Pass with revisions: what it means after your defense and what happens next

"Pass with revisions" means the committee accepts that you defended your work and requires changes before it signs. You have not failed. Many students leave their defense with a list of changes.

What the phrase means in practice depends on your institution, so the first thing to do is find out the rules where you study.

The usual outcomes

Programs name the outcomes differently, but they follow the same pattern.

• Pass. The committee signs, and you submit the final copy with any small corrections.
• Pass with minor revisions. Typos, clarifications, a missing reference, small additions. Your chair often checks these alone.
• Pass with major revisions. Substantial changes, such as reworking an analysis, adding a section, or rewriting a chapter. The full committee or specific members may need to approve the new version.
• Fail or resubmit. The work does not meet the standard, and the committee sets out what must change before a second defense.

In the UK, Ireland, Kenya and India the viva has its own set of outcomes. Our guide to the PhD viva voce lists them.

What to do in the first week

1. Get the revisions in writing. If the committee gave them orally, ask your chair to confirm them by email, and reply with your understanding of each item.
2. Find out who must approve the changes. The chair alone, one member, or the whole committee. This decides your timeline.
3. Find out the deadline. Graduate schools set a final submission date for each term. Missing it can mean waiting for the next term, and sometimes paying fees again.
4. Sort the list into fix, clarify, and rework, as we describe in how to respond to committee comments.

How to finish

Work through the list in order of difficulty, hardest first, and keep a response table with the page number of each change. Send the revised file to the person who must approve it, with the table.

When the committee agrees, the last steps are administrative: signature pages, the final formatting review by your graduate school, and the upload to the repository. These take longer than students expect, and a rejected format check can cost days. Our guides to formatting mistakes that return drafts and margins cover what the format reviewers check.

How long it takes

The time depends on the size of the revisions and on how fast your committee reads. Minor revisions can be finished in days. Major revisions can take weeks, and some programs allow a fixed period, so ask your chair for the date.

Mistakes to avoid

Do not change anything the committee did not ask for without telling them. Do not assume the revisions are small until you have the list in writing. Do not wait to check the graduate school's deadline.

Need a hand finishing the revisions and the final format?

The Two Dissertation Moms offers thesis or dissertation formatting to meet your graduate school's template, and editing for the language and citations in the final copy.