The viva is the one part of a doctorate you cannot revise your way through. It is also the most preparable, because the questions are not arbitrary — they are generated by your own thesis, from a small number of predictable directions. We interrogate your text from every one of those directions at once and hand you the questions, the reasoning behind each, and a defensible line for every answer.
The problem this solves
Most viva anxiety is not fear of the examiners. It is the fear of a question you have never considered — of discovering, in the room, that there was an obvious weakness in your own work you had somehow never articulated to yourself.
That fear is well founded, and it is almost entirely fixable. Examiners are not trying to catch you out with exotica. They read the thesis, they find the places where the argument is thin or the justification is missing, and they ask about those. Which means the questions are derivable from the text itself.
The difficulty is that you cannot derive them. You are too close to it. You know why you made every decision, so the places where the thesis does not explain a decision are invisible to you — and those are exactly the places an examiner will stop.
Six dimensions. One pass. Nothing left uncovered.
A viva is not a single conversation. It is five or six different examinations happening in the same room, and candidates come unstuck because they prepared thoroughly for one of them and not at all for the others.
Your thesis is interrogated from all six of these angles at once:
- Methodological — why this design, why not the obvious alternative, and whether you can defend the choice rather than merely describe it.
- Theoretical and conceptual — whether the framework you built actually holds the study up, and whether you can articulate it without reaching for the literature.
- Data-analytical — what your data genuinely supports, where your interpretation has run ahead of it, and how you handle being pressed on the difference.
- Contribution and significance — the question every viva contains in some form: what is new here, and why should the field care?
- Field specialisation — your work read against the conventions of your own discipline. What your field expects as standard, the debates an examiner in your area will already have in mind, and the terminology and reporting norms that mark a candidate as fluent in their own subject.
- Adversarial — the direct challenges. The places a hostile reader would push hardest, surfaced deliberately rather than left for the room.
Assembling six perspectives by hand means finding a methodologist, a theorist, a data specialist, a subject expert in your exact area, and someone willing to be genuinely hostile to your work — then coordinating five diaries around your submission date. Most candidates get one supervisor and a single mock viva. This gives you all six, generated from your own text, in minutes.
The field specialisation pass is the one candidates underestimate. A methodologist can tell you your sampling is thin. Only someone reading as a specialist in your area can tell you that the debate you treated as settled is the one your examiner has spent a decade arguing the other side of.
The outsider's eye you cannot give yourself
The most valuable thing here is not the list of problems. It is being made to see your own research from outside your own head.
You know why every decision was made, so you cannot see the places where the document does not explain them. You know what you meant, so you cannot see where the text does not say it. An outsider reads only what is on the page — and the gaps they notice immediately are the ones you stopped being able to see years ago.
Researchers routinely tell us the report changed how they understood their own project, not just how they fixed it. [SONNY: a real one-line quote from a customer would be far stronger than this sentence — drop one in when you have consent to use it.]
Common PhD viva questions — and why a generic list is not enough
Search for "common PhD viva questions" and you will find the same forty or fifty questions repeated across dozens of sites. What is your original contribution to knowledge? Why did you choose this methodology? What are the limitations of your study? How would you do it differently? Who benefits from your findings?
Those lists are not wrong. Examiners genuinely do ask questions in these families, and you should be able to answer all of them. But a generic list has a hard ceiling, and it is worth understanding exactly where that ceiling sits.
What a generic list cannot tell you
- Which of them apply to you. "What are your study's limitations?" is universal. Which limitations your examiner will press on is specific to your design, your sample, and your claims.
- What a good answer sounds like for your work. Knowing the question is the easy half. Knowing which of your three limitations to lead with, and which to concede immediately, is the half that decides the outcome.
- The questions that exist only in your thesis. The most dangerous question in any viva is the one arising from a specific claim on a specific page — the paragraph where you reached further than your data allows. No generic list contains that question, because it is about you.
- Where your discipline differs. What counts as an adequate sample, an acceptable framework, or a defensible ethics position varies enormously by field. Generic lists flatten all of that.
This is the gap the Viva Preparation engine fills. It reads your actual thesis and generates the questions your text invites, across all six dimensions, each with the reasoning behind it and a defensible line of answer. You still get the universal questions — because your thesis invites those too — but you get them answered against your own work, alongside the ones only your thesis could produce.
Who it is for
Once your thesis is submitted
The natural moment. The text is settled, so the questions generated from it are the questions your examiners will be reading towards.
