Rant: How bad does a PhD candidate have to be before they fail?
Yes, I understand that defenses are handled in different manners around the world. Yes I also understand that a defense is often more a celebration of the work and less a rigorous examination. I also totally understand you really don't want to fail somebody who worked 3+ years for you, and that you are looking for the good parts of the work, and not focus on the weaknesses. I also understand that the inability to answer basic questions is a temporary embarrassment, not grounds to fail a candidate.
But this week things just went too far. Our defenses consist of 30 minutes presentations and up to 90 minutes of questions from a committee of 5 professors, no audience questions allowed.
The presentation had no introduction, barely any explanation of what was going on. If you were not deep into his work you were already lost from the first slide. At the same time it avoided all difficult or advanced topics. A typical case of explaining a simple things in a complicated way.
The presentation clearly had a lot of AI-generated parts. Obvious from some of the wording and the formatting. The formulas had weird formatting issues throughout the presentation, e.g. the Greek letter phi was written multiple times as the empty set ∅. That cannot happen by accident with a typo in LaTeX. Many pictures and illustrations, none of them had any reference provided.
And then the slides that were not AI-generated. Extremely crowded. Tiny plots of data with labels that were absolutely impossible to read, embedded in walls of text. Core processing steps and results were only shown inside screenshots of a GUI. One crucial data processing step was only shown on a slide that had six(!) full monitor screen shots pasted next to each other.
And what was the committee thinking about all of this? They handled him with silk gloves. A full hour of softball questions. Not a single question about the fundamentals behind theory and assumptions. He was asked about the assumptions he makes, could not answer that. Not a single question about complementary techniques, or the limitations of his work. Only vague, open questions, answered in a rambling style of a politician. There was one genuine question one would expect in a PhD defense, but the committee member already apologized for asking in advance. Of course he had no idea what the question was about, even though it directly related to the work of his own supervisor. The committee is also allowed to ask general questions about the field, they asked absolutely none.
Well, in the end there was one final question: What is actually the scientific contribution of your work? You have only presented measurements well known in literature? His answer: I made a GUI.
Well of course he passed.
Sorry for the rant here, maybe you can say something about how you would handle such a situation. If I was on the committee I would have grilled him with basic fundamental questions and insisted on getting an actual answer. Not to speak about the numerous illustrations that were plagiarized from somewhere.