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Department of Politics and International Relations

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Honours Program
 
Thesis

>> Supervision
>> Live Interviews
>> Bibliographical Essay
>> Thesis Writing Seminar
>> Thesis Draft
>> Submission
>> Assessment

Students must complete a thesis of 15,000 words. The thesis is expected to be an original piece of research or scholarship, addressing some important empirical questions and/or theoretical problems in political science broadly conceived.

Full-time students will undertake the research and writing over a period of two semesters; part-time students will normally be expected to complete their theses at the end of the second year of their candidature.
 
Supervision

A thesis is undertaken under the supervision of a full-time member of staff; or, where both parties are agreeable, under the supervision of a former member of staff who continues to have a formal relationship with the Department.

Students should have a thesis topic and supervisor (approved after consultation with the Honours convenors) before applying for entry; students who are unsure about what they wish to do, or who could supervise them, should talk to the Honours convenor. Lack of appropriate staff (e.g. through study leave) may mean that a good research topic cannot be pursued.

The choice of thesis is important. It should be something that the student wants to do - preferably related to something that the student has studied in the undergraduate program; for example, through the Reading Unit. It should be on a topic that will sustain the student's interest through the hard slog of reading, talking and writing. And it should be something that is not too small for the time and space available, but equally not too big for a thesis undertaken at the undergraduate level.

Work on the thesis should begin, for full-time students entering the program, as soon as possible. Part-time students should commence work on their thesis no later than the beginning of their second year.

Students should make contact with their supervisors as early as possible and keep in touch. The frequency of contact between students and their supervisors is a matter of negotiation: there are no hard and fast rules. But as a rule of thumb, students should see their supervisors fortnightly. Students should not conclude any meeting with their supervisors without fixing the time of their next meeting.

Students are responsible for letting supervisors know of any problems they are having, for getting the work done and for writing it up - properly structured, persuasively argued and well presented. Supervisors are there to advise on sources and the scope of the thesis, to talk through problems of method, structure, etc. and to comment, in a timely fashion, on drafts.

Ultimately, however, the thesis is the responsibility of the student. Whatever suggestions the supervisor makes, it is the student who is finally responsible for the scholarly and literary qualities of the work. The supervisor does not mark the thesis; and even if supervisors did, they wouldn't be able to guarantee a particular result.

Where students strike problems with their supervision (or problems of any other kind) they should contact the Honours convenors or Head of Department as soon as possible.

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Live Interviews
Conducting live interviews is strongly discouraged for reasons of time and in the belief that they are not necessary for the successful completion of a study of this length or at this level. However, in the event that a student wishes to undertake such interviews, he/she must submit a detailed explanation of the type of interviews to be undertaked for approval by the University Ethics Committee to get permission to proceed..

On-line Surveys and already published interviews are perfectly acceptable sources of primary research and require no formal authorization.
 
Bibliographical Essay

After consultation with the supervisor an essay of 3,000 words, reviewing the literature and relating this to the main problems of the research (the research questions), may be required by within a month of the thesis being commenced.

The aims of this exercise are to set out what the thesis is intended to do, to explain why it is worth doing and to show how the student intends doing it. The form the essay takes will vary according to the kind of thesis it is (whether, for example, it is the prelude to a largely empirical work or the opening gambit in a largely theoretical work) and should be discussed with the supervisor very early in the piece.

Some general points, however, need to be borne in mind. (These points apply also to essays students write at the end of the Honours seminars).

First, the bibliographical essay needs to set out the main problems with which the thesis will deal. A thesis needs to address a set of problems, issues or questions; it is never a purely descriptive exercise or a piece of story-telling.

Second, the essay needs to relate the thesis to a wider body of literature or literatures; all theses refer, to a greater or lesser degree, to what others have said on the issues at hand and are judged, in part, by their success in identifying relevant ideas and coming to grips with them. A bibliographical essay, therefore, is not an annotated bibliography; it is a critical review. It seeks to identify the main approaches (theoretical, methodological, etc) others have taken, to say something about their weaknesses and strengths, and to show how the thesis intends to build on what has gone before.

Third, the essay should include some discussion of the scope and significance of the problems the thesis will address, explaining the approach it will take, making clear what is to be covered and (just as important) what will not be covered - and justifying it in terms of time and other resources, the length of the thesis, and of course the contribution the finished product will make on its own.

In addition, the essay might usefully incorporate a tentative plan of the thesis - section by section or chapter by chapter. This gives the writer (not just the reader) a sense of how the thesis might look, the order in which different aspects of the task might be tackled and how much space might be devoted to various parts of the thesis.

The more thorough and thoughtful the job, the easier and more rewarding the research and writing of the thesis itself. This is not to say that what comes out of this initial exercise won't be revised - perhaps radically revised - in the course of the subsequent research and writing; almost certainly it will. It is simply to say that a clearing away of the underbrush to establish a view of the larger terrain needs to be done at some stage and the sooner it is done the better.

The bibliographical essay will form the basis of a presentation by the student to the work-in-progress seminar (see below). Apart from providing an overall framework for the thesis, the essay usually provides the basis for the introductory chapter.

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Thesis Writing Seminar

In addition to the individual supervision of the thesis provided by a designated member of the Department, the Honours program includes a compulsory weekly work-in-progress seminar.This seminar will be held on Friday, 10-12 am in W5A 204.

This seminar which has several purposes.
  • To provide an opportunity for students writing theses to get together, to talk about their work and to exchange ideas and to share experiences.
  • To address a range of methodological issues in the social sciences almost all of which impinge on different theses at different times; this may involve, among other things, hearing from members of the Department about some of their own research and visiting the Library to get up to speed on how to search electronic data bases.
  • A third purpose is to focus more closely on the nature of thesis writing itself - in part, perhaps, by reviewing some of the theses completed by earlier students.

The work-in-progress seminar in the second semester continues these themes, but focuses especially on the theses then being undertaken by candidates. During the second semester, each candidate is required to present an account of their work to that point to the group as a whole. Further information is available from the Honours convenors:Dr Lloyd.Cox or Assoc Prof Morris Morley

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Thesis Draft

The next to final draft of the thesis will be read by the supervisor if it is submitted no later than the week beginning Monday October 2. The supervisor will return the draft the following week.

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Submission

Three copies, each of them perfect-bound, are to be submitted to the Honours convenor by 5.00 p.m. 17 October (for students finishing at the end of year) or by 5.00 p.m. 9 May (for students finishing mid-year). Extensions, approved by both the Head of Department and the Honours Convenors, will be granted only on the grounds of serious and well documented illness or misadventure. (It is the responsibility of the student to ensure that the thesis is not held up at the binder).

Late submissions will be penalised. The penalty is one per cent of the final mark for each working day; that is, five per cent per week.

Theses of excessive length (greater than 16,500 words) and theses that are too short (less than 13,500) will also be penalised.

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Assessment
 

The thesis is marked by three people, including an external examiner; who will read all the theses. The other two examiners, determined by the Honours Convenors, and the supervisors, are drawn from within the Politics Department itself; only in exceptional circumstances (agreed to by both the Head of Department and the Honours Convenors) will one of these examiners be drawn from outside the Department.

The examiners discuss their views at the examiners' meeting and, in the light of these discussions, one or more of them may amend their marks. The final mark for each thesis is normally the average of the two marks which are closest together.

Examiners reports will be made available to students after the examiners' meeting. They can be collected, along with two of the three copies of the thesis, from the Department Office by the 1st or 2nd week of December.. However, all discussions at the examiners' meetings are confidential: students will not be briefed on the nature or content of these deliberations .

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