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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Depending on the area of study, it can require 200+ pages to make the argument. There are mathematical proofs that extend for thousands of pages, and that can be without even including background results necessary for validating them.
Regarding important information, it’s almost always explicitly summarized at the beginning of the thesis. “In this paper I will lay out…” etc. – there’s not going to be a hundred pages of formulas, then “and that’s how general relativity is completely disproven,” and then a hundred more pages.
Research can be detailed. My bachelor thesis was 50 pages of writing and 200 pages of data. The actual research data needs to go somewhere for it to make sense.
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Its also important to note that depending on the field and the specific thesis, a substantial portion of the length can be in appendices and supplementary information that isn’t required to understand the main point of the thesis. This could include things like raw data, exact procedure for all experiments referenced in the thesis, or even all the code used in the experiment printed out. This stuff only really needs to be referenced if you are trying to replicate results or double check the exact methods they used.
Sometimes it’s formatting. My theses require double spaced and certain font. My references were about 30-60 pages
Either because the bachelor student, being just a bachelor student, is inexperienced in separating necessary info from unnecessary info and creating a text with a high density of information, or because the bachelor student was told to add a transcript of all code and every used graphic in the appendix, which accounted for 150 pages, and the list of sources another 10.
My prof told me if the body of my thesis was more than 40 pages he would not read it because he had better things to do. 213pgs is bonkers.
Also, to answer your second question: research performed by bachelor students is often incorporated into (aka done as part of) a larger research project led by a master student, PhD or someone else/a team within the department. Eg in my case, another student used the math I put together to build a simulation model, and both those projects went into a research paper published by a PhD student.
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.
Depends on the topic , mine had fair number of graphs and images (palynology) , add loads of references and then actually discussing my point.
But had a friend whos was quite a bit shorter, because didnt need images , and it turned out to be quite a simple point being made
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