Steve Tippins Ph.D.Helping doctoral students get their dissertation accepted, succeed in their careers, & change the world | Academic Career Advisor | Dissertation Chair & Founder, Beyond PhD Coaching | 35 + years of experience.

Are There Committee Members Who Are Notoriously Slow at Feedback?

18 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief advisory segment, the speaker acknowledges that some dissertation committee members are notoriously slow in providing feedback. While certain universities enforce formal response deadlines, the speaker emphasizes that the dissertation chair can play a pivotal role by establishing practical cut‑off dates for comments. By announcing a defense date (e.g., March 30) and stating that comments received after a pre‑set deadline (e.g., March 15) will be considered waived, the chair creates an implicit deadline without imposing a hard rule. This approach helps keep the defense and revision timeline on track while signaling that late feedback will not be factored into the decision.

Chapters

Are there any committee members who are notoriously slow with feedback? Yeah, there are people that are notoriously slow with feedback. Some universities have rules that they've got to respond by certain times. A lot of this can be helped by your chair. One of the tools that can be helpful if your chair can say, okay, we're going to have a defense, let's say, March 30th. We'd love your comments, but if you don't comment before March 15th, we'll just assume you're happy with it. So it's a way of imposing a deadline on them without just saying, "You gotta do this by this date," but it's also your chair saying, "And if you respond on the 25th of March, we're not taking it into consideration."