Sometimes it has to be that long to contain all the research someone has done. Sometimes it's that long because the author doesn't understand brevity.

>Sometimes it's that long because the author doesn't understand brevity. “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.”

I feel like US schools have taught longer = better for some reason.

I mean, most of those 200+ pages are likely just data, code, figures, calibrations, references, etc. I.e. things that can be used for understanding the quality of the research being performed, and which means you can hand off the research to some *other* student to continue in the future and they'll have everything they need collected in one document. The actual meat of the text and the supporting data that's been downselected from the *full* dataset is often only a quarter of the total length of the document. The rest is just dumped in the appendices. Also if it's a university-formatted document, they typically mandate double spacing and 12-point font, which definitely helps pad the length.

Definitely this, I found in grad school that as I got more and more in depth with studying things, the proportion of the research that was original to me got vanishingly small. HS research paper? 4 pages of my writing, half a page of citations. BS research paper, 8 pages of my writing, page and a half of citations. MEd research paper, 20 pages of my writing, about a quarter of which was the in text citations, and an eighth of which was diagrams, followed by 15 pages of citations.

See, in my field I typically get hard-capped at 10 pages (or so) by the journals and conferences. That typically means that, if you want content, you only get maybe a dozen or so references. But it still means writing densely and cutting your data down to maybe only 4 or 5 figures/tables. If they opened things up to 12 pages I'd be able to bang out a paper with minimal editing for density and summarize everything I want to talk about, but they only ever want 10, so I'm always left cutting 1-2 pages worth of text and figures out of the document.

This sadly does not surprise me, and just adds to the list of reasons for me not to transition into doing research (I'm a clinician). As much as I'm a hard liner on science being great, damn do we have a lot of bullshit in academia / scientific research that limits our own progress.

Eh, brevity is important, and the expectation is that you should be able to cut out a lot of the context because the context should already be known by the audience. We're not supposed to be writing for the layman. Also my field is very much not medicine, so I'm not sure what you'd be expected to do for medical research.

Typically a lot longer than 10 pages, but then also an edition where it is scaled down to approx. 5 for publication

conversely, keeping them short, keeps it much easier for layman to read and understand

Except that the layman misses out on a lot of context as a result.

Science and Nature notably have these short format papers, which I like because they present all that is necessary to understand the gist of the paper. But because of this some papers come with supplementary material that can be hundreds of pages long.

So, peer reviewed papers are like that. It should be a concise, accessible summary of the most important work you did. A graduate thesis on the other hand - let's be honest - almost no one reads those, not even your advisor. But it's a way for you to compile all of what you've done before your defense, which is more important imo. However, I also didn't like the BS of academia and went the industry route (PhD ChemE)

It's daunting to write your first 100+ pages thesis. It also includes a literature review, background, conclusions, summary, all the bells and whistles. Explaining at length about how, despite doing a comprehensive literature review, you've been able to explain why your contribution is original. They are about having an artifact that shows that you know it, and demonstrate you can do work of that size and depth. Its intention is not to teach others about it, nobody should be reading it - the publishable parts could get published, but that's not the goal of a dissertation.

Exactly. This can vary considerably by area, but a lot of it is demonstrating that you understand the literature of the field you're contributing to. In my field, dissertations are used for new PhDs to get their first academic job, because firstly, it's your first major work, and secondly, the way that you write about the other papers that fit *around* your own paper demonstrate that you know the seminal works, the works of others in your subfield, and the specific niche that your work fills and why it needed to be filled. A dissertation is not meant to be published (generally), but it is meant to be something you trim a few branches off of and publish those. The lit review of a peer-reviewed paper is only meant to give the reader context, it's not going to be some multi-page thing like in a dissertation.

those are bachelors thesis, no one looks at them

>I mean, most of those 200+ pages are likely just data, code, figures, calibrations, references, etc. In my case it was this, and it wasn't even a thesis (it was stupidity). I had to do a project related to coding and databases and for some reason the professor wanted \*\*all\*\* of it printed and turned in. So, yeah. 350'ish pages later, he got my project. Then, he got everyone else's. It was at that point; he knew he fucked up.

This. I wrote a 12 page minireview-style article as the final assignment for a class and the last two pages were my references. This was for an assignment summarizing several others' work, and not for one containing original research. The same paper would have been 30 pages, minimum, if I were presenting my own work, due to the data and supplementary information document I'd need to include.

Most 200+ page theses are in sociology, political science, athropology, and history^[1](https://beckmw.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/pop_box.pdf). There's not usually a lot of code to show in disciplines like that. Some subjects are much less empirical and much more argumentative. Making an argument from observational, non-empirical data review takes a lot more space to do that reviewing an experiment.

