PhD viva preparation coaching.

The thesis is in, the date is set, you know your examiners' names, and you have read the thing twice. The problem is not that you do not know your work. It is the distance between knowing your work and defending it out loud, for two or three hours, to two people who have read it carefully and will ask why you made a decision in month fourteen that you have half forgotten.

That distance closes with rehearsal, under pressure, with someone who has sat on the examiners' side of the table. A mock viva at full length, recorded, in the format your institution uses; a written examiner-style report afterwards saying where the answers were thin and where you conceded ground you did not need to; and two follow-up sessions to fix those lines.

What viva coaching is, and what we will not do

One fact organises this entire page. Among the general responsibilities the UK Council for Graduate Education sets out for doctoral examiners is the question: are you the author of the thesis and, in so far as can be ascertained, did you carry out the research? — with the note that candidates have to satisfy their examiners that the thesis is their own work.

So: we run mock vivas, predict the question lines your actual thesis invites, give feedback on how you answer rather than on what your thesis says, and help you plan corrections once you have them. We do not write, rewrite or edit your thesis. We do not attend your viva. We do not sell chapters.

That last point is worth saying plainly, because it is the thing to check about anyone you consider paying. If a service offers viva preparation and thesis writing from the same website, you are being sold both halves of the same problem. Our academic integrity policy sets out the boundary in full.

What your examiners are required to establish

Preparation gets much easier once you stop guessing at what examiners want and read what they are actually working to. The UKCGE guidance for doctoral candidates reproduces one university's examination regulations, which require examiners to confirm that:

• the student possesses a good general knowledge of the field;
• the student has made a significant and substantial contribution in the particular field of learning;
• the thesis is presented in a lucid and scholarly manner;
• in the examiners' opinion, the thesis merits the doctoral degree;
• the student has presented a satisfactory abstract of the thesis.

Alongside those, the same guidance lists the questions examiners hold in mind throughout: are you the author and did you do the research; are you competent as an independent researcher; have you contributed to knowledge; do you know the field well enough that you could teach it; and is the research of publishable quality.

Then the single most anxiety-reducing fact in the sector, and one almost no commercial page will tell you. The standard examiners apply is not perfection. The regulation quoted in that guidance instructs examiners to judge significance against “what may be reasonably expected of a capable and diligent student after three or at most four years of full-time study” — which is to say, as Mullins and Kiley titled the study the guidance cites, it's a PhD, not a Nobel Prize. The same study found that experienced examiners want candidates to be awarded the degree and will go to considerable lengths to make that possible.

The underlying standard is set at sector level: the QAA defines a UK doctorate by an original contribution to knowledge made through independent research. Everything an examiner asks is a test of that, in some disguise.

Who is in the room, and what actually happens

Normally two examiners: one internal to your institution and one external. If you are a member of your university's staff, two externals are usually appointed instead — that is the rule at Liverpool, for example, and the pattern the UKCGE guidance describes.

Whether your supervisor is present varies, and this catches people out. The UKCGE guidance notes that many universities permit supervisors to attend without taking an active part, with the candidate's agreement. At others they are simply not there: Liverpool's published guidance states flatly that your supervisor will not be present. Check yours, and decide in advance which you would prefer where you have a choice.

Some institutions appoint an independent chair as standard; others only for particular cases — at Liverpool, a second viva following a resubmission is attended by an independent chair. A chair does not examine. They are there to see the process is run properly, which is useful to you.

Other practicalities worth knowing:

• Length is not announced in advance and can run to several hours. Liverpool says so explicitly. Eat beforehand. Ask about breaks.
• The timing after submission varies but is often within about three months — Liverpool's internal examiner normally arranges the viva inside that window. Use the gap; do not simply wait in it.
• You can take your annotated thesis and your notes in. Essex recommends exactly this, with page markers in the sections you may need to quote. The UKCGE guidance says to keep your highlights and sticky markers in the copy you bring.
• Make sure your copy matches theirs. Examiners will refer you to page numbers.
• At the end you will be asked to step out while the examiners deliberate. They will normally invite you back and give you an indication of the outcome — though formally they are recommending, not conferring, and the award is confirmed later by a board or committee.

Online and hybrid vivas are now routine at many institutions, and Essex's own preparation guidance assumes some vivas are held online. If yours is, the practical checklist is short: test the platform on the actual machine you will use; have a second screen or a second device for the thesis; bring a hard copy anyway; know who to telephone if the connection drops, and agree that before you start rather than during.

A six-week preparation plan

Anchored to the published advice rather than invented. Six weeks is a shape, not a rule — part-time candidates, candidates working full-time and candidates with caring responsibilities should stretch or compress it, and anyone with three weeks should start at week three and do less of each thing.

Weeks six and five — rebuild the overview

• Write a one-sentence summary of every chapter. Murray's technique, and the fastest way to recover the shape of a thesis you are now too close to.
• Build a page map. Phillips and Pugh suggest three sheets of lined A4, divided down the centre so each half-line is one page of the thesis, with the main idea of that page written on it. Tedious, and it means you can find anything in the viva in seconds.
• Identify the four or five key people in your field and make sure you can discuss their work in detail, not just cite it. The UKCGE guidance flags this specifically.

Weeks four and three — the golden thread, and the questions you fear

• Rehearse your contribution at three lengths: sixty seconds, three minutes, ten minutes. If the sixty-second version is a summary of your contents page rather than an argument, that is the work.
• Write down the questions that frighten you most and draft answers to them. The UKCGE guidance recommends exactly this, and it works because the fear is usually about four questions, not forty.
• Read what your examiners have published that bears on your topic. Skim a couple of papers. You are not looking for ammunition; you are looking for the frame they will read you through.
• Keep reading the literature right up to the viva. Currency is checked.

