Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

There has been a discussion I have been following in my office e-mail about whether there is a need to change the thesis guidelines.

The way that we do things now, the students have a suggestion which faculty members they want their panelists to be, along with alternates in case one or all of their choices gets rejected. This gets passed on to their thesis adviser, who then gives it to the thesis coordinator, who finalizes the list.

It is then up to the students to find a common free time for their adviser and panelists when they could schedule their defense.

There is a written rule that thesis defenses should be done on or before the week before finals, but it is rarely followed. They are usually scheduled on the week of finals up to two to three days after course card distribution. This gives the students up to the deadline for changing of grades (two weeks after course card distribution) to submit their final copy with the (more often than not) revisions the panelists have asked, reproduced three times and bound, plus the CD with the document file, source code (if any) and poster presentation file.

Since there are several disciplines under the department’s scope (i.e. solid state, optics, astronomy) there was also a complaint given about how some majors/specializations have an easier topic and task than the others. This particularly targets the medical instrumentation group, who, I have mentioned before, have conducted experiments with less than 50 samples.

Because of this apparent “unfairness” in terms of difficulty of thesis assignments, there has been a call to completely standardize and centralize the department’s thesis-related decisions, including scheduling of defenses and deadlines.

There was even a suggestion that the thesis defenses should be scheduled around the midterm week, so that the students will have enough time to work on all the revisions the panelists require (except if it is a major overhaul) so that they can be given their grades on time instead of always relying on the change of grade.

On my part, I think that this is workable, provided that the thesis advisers, under whose supervision the students have to be graded in their three thesis subjects, strictly adhere to a procedure that prevents their advisees from cramming everything (the paper, slide presentation) during the last weeks of the term.

Proposals could be done during the midterm period of the first thesis subject. By the end of that term, the students would be graded not only on whether they have successfully defended their proposal, but also how efficiently they have used the last seven weeks of the term in attaining their final goal.

By the start of the second thesis subject, the students should be at least a third of the way finished with their data collection. By the end of that term, they should be done with the experiment. If the topic requires more than three months to complete, they should use the downtime to already start working on their paper.

Otherwise, the third thesis subject should be all writing, except in the circumstances of long durations mentioned above. Either case, by the second month of classes, the students should be finalizing their paper and slide presentation for a panel already. It can be done, needing just discipline of the students to the schedule given.