A few weeks before the date
Enough time to think through the difficult answers properly rather than memorise anything.
Before a mock viva
Going into a mock with the likely questions already mapped makes the mock far more useful — you spend it practising delivery rather than discovering problems.
If you are defending remotely
Online vivas are harder to read and easier to freeze in. Knowing the terrain in advance matters more, not less.
What the packs contain
The Questions Pack gives you the examination questions. The Preparation Pack adds everything above them — the analysis of where you are strong, where you are exposed, and how to hold the whole defence together.
The five question categories
Questions arrive grouped, because examiners think in these groups too.
- Examiner Challenges — the direct pressure points, where the thesis is most open to objection.
- Contribution and Significance — what is new here, and why it matters. The question every viva contains in some form.
- Methodology and Methods — why this design, and why not the obvious alternative.
- Findings and Analysis — what the data actually supports, and where you have reached past it.
- Research Design and Conceptual Framework — whether the theoretical scaffolding holds the study up.
Each question comes with why it is likely to be asked and a suggested approach to answering it — the shape of a defensible answer, not a script.
Minutes, not months
The alternative to this is waiting. Waiting for a supervisor with six other students, waiting for a reviewer who has your manuscript for four months, waiting for a viva to discover what you should have known before you submitted.
Upload your document and the report exists before you have finished your coffee. You do not book anything, you do not wait for a slot, and you do not explain your project to anyone.
What this pack is not
- It is not a prediction of the exact questions you will face. Nobody can supply that, and any service claiming to is selling you something it cannot deliver.
- It is not a script to memorise. Reciting a prepared answer to a question that was not quite asked is one of the clearest signals to an examiner that you are performing rather than thinking.
- It does not replace a mock viva with a real person who can follow up on your answers.
What it is: every question your thesis invites, derived from your own text, across every dimension an examiner will use — so that nothing said in that room is the first time you have considered it. That is the whole point. Not confidence from having memorised answers, but the calm that comes from having already been somewhere.
Use it to think, not to memorise
The candidates who do best in vivas are not the ones with the most prepared answers. They are the ones who have already thought hard about their own weaknesses and can discuss them without becoming defensive.
Read the weaknesses section first, and sit with the uncomfortable parts. An examiner can tell the difference between a candidate who has genuinely considered a limitation and one who is reciting a form of words about it.
How it works
- Choose your check. Pick the report you want in the panel on this page. The price shown is the price charged — it is read from the same configuration the checkout bills from.
- Verify your email. We send a six-digit code. This is how your report is tied to you and to nobody else, and it is why reports cannot be intercepted by someone who guesses a reference number.
- Upload your document. PDF, DOCX or TXT, up to 50 MB. A full thesis, a single chapter or a manuscript all work.
- Receive your report. Generated within minutes and delivered to the address you verified. Your document is deleted once the report exists.
What happens to your document
Your file is used for one purpose: producing your report. Once the report has been generated, the source document is deleted from our servers. It is not kept for training, it is not shared, and it is not readable by anyone who has not verified the email address the report belongs to.
This matters more for academic work than for most things people upload. An unpublished manuscript or an unexamined thesis is the one document in your career you cannot afford to have circulating, and a service that quietly retained it would be a liability rather than a help.
See a real report before you buy
Sample Questions Packs and Preparation Packs, so you can see the kind of questions the engine generates from a thesis.
View Viva Preparation samples →Common questions
Are these the exact questions I will be asked?
No, and any service promising that is selling you something it cannot deliver. These are the questions your thesis invites, generated from your own text, with the reasoning for why each is likely to come up.
When should I run it?
Once your thesis is submitted or very close to final. The questions come from your text, so they are most useful when that text has stopped moving.
Which pack should I buy?
The Questions Pack if you want the questions and will do your own analysis around them. The Preparation Pack if you also want the strengths, weaknesses and defence strategy worked through for you.
Does it replace a mock viva?
No. A mock viva with a real person who can follow up on your answers does something this cannot. The pack makes a mock more valuable by telling you what to practise.
Do I upload the whole thesis?
Yes. The questions are generated from the full argument, so a chapter alone would produce a partial pack. The minimum is 300 words, but the whole document is the right input.
How long does it take?
The Preparation Pack makes several large model calls and is the slowest of our checks. Allow longer than the others, though it is still delivered in minutes rather than days.
Ready to run it?
Upload your thesis and have every question in front of you within minutes.
Start your check ↑