I just made a student very upset and I hate making students unhappy. So now I’m wondering if I’m being unreasonable in what I ask of them.
Here is what is going on. I supervise 10 independent researchers who are doing their Senior Assignment with me. Our Senior Assignment program is consistently rated as being among the best in the country, on the par with universities like Brown. We are very proud of this program and are committed to maintaining high standards of scholarship within it.
The student X wants to use Master’s theses as the majority of his critical sources for this research project. The work of literature he is analyzing is extremely famous and there is a humongous body of research on it yet he persists in using this collection of MA dissertations. My own doctoral dissertation analyzed this writer, and I know for a fact that the bibliography of critical sources on it in respectable peer-reviewed journals is very extensive. Also, the MA theses the student wants to use mostly come from very humdrum universities, which, to me, means that we cannot rely on their rigour.
Finally, after protracted and emotionally charged negotiations, I allowed the student to use the maximum of 2 MA theses for the project. He was still very unhappy and disappointed.
Do you allow students to use MA theses in their research? Am I being unreasonable?
P.S. My in-built spell-checker tries to change “dissertation” into “detestation.” Well, at least it isn’t “defenestration.”
Clarissa's Blog 
At the level this student is working he should be referencing published work that has successfully negotiated the peer review process. MA dissertations themselves, unless published by a reputable press or in journals simply do not cut the mustard.
You should never be afraid to challenge shoddy work. Students who cannot handle good criticism will never make it further in the world of scholarship. Faculty who do not have the couragwe to confront inadequate work let their students down very badly.
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“At the level this student is working he should be referencing published work that has successfully negotiated the peer review process. MA dissertations themselves, unless published by a reputable press or in journals simply do not cut the mustard.”
– This is exactly what I think and what I’ve been trying to convey to the student. I have published 2 peer-reviewed articles on the basis of my own MA dissertation and I believe that unless it has been peer-reviewed and published, it is not a reliable source. But the student looked so distraught that I began to doubt myself.
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Absolutely, peer-reviewed, published information has to be the primary basis of their work – at this level, I’d expect the best pieces to be potentially publishable and them all to be using that level of referencing. Thank you for holding the line for all of us!
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Thank you for the support! I was starting to feel like some sort of a monster here. The student sat there, literally hugging the stack of MA theses to his heart and his eyes were filled with tears.
I gave a lecture on what constitutes a good, reliable source at the beginning of the semester and then there was a library workshop on the same subject. Yet this is the result.
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Oh I never allow students to cite from MA or PhD dissertations. Especially not when students are writing their senior theses. I don’t even allow one quotation from a dissertation! I tell students that MA/PhD dissertations can be useful to them if they want to look through the Works Cited/ Bibliography. But that’s pretty much where their usefulness ends. ….. Come to think of it, I’m fairly rigid in this regard.While I still allow students to cite from less reputable presses, I always emphasize and stipulate that they should be looking for University Presses, or “established” trade presses (i.e. Routledge, Macmillan etc. etc.) Students sometimes complain but they always “get it” in the end…….Overall, I don’t view it as being harsh so much as teaching the students the realities of academic research. And I find it results in _much_ better work and that’s good for them! 🙂
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” I tell students that MA/PhD dissertations can be useful to them if they want to look through the Works Cited/ Bibliography.”
– That’s what I said to him. I showed him the bibliographies in all of these MA theses and asked why he is not using them instead. Also, he kept insisting that the theses count as “published work” because they were delivered as bound copies. So I tried explaining that I can print anything on my printer and have it bound at the copy center. And that will not make it published. I even switched to English to explain all this but the result was the same.
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Another vote that you were being entirely reasonable and giving some very sensible advice! If there was almost nothing available on the text, that might be one thing, but if the sources are out there, then part of the point of the assignment should surely be finding and using them well?
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” If there was almost nothing available on the text, that might be one thing, but if the sources are out there, then part of the point of the assignment should surely be finding and using them well?”
– Exactly! This is probably the most studied and read XXth century novel from Spain.
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A student wrote a M. S. thesis with me in 1970. There was an error in it that I did not discover, although most of it was correct. A doctoral student of mine found and corrected this error, in the 1990’s. The M. S. thesis is now regarded as an important steppingstone in the study of this particular topic, along with the doctoral dissertation which followed it up. If something is correct, and turns out later to be important, it does not matter, as far as I can see, that it happens to be contained in a master’s thesis.
On the other hand, looking beyond such theses is also important to learn to do, even if in the end, the content of a particular thesis turns out to be critically important. The importance of work is not determined by where or whether it is published, although one hopes that the opposite is true, namely, that being published in a notable venue is perhaps evidence of quality.
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The problem is that I will not be able to read all of these MA theses. Each is at least 100 pages long. And the students do not have the expertise that will enable them to decide if the thesis is good. Somebody needs to make that decision for them. I believe that a board of reviewers should do that.
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I’m with you on this one – masters and PhD theses are great for looking for references, and also for reading succinct summaries of topics. Gives you an idea of where to *start*, not where you’re going! But there are a couple of notable exceptions in my brain for these. I’m a scientist – we use data. Lots of data. And in my field, there’s a fair amount of data that exist only in masters or PhD (most often PhD) theses – people who did their thesis then left science, or let the dataset languish unpublished, because the conclusions they drew after generating it weren’t terribly interesting. The data is still extremely valid data, and is quite often very useful in our analyses. It just to happens that it might not be published in a peer-reviewed journal, because the author never bothered to do it. And in that case, I would cite the thesis. I have, in fact, done just that. I’ve also cited a thesis that was just completed, when I was working with the author, and knew that she wasn’t planning to publish it at any time soon, but it was necessary to the discussion of my own data. But theses should *never* form the entire bibliography of a paper or project… not ever.
–A (hopefully responsible scholar and) 2nd year graduate student.
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I am kind of puzzled why the student would want to do this in the first place. Is there some advantage I’m not seeing?
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I’m guessing maybe the student feels that those particular theses will support his thesis and if s/he has to account for the wider body of research s/he has to rethink the entire class?
And I’m guessing students use their “senior assignment” as an example of the kind of graduate level work they are capable of?
You do the student no favors by letting him/her cherry pick the sources. The papers I did in college that relied on a small group of sources were not very good even though they got As.
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