China to pilot thesis-free postgraduate degrees in five disciplines

China will pilot the use of practical achievements as an alternative to dissertations for professional postgraduate degrees in translation, agriculture, clinical medicine, accounting and art, according to a policy issued on Monday by the Office of the State Council Academic Degrees Committee.

The move responds to the country's growing demand for high-level applied talent, which has driven the steady expansion of professional degree programs, a senior official from the office said. Traditional thesis-based assessment has been seen as too narrow to fully reflect professional degree students' practical innovation and contributions, the official said.

The legal foundation for the reform was laid in April 2024, when the Academic Degrees Law for the first time explicitly allowed graduate students to apply for degrees through either a thesis defense or a defense of practical achievements.

In September 2024, basic requirements for engineering doctoral candidates to obtain professional degrees through either route were released on a trial basis, with positive results.

Since the trial began, more than 140 students in pilot programs for specialized engineering master's and doctoral degrees have applied for degrees based on practical achievements, providing new cases and replicable experience for the reform, according to the official.

The latest reform remains at the trial and exploratory stage and will be rolled out in batches, the policy document said.

For the five newly added disciplines, professional degree education steering committees will formulate basic requirements for master's and doctoral programs, specifying the sources, forms, content structure, writing standards and evaluation criteria for different types of practical achievements.

Degree-granting institutions will use these requirements to develop their own implementation rules and comprehensive guidelines covering topic selection and rationale, supervision throughout the research process and evaluation, the document said.

Practical achievements must be completed independently by students under the guidance of their supervisors, or students must have undertaken the core work as principal contributors.

Institutions will also revise rules on degree conferral, supervisor selection and intellectual property rights to ensure quality control throughout the process, according to the policy.

The reform builds on earlier pilot programs that demonstrated how practical achievements can serve as an alternative to traditional dissertations.

At China University of Petroleum (Beijing), master's student Zhang Baichuan defended a practical achievement in May 2025: a drilling fluid additive developed during nearly two years of research conducted in collaboration with a company.

A panel that included three industry experts unanimously recommended awarding him an engineering master's degree, giving his work an "excellent" rating.

At Shandong University, Wang Qian became the university's first student to earn a master's degree through a practical achievement last year.

During an internship at Goertek Inc, a virtual reality equipment manufacturer, Wang developed an optical lens bonding process and submitted a 45,000-word research report along with a design video.

For translation programs, the shift addresses a long-standing tension between academic requirements and professional training.

Hu Dan, deputy director of the Australian Studies Centre at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said requiring professional master's students to situate their work within a theoretical framework "not only departs from the original purpose of professional degree programs but also disconnects from students' curricula and employment outcomes".

"Under the proposed approach, the practical achievement for translation students will take the form of a translation practice report," she said. Students generally select around 30,000 words of English source material, translate it, and then document and analyze the difficulties they encountered, along with the strategies and methods they used to address them, Hu added.

Although the report includes discussion of translation strategies, students will not be required to write a thesis-style paper based on a purely academic theoretical perspective or framework, she said.

zoushuo@chinadaily.com.cn