How may credit hours I can transfer to PhD

Graduate School
1

Hi;

I know rules vary from university to university, but I’m asking in general.

I study for post graduate diploma around 15 CH and I also have master degree worth of 31 hours, so total 46 credit hours:

  1. usually, how many CH I could transfer from those 46
  2. some of those are independent study course WITH grade, could I transfer those.
  3. some of them is thesis preparation WITHOUT grade, could I transfer those.
  4. after transferring the permissible credit hours, how many years it will take me to finish PhD.

Thanks!

2

It will depend on how many of those courses satisfy the course requirements for each Ph.D. I don’t think that you understand what is required in a Ph.D. program.

3

  1. Depends on the program, but I wouldn’t expect to be able to transfer more than ~24 credits, and I’d be surprised if you could transfer in more than ~12.

  2. Maybe. Each program will treat this differently, and it’ll depend on the content and quality of the independent study.

  3. Maybe. Depends on the program. There’s no ‘in general’ answer to this question or the previous one. Each program will handle this individually.

  4. You should know that coursework is not the major determinant of how long a PhD program takes. More often, it’s the dissertation. Let’s say that you are going into a computer science PhD program which normally take students 5 years on average to finish. (The average includes the time of students who come in with an MS, but let’s ignore that for now). Your coursework might shave a semester off of that, but your time to degree could be extended by a semester or more because your PI insists that you publish 4 first-authored papers before you graduate, or because you failed your first round of comprehensive exams, or because it took you a long time to get your algorithm that’s a key part of your dissertation to work, or because you take time off to get married or have children…etc.

4

Agreed that there often is just two years of coursework for a PhD (in addition to the dissertation) and so you won’t be able to skip many of those courses. Some masters students take PhD-level courses and sometimes those can be used for the PhD at the same university.

5

At UIUC for ECE, there are 64 credits of coursework required for the PhD. If you have an MS, they waive 32. Period. You don’t have to have 32 credits in your MS and they just have be in a related department, the MS does NOT need to be in the same research area.

MIT ECE doesn’t care what you did before you arrive, they have a curriculum and you follow it. Already have an MS? Good for you, now take the courses anyway.

The point is just that it varies by department.

6

Thank you …
so if I transfer 32 credits … how long it will take me to finish PhD at UIUC (including the dissertation)?

7

Well, in ECE at UIUC, having already done a masters elsewhere, 3 years would be fast, 4-5 typical, and 6 or more would be slow.

8

It will take you however long it takes you. Really, it’s not possible to tell up front. You can estimate - like cosmicfish said, probably around 4-5 years, maybe 6. But you really have no idea what kind of circumstances will pop up and, like I mentioned before, it’s really exams and dissertation work that tend to stretch PhD students’ work beyond what they originally estimated when they started.