Another DNB thesis lands in my inbox—joining its MD cousins.
My task is to evaluate it. A formality, really. The postgraduate has written it, the professor has supervised it—or so the paperwork claims.
I enter the username, type the password, and open the file—without hope.
An immaculate PDF appears. Crisp formatting. Polished grammar. Elegant English. Tables aligned with military precision. P-values refusing to cross the 𝘓𝘢𝘹𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘬𝘩𝘢- the 0.05 threshold. It looks like research, but it isn’t science.
There is no question, no curiosity, no wonder. Only data, arranged to pass. Methods are borrowed. Results, brazenly copied. Plagiarism software outwitted. This isn’t scholarship. It’s certification.
What happened?
There was a time when the thesis was a rite of passage—typed line by line, slowly, painfully. Pages corrected, retyped, carried with care and pride. Imperfect, yes, but sincere. Today, a ghostwriter assembles your thesis while you sleep. For a fee, you purchase data and lease your integrity.
Each thesis I read tells the same silent tale: borrowed questions, recycled methods, conclusions without meaning. The student doesn’t understand it. The guide doesn’t care. The institution demands compliance, not curiosity.
How did we get here?
First came the software. Then the internet. Medical colleges mushroomed. Degrees multiplied. But the time to teach research disappeared. So did the desire to learn it. The rot spread—quietly, completely, from the top down.
Truth, today, is casualty.
We’ve made deception routine. We’ve taught our students that science is not a way of thinking, but a passport to the MD exams. That it is easier to fake findings than to ask questions. That looking like a scientist matters more than thinking like one.
This is not just bad science. This is anti-science.
And no one pauses. Not the student. Not the guide. The department head does not care. The Dean looks the other way. The examiner does not blow the whistle.
Not even the journal editor who may one day publish this charade. With in-house journals and institutions chasing publication metrics, every thesis stands a near-certain chance of getting published.
And ignored.
We are not training scientists. We are producing impostors.
We must stop. Scrap the thesis, if we must. Yes, stop them. At the very least, don’t compel students to partake in this parody. Let them learn honesty before technique. Let them fail truthfully, rather than succeed through fraud.
Sir Doug Altman, the British statistician, warned us in the 𝗕𝗠𝗝 in 1994: “𝘞𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩, 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 𝘥𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘴.”
He was right then. He is right now.
The publish-or-perish culture lives on. But the tragedy is this: we are publishing—and still perishing.