DgcityChina will allow students in professional clinical medicine master’s and doctoral programs to graduate on the strength of a practical achievement rather than a research thesis, under draft rules released by a government advisory panel. A candidate might, for example, present a rigorous analysis of an unusual clinical case or a study of a problem afflicting a hospital.
The change makes medicine the second field, after engineering, to embrace the alternative route. Since 2024, engineering postgraduates across the country have been allowed to qualify by developing a new product, technique, project or installation. Officials say translation, agriculture, accounting and the arts are expected to follow.
The reform targets a long-standing complaint about professional degrees in China: that doctors and engineers trained for practical careers have been forced to chase publication in academic journals, often producing research of marginal value, to satisfy graduation requirements designed for scholars. Professional medicine programs in China typically last three years and are taken by medical graduates and practicing physicians.
A spinal surgeon at Peking University Third Hospital said the first practical doctorate in clinical medicine was awarded in June to a student who built artificial-intelligence software that helps classify a rare spinal condition and recommend treatment. Supporters argue the approach pushes trainees to find problems at the bedside and solve them scientifically.
The hard part, advisers acknowledge, will be assessment. Standards must be credible and transparent yet tailored to specialties as different as cardiology and dermatology, and universities will have broad latitude to set their own rules. Some committee members worry the public will read the change as a softening of the degree rather than a redirection of it.
Several leading hospitals affiliated with universities in Beijing and Shanghai have quietly run pilots of their own, allowing surgical trainees to submit technical innovations or systematic reviews of difficult operations. The national rollout will force less-prepared institutions to build the machinery to judge such work: panels of senior clinicians, external examiners and defenses conducted in front of practicing doctors rather than literature scholars. Students may find the new route no easier than a thesis. A useful clinical tool or a genuinely instructive case study requires years of ward work and data collection, and examiners insist that rigor, rather than format, is what the degree certifies.
