Read your thesis before you submit it

Too late for bachelor students (they had to submit on May 23rd), but in time for master students (who submit by the end of June): please read your thesis before you submit it.

One of the theses submitted this year obviously had comments and change tracking enabled. This is a good thing, especially when you are working on a document in a group. Students should use collaboration tools, and having experience in using word processors is a good thing once you start working in industry. But remember there is a difference between the draft version of your document and the release version that you expect an external examiner to read and give you a grade on. Yes, it eases the work of the reviewer to find the parts of the document that warrant further attention, but you do not want to point out the weak points of your thesis.

I did a similar mistake myself when I submitted my master thesis a decade ago. I had used a FrameMaker template of a thesis submitted earlier by a different student. It was a long evening before the day of submission, and somehow I did not fully update the table of contents. Days later I discovered that I had included parts of the table of contents from the other thesis. It did not affect the grading of the thesis, though.

About Author: Hanno Langweg

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