Minor Side Point: ABT (All Bar Thesis) is more commonly called the ABD (All But Dissertation).
Yes, the “original research” dissertation is a central part of the modern PhD, but there are other non-PhD doctoral degrees that do not necessarily require such a dissertation, such as MD’s or JD’s.
That makes me wonder - are there non-PhD doctoral degrees (or even any degrees) that could be earned mostly or entirely through submission of an open-source software project? For example, could you earn an EdD (Doctor of Education) degree (or even an MEd or BEd) by writing and submitting a slightly-better-but-not-especially-groundbreaking “teach yourself high school algebra” educational game or a new student management system that combined letter grades and disciplinary referrals into one system? Could you earn a DFA (Doctor of Fine Arts) degree (or even an MFA or BFA) for writing an exceptionally aesthetic demo? How about a Doctor of Music degree for writing a new synthesizer? Doctor of Divinity for writing a bible study app? Doctor of Architecture by building a super-realistic model of a skyscraper in Second Life and scripting it to consume simulated public utilities?
Professional doctorates such as J.D.s and M.D.s are degrees awarded to individuas who have trained to perform in professions, not because of original research, as you noted. Awarding an individual a degree in these fields based on previous work therefore makes little sense. I can’t speak about M.D.s, but in my own field (I have a J.D. and practice law), the ABA sets accreditation standards that law schools have to follow, including the number of class hours that students must take before being awarded a degree. So for J.D.s, at least, it’s almost certainly unlikely an individual can be awarded a degree based on outside work.
And even more commonly called MS or MA.
Not quite. People often take courses after their master’s while working on their Ph.D. They usually have to pass a comprehensive exam before starting on their dissertation.
Not at all true in my field. ABD means you’ve passed qualifying exams, defended your thesis proposal, and have quite a bit of research finished. The latter 2 are not part of an MS. (And the first is only for a consolation Masters.) The main task remaining is writing and defending the thesis.
People get hired all the time ABD for tenure track positions. (I was.) Not so much for MS folk.
True. There are plenty of people who are in Masters programs from the start, but I also know of schools where people who flunk their quals often enough can get one (after satisfying the other requirements) as a kind of consolation prize.
I only know one ABD in CS, but I read a book all about the problem for Ed.D. Those people usually work while getting their PhD, so it is a bit harder to get it all done than when you are supported and can work full time. And it is definitely all but dissertation.
My university introduced a structured PhD programme to cope with part of the problem of non-finishing PhDs. You can’t enrol in a PhD. You can enrol in a MSc/MA by research, and after a minimum time apply to have the enrolment upgraded to PhD. This is subject to a set of performance and progress assessments intended to weed out those that are probably not going to make it. They will typically complete their MSc by thesis. It isn’t perfect, but it experience has shown it helps significantly. The weird thing about PhD funding in Oz, is that the universities are funded by the federal government, but the universities are now only paid for a student upon PhD completion. ABD means the university gets zip. This has focussed the minds.
I know of only a very few people who have managed to complete a PhD part time - whilst working for a living. It is dire. Those that try to write up after taking a job find it extremely difficult, and it is a prime cause of ABD. A very sympathetic and supportive spouse is usually the only way it works. One of our students quit work to go back to write up. His wife was really happy that he did this, and he competed with a very nice thesis. (Apparently after I very strongly advised him to to this (his job was driving him nuts), his wife called it the most sensible thing she had heard.) Spouses like that are a rare gem.
Speaking as one who did successfully complete a PhD part-time, I can concur that it is difficult - although maybe not quite “dire”. I was very fortunate that I could use the work I was being paid to do as the basis for my dissertation - I had an employer who was willing to let me work on a sufficiently challenging project and to publish the work, and I was able to find a thesis adviser who was willing to go along with the scheme. Even so, it took 8.5 years from the first post-master’s class to getting the diploma. I know another person who did his research completely apart from work - I have no idea how he managed.
