This might be a silly question but why are theses so long (200+ pages)? Someone just told me that they finished their 213 pages-long bachelor’s thesis, but I‘m confused about who the audience would be. Who would spend so much time reading a 213 thesis of a bachelor student? Do people actually read them? What is the purpose of some theses being so long. Also, on a Masters level, does the long length not make important information inaccessible, because it‘s buried deep down in those hundreds of pages?
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Not sure about bachelor level, but my PhD dissertation was about 170 pages long, which was considered above average for my discipline. Only 120 pages had actual writing on them.
To answer your question about reading time and whether the info is accessible, theses/dissertations are usually divided into sections or chapters. For my dissertation, roughly ~70 pages were the intro and lit review. The methodology section was ~20 pages and results/discussion were maybe ~30 pages. The rest was table of contents, appendices, and bibliography.
If someone in the field were to read my dissertation, they would probably skip directly to the methodology and results sections. They wouldn’t be reading 80 pages of lit review unless they were completely unfamiliar with the topic or a masochist. I estimate it would probably take maybe 5 minutes to skim the methodology and results to get the gist of my research.
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