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Roughly how many words are they?
Undergrad: 10,000 to 15,000 words
Masters: 20,000 to 30,000 (MPhil: 30,000 to 45,000)
PhD: 90,000 to 120,000 words (depends on your area of specialisation)
How much do they decide your overall grade of your course?
This depends on the uni, course and level. At undergrad level at the uni I'm at, the mark you get counts towards your final degree mark just like the mark you'd get for a taught module. At Masters level, I think it has a higher impact on your final mark, as it is more of an independent research project. And then at PhD...the thesis is everything. You either complete it to the viva board's satisfaction or you don't.
Who judges them, is it one lecturer or some kind of governing body?
Undergrad & Masters: Your supervisor assigns a mark, which is confirmed by an external examiner.
PhD: You have to sit through a verbal examination (known as a viva, defence, or any of a hundred other, fear-inspiring names) held by a board of three academics in your field. Usually two professors from your home university and one external. The external will most likely be an expert in your field of study who knows more about this than you can hope to have achieved in three/four years of research. These three individuals conduct a rigorous dissection of your thesis, questioning you on whatever caught their eye when they read it. You have to defend your hypothesis, claims, research design, research results, discussion...basically everything. At the end of all this, there are a number of options:
1. You are given a heary handshake and can call yourself 'Dr.'
2. You are given a provisional title, based on the carrying out of minor corrections. Usually within a two-three week deadline, based on the amount of corrections to be made (structure, grammar, spelling, etc).
3. You are told your thesis needs major reworking. Extensive re-writes are neccessary, possibly a complete verhaul of your conclusions and discussions. Deadline for this is generally in the region of six months.
4. You fail.
There's a wide range inbetween those 4 options of course...
My thesis is progressing at a pace matched only by antarctic glaciers. Writing everything down in a clear and structured fashion is proving more difficult than I first imagined. It's sucking up every waking hour, and yes, I too have lost my social life. If all goes well this will see its end in July. By this time I will in all probability have fully fledged RSI, be clinically blind from staring at a crappy cut-price university monitor and be reduced to eating cold spaghetti from cans in my office for sustenance. Anyone who's considering a PhD: Start writing the damn thing from day one. No, really, start writing something, anything. It's better than finding yourself faced with blank space and no idea where you're taking this thing with four months left to go... |
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