BEIJING — An education supervision office under the State Council has recently convened a talk to ask universities and institutions to improve the quality of doctoral dissertations, according to the Ministry of Education (MOE) on Nov 14.

Degree-awarding institutions who were found to have problems during a random paper sampling review in 2018 attended the meeting, which was also jointly organized by two departments of the MOE.

The meeting requires that institutions that attended the meeting analyze and inspect their weak points of maintaining the quality of doctoral dissertations and make a list of the problems.

It said that institutions should strengthen supervision in the process of admission, cultivation and thesis writing, as well as highlight the role of tutors.

Institutions are required to greatly reduce both the number and percentage of unqualified doctoral dissertations in the random sampling review in 2020, according to the meeting.

In 2018, a total of 6,572 doctoral dissertations were randomly selected for review, accounting for 10.4 percent of the total.