Til about Dr David Clutton who’s the only person with PhD in Gin, however stupid that sounds.
How do you get a phd in a discipline where there’s no-one to grant you that phd? How was it done in the past?
In: Other
The quick answer is that your PhD work does not necessarily need to be marked by someone superior to you in that subject like a school test is – it will be checked and tested by people of equivalent (or better) in parallel subjects.
What they are doing is not marking the answers in a test as right or wrong, but checking your methodology and research to determine that the work you have done will be correct and relevant.
So they won’t be marking the result you get, they will be marking your workings.
So this means that if your field is a very specific branch of a subject, it can be marked by people in similar (but slightly different) parallel branches – people who will have gone through the same process themselves before with their own subjects.
There is also the question of exactly what it says on your doctorate – are you listed as a doctor of a very specific branch, or of the larger grouping? So is the person mentioned a doctor of gin, or a doctor of food sciences with a specialisation in gin?
Latest Answers