A spouse willing to kick you butt repeatedly until you finish also helps…
Going to the OP’s question: my school offered two doctoral degrees in the engineering department, a PhD (with all of the requirements mentioned in previous posts) and a D.Eng (Doctor of Engineering), wich required completion of a “substantial engineering project”. I was actually considering the D.Eng instead of the PhD, but my adviser convinced me that a project significant enough to qualify for the D.Eng would need to have enough unique contribution to the state of the art that a PhD thesis could be developed from it - basically the difference between the degrees was a matter of presentation of the results. Possibly the D.Eng was meant as a consolation prize for ABD engineering students.
I have no idea if the school still grants D.Eng degrees (this is going back 25 years) or if they would accept any work completed before the project was actually approved (D.Eng still required passing DQEs and a convening a doctoral committee to approve and oversee the actual project).
It’s only very recently that PhDs were required to obtain a permanent position in academia in Britain. Even now I see the occasional advert for permanent lecturing positions in computer science that imply the institution is willing to overlook the lack of a PhD. Several very notable British computer scientists, e.g. Robin Milner, a winner of the Turing Award, and Christopher Strachey, first professor of Computer Science at Oxford, never obtained a PhD, and Turing only obtained his because he moved to the US to work under Church, his most important work being carried out before enrolling as a doctoral student whilst a research fellow in Cambridge with only an undergraduate degree.
Turing’s degrees were all in math, of course, since no such field as computer science existed when he got a Ph.D.
Which is perfectly reasonable, since computer science (at least, the sort of computer science Turning did) is a branch of mathematics.
What about other degrees, even non-doctorates? Assuming that I was smart enough to pass comprehensive examinations, is there any other degree, even if not a doctorate, that I could get primarily on the basis of an open-source project that relates to the discipline? E.g. could I get a degree in theology or divinity (e.g. MTh, DD, ThB, etc.) for writing Bible study software and passing a comprehensive examination in theology? How about earning an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) for writing and open-sourcing a video game with particularly beautiful scenery and also passing a comprehensive examination in fine art?
I would say that the important point about most works that involve an open source (or even closed source) coding effort, is that it isn’t the code that matters. The code is a vehicle by which the real work is expressed. If you wrote a beautiful video game, it wouldn’t be the code that got your work recognised, but the design. If there were two people involved, a designer and a coder, the designer would get the degree, not the coder.
Same in say divinity. If you created a bible study system, it would not be the system, but the population of the system with theological knowledge that would matter. It may be that you could find enough novel problems in epistemological representations that related to theological issues that you could make a PhD worthy contribution. But again, the actual code isn’t it.
About the only thing that the coding itself would make for is perhaps something akin to an apprenticeship style qualification. Where you could present such a project as a literal masterpiece. I could imagine a guide of coders accepting such. However I know of no such guild. (I would not be surprised if one existed.)
Thanks for the comments. In my question, I was implying that both the code and the design would be created by the same person. In fact, a design without code doesn’t really do anything - perhaps having both the creativity to come up with a good design and the coding skills to make it a reality could both count. I would expect it to be a unusual and novel path to a degree ++though. While most students in a religious degree program might be writing essays on what they think the best practices for relating certain Bible issues to the realities of the daily lives of police sergeants in Tokelau who are registered as official ethnic minorities, someone could come along and write PolynesianBiblePreacher 2018 Open Source where you could click a topic and a target demographic and it would automatically pop up a preaching strategy that emphasizes the latest best practices in Pacific Islands church development. Isn’t coming up with something non-ordinary part of getting many higher degrees?
Does anyone know if such a guild exists? It certainly could be said to exist in an informal sense in the Open Source community, but I am talking about an organization that could have a formal policy saying “Write an open-source app, submit it, get your level 1 membership. Write three open source apps, pass a comprehensive examination in Stallmanism, get your level 2 membership which comes with a ceremonial BanHammmer and a complimentary job referral service to find the most awesome IT jobs.” IT certifications (or at least the vast majority of them) don’t seem to match either - most of them are based around passing exams, not developing a portfolio of software.
No organization which requires passing an exam in “Stallmanism” would be caught dead asking its members to code “open-source” apps. Stallman has always harbored a great deal of animosity towards the “open source” movement and rarely passes up the opportunity to distance his philosophy from theirs.