I have a question for faculty-types who review student theses and dissertations, and I'd also like to hear from students writing such things. I'm currently reviewing the MS thesis of one of my students, this is my third time thru and it is actually in pretty good shape. I suspect only one or two more drafts and it will be ready to distribute to the rest of his committee and he can defend. that's good because he's in a real hurry to get done; he's accepted into a PhD program and they won't let him register for next term until he defends his MS thesis. But I'm worried about the changes in the way I do this, compared to previous students, and I'd like some feedback from other folks in similar situations.
The previous drafts of his thesis that I've reviewed were hard copies, and I wrote directly on the hard copy, and the marks were pretty dramatic: elaborate on this point here, cut this page of text down to one short paragraph, move this to results, add a table summarizing this, etc. He had to work pretty hard to make all these changes, and many involved original work. But this most recent draft I'm reviewing using Track Changes in Word, and since he's followed my advice on the previous drafts the current suggestions are a lot less dramatic--delete this word and use this word, switch the order of these two clauses, etc. To indicate what I suggest, in many cases I actually do it--like delete the offending word and type in a better one. In one way this is quite similar to what I did on previous versions of this same thesis--cross out a word and write a different one above it. where I've come to places where I can't make such simple suggestions, I do use the "Comment" function to suggest more substantial changes, but there aren't many of those in this draft. so here's the question--is there something inherently wrong with the fact that now all he has to do to deal with 80% of my suggestions is take the version I've worked on, and click on "Accept Changes"? if so, does that mean I should only edit hard copies? if not, doesn't that mean I'm doing most of his work? Keep in mind that while he is a good honest student he is in a big hurry to finish. Dr. Russell Burke Department of Biology 114 Hofstra University Hempstead, NY 11549 voice: (516) 463-5521 fax: 516-463-5112 http://www.people.hofstra.edu/faculty/russell_l_burke/
