PTS Catalogue - Princeton Theological Seminary

ity. Other appropriate faculty members may be appointed as substitutes
for dissertation committee chairs who are on leave.
6. Dissertation: The Ph.D. Studies Committee has set a maximum length of
250 pages for a Princeton Seminary dissertation. Permission of the dissertation
committee is required in advance for a significantly longer work.
A final draft of the dissertation must be approved by the dissertation
committee no later than March 15 of the year in which the degree is to
be conferred. To allow sufficient time for evaluation of the dissertation,
the student should submit the draft to the committee several weeks in
advance of this deadline. Style guidelines and specifications are available
through the Ph.D. portal on the Seminary’s web site.
After the dissertation committee has deemed the dissertation defensible
and before the oral examination is scheduled, an expert in the field
will normally be invited to serve as an external reviewer for the dissertation.
External reviewers are identified by the department. The purpose of
the external examiner is two-fold. First, the external examiner will offer
a judgment on the quality of the dissertation as a member of the wider
academic community. If the external examiner is not in agreement with
the judgment of the committee, he or she does not have the power to
override the decision of the committee. Second, the requirement of an
external examiner will allow for academic interchange with other schools
for our students and faculty.
A date for a public oral examination is set by the candidate’s department,
in consultation with the candidate and with the approval of the
Office of Academic Affairs, Ph.D. Studies. The oral defense must be scheduled
no later than the last week of April.
The candidate must provide one hard copy of the defensible draft
of the dissertation, with an abstract of 350 words or less, to the Office
of Academic Affairs, Ph.D. Studies no later than fourteen days prior to
the date set for the oral examination. The candidate must also provide
one electronic version in PDF and as a Word document or rtf (Rich Text
Format) to phd@ptsem.edu. A dissertation editor will begin reviewing
the electronic version to make any editorial changes to the document
to ensure, when possible, that the dissertation is in accordance with the
Ph.D. Dissertation Style Guide. The editor sends the document back to
the student AFTER the oral defense. The student then makes any content
changes necessary as a result of the dissertation defense. The dissertation
editor gives the document one last review, deems it acceptable, and
returns a final edited version to the student.
Once the final copy is approved, the candidate is required to send
the final electronic PDF version to phd@ptsem.edu and three hard copies
(two on acid-free paper and one on plain paper) to the Office of
Academic Affairs, Ph.D. Studies at least one week prior to the last faculty
meeting of the term.
7. Degree completion: Upon satisfactory completion of the dissertation
defense and receipt of all required documentation by Ph.D. Studies, the
dissertation committee recommends the candidate to the faculty for the
Ph.D. degree.
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