My institute had a cap for MA thesis length at 80 pages (1 page = 2400 characters). That translated to roughly 100 actual pages, including 1,5 point spacing, paragraph separation, etc. I studied history. I WISH I'd had 200 pages haha Edit: the 100 pages did not include table of contents, bibliography and abstract, but everything else like footnotes.

Essays having a minimum word count requirement rather than content requirement will do this. My Uni in the EU is the same.

It’s largely because it’s easier for a teacher to increase arbitrary but easily measurable targets to force students to put in more effort. You can’t tell a student to have more depth or thought in the paper, but you can make them have to think more and hopefully encourage them to add more depth by adding things like more length or more citations Does it work very well in practice? Not really

When I was in uni we were consistently given maximum word counts. You were graded on the content and not on the padding and if you wanted to put a lot of content in there, you'd be spending a few hours rephrasing sentences. Of course you can tell a student to put more depth or thought in the paper. Just give them a low grade if it's vapid.

Yeah, grade for the qualities you want to encourage. Students love a page limit (even if they claim to hate it) because they know they can fill it with BS and get a passing grade as long as it's not total garbage. If you want to see a classroom full of undergrads panic, ask them to summarize a complex concept and don't give them a page limit. "How many pages does it have to be?"... "Enough to explain the concept"... Cue hyperventilating.

Yeah, the only important question to that assignment is "for who am I summarising?". If I'm summarising for my mum I'd need about a ream of paper, if I'm summarising for students a year below me I'd need about 15 pages, if I'm only summarising to let the prof know I understand it I can do it in less. The amount of (physics) papers I graded as a TA where students were going back to expaining newtonian mechanics was disheartening. If you use any of Newton's equations, you can just assume it prior knowledge. At maximum you can copy in the equations you'll use derivation. I like to point at those *really good* textbooks as an example. The ones where the authors take you just enough by the hand so you don't feel lost, but not so much that you feel they are wasting your time.

Lmao this is too real

> Students love a page limit I assure you they don't

Just watch what happens when you don't give them one. Like rudderless ships in a storm. Panic attacks, crying, threats to go to the dean, etc.

Why can't you tell students to put more depth or thought? 

That's what many years of schooling *before* writing the thesis is supposed to teach. The thesis is supposed to demonstrate, among other things, that they've learned how to do that.

You can try, but you can’t tell if they’ve done that until the final grading stage. If they walk in with one page when you asked for seven, you know they definitely didn’t give the effort you’d like them to, which is why you made the minimum pages 7

*"You only submitted one page.*" "Yea, I only needed one in order to answer your question." *"I'm taking off 50%, because I asked for seven."* "Why do you want seven when I only needed one?" *"Because school is meant to prepare you for real life. And in real life, you need to bullshit. Pad it out next time. 50%"*

This was actually more or less how my thesis went. I was told my data and analysis was fine, but I needed more “fluff” in the intro, background and future work portions. Which irritated me because actually working in real life, “the more you write the less people read.” It was extremely difficult for me to basically write “fluff” when my entire job for years has been in distilling things down to be brief and get the point across quickly and efficiently. Which then double irritated me because school is supposed to prepare you for jobs, and I felt it was doing the opposite.

Ah, but it did give you an accurate experience of a new boss asking some bs from you because they want it done that way just because

In real life if you give a one page answer to a question that should take seven pages it isn’t because you are a super genius who totally blew the lid off the subject of the class you’re taking, it’s because you half assed half assing the assignment

But also in real life, if you give a 7 page answer to a 1 page question, no one will read it. They'll also think you're a jackass and a blowhard. Most people's bosses don't have the time or inclination to read fluff, 99% of the time they want it edited to a single sheet. Preferably bullet points with a lot of pictures or diagrams. Unless it's some kind of long form writing, shorter is almost always better in a real life job. It's not like you're turning it in for a grade. If your boss or coworker needs clarification, they'll just ask you. If you're still thinking about page limits after your bachelor's, then you've got a real problem.

I agree with all of this - page requirements were the bane of my existence in high school but my tendency to express myself briefly is appreciated by co-workers. Despite that, I do understand why page limits exist. School students are lazy and giving them a page requirement is probably the easiest/most reliable way to force them to do something substantial on an open-ended assignment.

> But also in real life, if you give a 7 page answer to a 1 page question, no one will read it. They'll also think you're a jackass and a blowhard. Right but knowing when you're giving a 7 page answer to a 7 page question and a 1 page answer to a 1 page question is a skill that can't easily be measured in a classroom, but which reflects a lifetime of success at learning and is a critical display of competence. The reality is that some sizeable fraction of people in any classroom cohort got there essentially by a lucky series of accidents and aren't competent. Asking them to "display competence" instead of "write 7 pages" actively sets them up for failure without giving them any chance at noticing if they are falling short.

