Abstract
Bachelor’s and Master’s theses are an opportunity for students to dive deep into a research question and gain in-depth knowledge about a research topic. At the end of a curriculum, theses act as a kind of bridge between the educational stage and work or further study. Thesis supervision is a resource-intensive task and often a critical factor for the quality of a thesis. After decades of experience with different methods, we have developed a concept for continuous thesis supervision and applied it to two specific degree programs at our university, the Bachelor's program in Computer Science and Digital Communication and the Master's program in Software Design and Engineering. Compared to traditional supervision methods, this concept has led to a higher adherence to deadlines and to a higher quality of the final theses. In this paper, we present our findings on different types of supervisors and our concept for continuous thesis supervision, which can be adapted to each identified supervisor type. This concept comprises several methods, intended to inspire other supervisors to choose the set of methods that best suits their needs. We also describe how this concept can be adapted for project-based courses.
Highlights
At the end of a degree program, students are usually required to write a final scientific thesis to demonstrate their maturity and readiness to investigate a complex topic in depth
Students work on a complex problem, while most other courses deal with complicated topics [1]
We developed and implemented the presented concept for continuous theses supervision for the first time in the summer semester of 2017
Summary
At the end of a degree program, students are usually required to write a final scientific thesis to demonstrate their maturity and readiness to investigate a complex topic in depth. This requires two major changes in student behavior. We analyze the goals and challenges of scientific theses, present a categorization of supervisors along two dimensions—“responsibility” and “autonomy”—and derive a recommendation for a supervising process addressing all types of supervisors. This paper is an extension of our previous work presented in [13] and includes the adaptation of our concept for project-based courses.
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