Dissertation Defense Questions: What Committees Actually Ask and How to Answer Them
July 20, 2026You revised it twice. You added more sources. You followed every note your chair gave you. And the background of the study still came back with feedback.
Are you that student, sitting at your computer asking, what is wrong with my background of the study? I am still lost.
I spent more than fifteen years as a dissertation chair. I was the person writing those feedback notes. And I can tell you that when a background section keeps getting sent back, it is almost never because the writing is bad. It is because the section is doing the wrong job.
What your chair is actually checking
Most students treat the background of the study like a history lesson. They summarize everything ever written about their topic and hope the volume proves the study matters.
Your chair is not checking your volume. Your chair is checking your logic. The background of the study has one job: to walk your reader from the broad problem area down to the specific gap your study will fill, so that by the last paragraph, your problem statement feels inevitable.
When your section reads like a book report instead of a funnel, the feedback comes back. And it will keep coming back no matter how many sources you add, because more sources do not fix a logic problem.
The two question test
Here is the test I gave my own doctoral students, and it is the same test I teach in the video above. Read each paragraph of your background section and ask two questions.
First, does this paragraph help explain why my problem exists?
Second, does this paragraph help explain why it matters right now?
If a paragraph does not answer yes to at least one of those questions, it does not belong in your background of the study. It might be interesting. It might have taken you a full weekend to write. It still has to go, because every paragraph that fails the test blurs the path to your problem statement, and a blurry path is exactly what your chair is flagging when the section comes back.
Where this usually leads
Here is the part most students do not see. A weak background of the study is usually a symptom, not the disease. The real issue sits underneath it, in a problem statement that describes a topic instead of a documented problem. Fix the problem statement, and the background section almost writes itself, because now you know exactly what gap every paragraph is walking toward.
That is why I built a free tool that scores your problem statement the way a chair reads it. Paste in your statement exactly as it appears in your draft today, and it will show you where it holds up and where a committee member would push back.
Score your problem statement with the free Problem Statement Evaluator
New episodes of The 3 Minute Chair come out every week, one real student question at a time, answered from the chair’s side of the table.
Don’t stress. We will get through it.
Dr. Rolanda Anderson
Dissertation Gurus
