the phone or meet.

Answer 1

This seems egregious to me, but your instinct that you have no real leverage here is correct. That your supervisor is now dodging or refusing meetings in addition to gumming up the works by insisting that everything go through them is a major problem.

There must be someone at your university you can talk to about this, with some level of confidentiality. It may be someone outside your department formally, like an academic ombudsman. It may be someone inside your department (not your supervisor) who has special responsibility for graduate students or interfacing with the graduate college. It may just be the department chair (assuming that's not your supervisor.)

Find this person, and set up an appointment, just you two. Explain the problem, as calmly and deferentially as you can. (To be clear, I would be boiling over after eight months, but it isn't helpful.) Be ready to talk about the whole timeline in detail, and comb your e-mails (which I hope you saved) as evidence that you're being ignored.

Also, this is not meant as justification but as caution: It might be your supervisor underestimated some professional commitment, and this is leaking out into their relations with their students. Or it might be your supervisor has problems outside academia that aren't visible to you. Again, this is not justification, but-- to make up a random example-- you don't want to be the person lashing out at someone who has been taking care of an elderly family member in hospice, or something.

Answer 2

This is hard to answer without reading your thesis. So let's establish the two extremes, and you can then figure out where between the two ends your case lies, and from there find a solution.

On one extreme you have the thesis with serious problems. Maybe the proposal should have never been approved in the first place, and you ended up with unusable results (say, experimental data without controls, samples that can't answer your question, etc.) Or the thesis is so badly written than your advisor feels overwhelmed and decides to give you piecemeal revisions. I've seen both cases. In the first type of case, the student almost always ends up saying "You approved the proposal, and I ran the experiments, now you have to pass this thesis, even if it contains no science or original contribution to the field." At some departments, this strategy works, and the professor and/or committee is forced to accept an unacceptable thesis just to make it fair to the student. At other departments (most?) the student is told that even though he/she is right in that the proposal should have never been approved, they still have to produce an acceptable thesis even if it means starting from scratch. In the case of bad writing, the student is so unprepared to write a thesis that, from the perspective of the advisor, to give detailed feedback on everything that needs to be fixed is pretty much writing the thesis on behalf of the student. So the advisor says things like "rewrite the intro", and the student brings the intro from a 1/10 to 2/10, then more revisions that bring it from 2/10 to 3/10 and so on. While the student gets exasperated, this is the only way to bring a badly written thesis to acceptable-land. If the student were capable of writing an 8/10 thesis, they would have done that already.

On the other extreme, you have the lazy, overwhelmed, and perfectionist advisor, asking for minor revisions without end. They tell you to revise from A to B, and you give them B, they say C would be better and when you bring C, they say how about A? Or they contradict earlier advice, and never read their old email, taking every draft you give them as a first draft. Or the perfectionist type that does not understand that the world runs on deadlines.

My advice is that you find others to read your current drafts and give you an honest opinion on where you stand. If the thesis itself is the problem, your only option might be to switch advisors and start again with another project. I know this sounds like the worst possible outcome, but forcing the department to accept and unacceptable thesis is bad for everyone. If your thesis is indeed acceptable, and the constant revisions are indeed trivial, and your advisor is not giving you timely feedback, you have to go up the chain of command. This usually means the director of graduate studies at your department, then the department chair, then some assistant/associate dean, then the dean's office and ultimately the Provost's office. Don't be tempted to jump steps, as it usually backfires. Another option, and one that I used myself when my MS advisor would not approve the final draft I gave him, was to publish every chapter of the thesis in good journals. The peer-review standard is much higher than an MS thesis standard, so he looked kinda stupid and petty in front of the committee trying to justify more revisions when I had reprints from the journal at hand. This route, of course, can take 6 months to a year, and the results can vary, but it does work.