Why a mock viva is not the same as reading your thesis again
Rereading your own thesis prepares you to recognise it. It does not prepare you to defend it under real questioning.
Most PhD candidates prepare for their viva the same way: they reread the thesis, cover to cover, and hope familiarity translates into confidence. It rarely does. A viva is not a comprehension test. It is an interrogation of your choices, and the questions that matter are the ones you did not put in the thesis because you assumed they were obvious.
A structured mock viva works differently. It puts an examiner style questioner in front of the candidate, asking the questions a real examiner is likely to ask: why this method and not another, what you would do differently now, where the weakest part of the argument is. The value is not in rehearsing answers. It is in discovering, before the real viva, which questions you cannot yet answer cleanly.
The candidates who walk into a viva calm are, almost without exception, the ones who have already been asked the hard question once before, in a room where getting it wrong cost them nothing.
Further Reading
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