Defence is part of the examination of students of postgraduate students.
Tutorial Fellows at the department are usually invited to the examinations of MSc and PhD candidates. The reason for the invitation of Tutorial Fellows to the committee of examiners is to assist in taking minutes of the specialised and technical discussion, typical in such defences. This webpage clarifies on minute-taking during MSc and PhD defences. This clarification is necessary so that candidates do not see the minutes of the deliberations after the defence. The documents the tutorial fellow/academic staff will handle are:
- Minutes,
- Examiners' reports, and
- Consolidated List of Corrections.
The two subsequent paragraphs will provide some clarification on the output of the tutorial fellow after the defence. Only two documents are required: the Minutes and the Consolidated List of Corrections.
Minutes should record the accounts of the committee's meeting. To avoid duplication, there is no need to copy-paste the examiners' reports into the minutes since the minutes are usually filed together with the examiners' reports. The minutes and examiners' reports are confidential and will not be sent to the student.
For the Consolidated List of Corrections, the academic secretary should copy-paste all the examiners' reports to a new document and remove the recommendations/classifications provided in the reports. Remove all identifiable personal information (such as the name of the examiner, institution, and department) from the consolidated list of corrections. You may include some corrections made during the defence. Provide a section at the end of the list for the first supervisor to sign. The consolidated list of corrections will be shared with the supervisor and will be forwarded to the faculty for record-keeping and the student to implement the corrections. The academic secretary may take advantage of the following templates.
The templates are continuously updated. Ensure you download the latest version.
Once the two documents are ready, the academic secretary should send the minutes to the Faculty of Engineering Postgraduate Correspondences Email: pg-feng@uonbi.ac.ke and copy the first supervisor. The subject of the email should be: "Defence Minutes - Student Name - Registration Number" for example, 'Defence Minutes - Another Student - F16/12345/2021'. The minutes should be sent within a week of the defence being held.
[Webpage updated: 2025-05-03]
