MA Supervision Arrangements
Students should note that an MA dissertation is designed to be
"an
independent piece of research focusing on the selection and analysis of a topic,
design of the research, its execution and presentation as a dissertation" (Hart,
2005, p. 5). Because an MA dissertation is designed to test your ability to do
independent research, you are expected to work largely on your own, with your
supervisor providing general guidance (but not e.g. designing test materials for
you, or writing or re-writing parts of your dissertation, or proof-reading it
for you). General supervision guidelines are outlined in the MA handbook. Here
are some of the most important points:
- In the departmental workload model, it is assumed that staff will spend
around 15 working hours on each dissertation they supervise. How this time
is spend will vary from one member of staff to another, but a typical
pattern might be that 4 hours are spend on individual face-to-face
supervision, 9 hours reading and commenting on draft material produced by
the student, and 2 hours marking the final dissertation
- The majority of supervision will take place in the third term.
- Your supervisor will not normally read any given draft section of your
dissertation more than once, and cannot be expected to proof-read or
ghost-write the final version.
In addition, individual members of staff have their own code of conduct with
respect to MA supervision. You can find the relevant information by clicking on
the entry for each member of staff below:
Staff
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Last modified on 11 May 2012.