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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Really, no. The vast majority of theses do not get read. They’re simply a demonstration of a student’s ability to, basically, write a book on their specialty. In theory every student would be creating a new body of meaningful work on a subtly distinct aspect of their field but in practice 99% of them are bad books. Any professional writer will tell you that everybody’s first book is bad though so there’s no shame in it or really any expectation of them to be good.
If you become famous maybe your thesis will be dug up and examined – although we rarely see that, or at least to any notable/newsworthy extent. Some exceptionally good or exceptionally salacious theses might see actual distribution as books. I know a lady who’s mid 00’s thesis about sex on the internet did but even a book like that only sells hundreds of hard copies. Still thought that’s more than most people can say!
Perhaps someday the AIs will get into all of those tens of thousands of 400 page academic works as a Large Language Model. Who knows what it might learn in there. Hope they were adequately peer reviewed! Narf!
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