Week two — the mock viva

Full length, recorded, and with someone who will not be kind about it. This is where we sit; see what a mock viva involves. The UKCGE guidance recommends trying to arrange one and gives candidates a set of honest self-assessment prompts first: are you good at oral presentation, do you find questions about your work easy to follow, how have you performed under pressure, and how have you performed in the face of aggressive questioning. Answer those before you book anything — they tell you what the mock needs to be for.

Week one — re-read and rehearse aloud

• Re-read the thesis. Mark it up. Accept that you will find typos; note them and move on, because they are corrections, not failures.
• Practise oral summaries and oral debate with colleagues and your supervisor. Out loud. Reading silently does not rehearse the thing being examined.
• Run a saved literature search and check what has appeared since you submitted. Have a sentence ready on anything relevant.
• Prepare a publication plan with named journals. The UKCGE guidance is explicit that you need to be as specific as possible, with specific journals. Most candidates underprepare this and it is free ground.

The day before

Logistics only. Route, timings, room or platform, what you are taking in, what you will eat. Sleep. No new reading — nothing you learn on the last evening will help you, and the anxiety it generates will not either.

What a mock viva actually involves

Specific, so you can price the alternative rather than take our word for the value.

1. Your mentor reads the thesis in advance. Not the abstract. The thesis.
2. A full-length oral examination, recorded. In your institution's format — in person or online, chair or no chair, with or without an opening presentation.
3. A predicted question set drawn from your thesis, chapter by chapter, with the follow-up each question leads to. Not a generic list of forty questions; the questions your decisions invite.
4. A written examiner-style report. Where the answers were thin, where you went off at a tangent, where you conceded ground you did not need to, and where you defended something that was not worth defending.
5. Two follow-up sessions to rehearse the lines that came apart, because reading a report does not fix an oral performance.

And what it cannot do: we cannot tell you what your examiners will ask. Nobody can. Anyone who says otherwise is guessing, and the guessing is the product. What a mock viva gives you is the experience of being questioned properly once before it counts, and a diagnosis of how you perform when it happens.

If you want to see the method before you buy anything, our guide to the questions examiners actually ask, and what each one is testing sets out twenty-six of them in the same format we use in the mock: what is being checked, what a weak answer sounds like, and the follow-up it invites.

Outcomes and corrections: your university's list, not a generic one

Every page that lists viva outcomes gives you one generic set of categories. That set is not standard, and neither are the clocks attached to it. Here is the UKCGE generic list against two real institutions, read on 8 October 2026, to show how much variation there is.

The point of the table is not the detail. It is that the category names are not standard and the clocks are not standard. Leeds materially lengthened two of its correction windows for theses submitted from 1 September 2026 and renamed one of its categories — a change no generic list anywhere will reflect. Find your own institution's regulation, read the version current for your submission date, and treat everything else, including this page, as orientation.

If you have been referred, or face a second viva

Almost every page about vivas assumes a first viva. If you have been referred, or have major corrections and a second examination ahead of you, you are probably the best-prepared reader on this page and the least well served by the internet.

A resubmission viva is usually narrower than the first. The examiners have already formed a view of the thesis; what they are establishing now is whether their report has been addressed. That changes the preparation completely. The work is not re-defending the whole thesis — it is being able to walk, calmly, through every point they raised and what you did about it.

The practical shape of it:

• Build a response document. Every examiner comment, in their words, mapped to the change you made and the page number where it now appears. This is the single most useful artefact in a resubmission, and examiners notice when it exists.
• Where you disagree with a comment, say so in the document, courteously, with a reason. You are allowed to disagree. What you cannot do is silently ignore a point and hope.
• Expect more formality. Independent chairs are more common at this stage — standard practice at Liverpool for second vivas.
• Know the limits. At Leeds a second referral is not permitted, and examiners cannot recommend a lower award or a fail without holding a second viva. Both facts are worth knowing before you walk in.

And the part that is not procedural: a referral is not a failure. It is a documented, ordinary outcome of a hard examination, and it is more common than the silence around it suggests. The people it happens to do not talk about it, which is precisely why it feels rarer than it is.

Master's, MRes and professional doctorates: do you even have a viva?

A reasonable question that almost nothing answers, because the answer is genuinely institutional.

Taught Master's (MA, MSc, MBA, LLM)

Most taught Master's programmes in the UK do not involve a viva. Where one happens it is usually for a specific reason — a borderline mark, or a question about authorship that the department wants to resolve in person. Your programme handbook is the authority.

MRes and Master's by research

Varies by institution. Some require an oral examination; some do not. If yours does, the examination is closer in character to a doctoral viva than to anything in a taught programme — expect to defend design decisions properly. Start with methodology mentorship if that is the part you are least sure of.

Professional doctorates (EdD, DBA, DClinPsy, EngD)

These do have a viva, and the questioning tends to put more weight on professional practice and impact alongside the contribution to knowledge. Candidates are frequently part-time, often several years out of full-time study, and sometimes examined on a portfolio or an artefact as well as a written thesis. The preparation is the same in kind and different in emphasis, and we match you to a mentor accordingly.

If you are nine to eighteen months into a PhD rather than at the end of one, the examination ahead of you is probably an upgrade or transfer panel, not a viva. That is a different examination with different criteria — see upgrade and transfer viva preparation.

Pricing

Doctoral mentorship sits in our Fellow tier, priced at £0.050 per word of the work being mentored, in pounds sterling. The same price applies to every candidate wherever they are reading this; there is no regional pricing and no currency conversion.

Your mentor

Questions candidates ask

Related guidance

Sources

Primary and institutional sources only. No commercial viva-preparation page is cited anywhere on this page, by design. Every link was checked on 8 October 2026.