China Overhauls Graduate Degrees, Allowing Practical Work to Replace the Traditional Thesis

China will allow graduate students in five professional-degree fields to seek degrees based on practical work rather than a traditional thesis, expanding an experiment meant to produce more application-oriented talent.

The State Council Academic Degrees Committee Office said the first fields covered by the policy are translation, agriculture, clinical medicine, accounting and the arts. The initiative follows an earlier trial for engineering master’s and doctoral candidates.