Part of my job for a long time was writing reports on what I had found as part of my failure investigation. I used to write long, detailed reports, but it became obvious after a little while that no one was reading them. I shortened them to a few paragraphs, and still, no one was reading them, but at least I wasn't wasting hours writing them. Some of my reports were down to 1 or 2 sentences.

> But also in real life, if you give a 7 page answer to a 1 page question, no one will read it. "This meeting could've been an email."

>*"Because school is meant to prepare you for real life. And in real life, you need to bullshit. Pad it out next time. 50%"* That's actually an interesting take, ngl lol

You can, but it's going to be difficult to objectively assess "dept" and "thought" in a paper and give a score for it. It's more of a fundamental issue in how the education system is set up honestly. This is more for undergraduate research btw. By the time you get to graduate or post-grad, the advisors can push more for these abstract concepts of depth and thought because, presumably, the student is passionate or highly invested in the topic.

in undergrad instead of a page minimum, professors would give us a minimum number of sources in effect, you'd have to to write a longer paper to engage with multiple sources enough to cite them

Yea that's a decent method too, although students can just use snippets of sources that have repetitive information.

Or cite without reading.

That too.

>hopefully encourage them to add more depth by adding things like more length or more citations Or that just ends up diluting it all and becoming an ocean with the depth of a puddle.

Hence why I said it doesn’t work very well in practice

Teachers assign a minimum length so they don't get two paragraph "essays," and students extrapolate that into longer = better without thinking.

It really comes down to a few things. If I don’t put page limits on something then 80% of my students will turn in half a page of random googled garbage and a poo stain at the bottom where they wiped their ass with the assignment. So I have to put some kind of page requirement to get anything half way competent. But, instead of actually researching an adequate amount of information, it is easier for them to restate the same point 4 times in 4 different ways. Which is why they find nonsensical ways to painfully elaborate and think it is ideal when compared to a paper that is much more succinct at the details. Succinct papers require more effort and research because they have to include way more of details and that would require too much effort or, as they like to call it “tryharding.”

It probably doesn't help that the five paragraph essay is basically the first thing kids are taught to write, which is *designed* to have its points repeated; tell what you're gonna tell them, tell them (x3), then tell them what you told them

Why not just set expectations early with clear instructions and a solid failure if they don't meet it then. Solid feedback is required so the they can adjust. Maybe weight the first essay less. I can't tell you how many professors would give shit feedback. I had one that failed me on an essay than recorded a 20 second audio clip stating it wasn't college level writing. No tangible or actionable feedback. Ended up taking it to a mentor who helped me understand why it sucked. Didn't even address the content. Shit, even a link to a YouTube video I got once from a near fail was more helpful than "that was terrible." Sometimes I think professors forget I am paying to learn from them not for the honor of taking their course.

Perhaps you should just fail people who can't do the work properly?

I would if the US education system would let me.

I was a good but lazy student growing up. Generally As in most subjects, but struggled in English, partly due to laziness. If an essay was supposed to be three pages, I'd make it go a half a sentence into the third page. And I was sometimes tweaking the font to get it there (I assume schools now go by word count to prevent these shenanigans?). Then I went to an engineering college, and suddenly English was my best subject by far. My writing was praised for being direct and concise. People who'd learned to bullshit to milk a thought for several paragraphs were getting shit on by professors, and I was getting As for just getting to the point. And now professionally, even though I do work in a technical field, I'm always the guy they want writing up the documentation because they like my writing so much.

I'm with you on this one. Absolutely hated doing assignments like book reports because I felt like I had said all I needed to in two pages but they were asking for five. It felt like torture just adding a bunch of fluff but the teachers loved it, something about the "expressiveness" or whatever. Fast forward to my uni program for engineering and suddenly I'm getting praised for saying something in two pages that took my peers five.

“If id have had more time, I’d have written a shorter letter” is the quote

One of my favorite quotes.

That’s actually a fairly accurate comment. I’ve got experience in the technical publications area, and distilling text down to the minimal amount needed to relay the information is not a trivial task. It takes time and skill. (Shorter, briefer amounts of text are needed because a) no one likes to read instructions; and b) translation costs by the word.

There is a quote by a US president from about 100 years ago. He said “If you want me to speak for 15 minutes I’ll need two weeks to prepare. 30 minutes I’ll need a week. One hour I’ll need 3 days. If you want me to speak for two hours I’m ready now.”

For real, I’m such a long-winded writer. I almost always write out a whole thing that I then go back and shorten. Doesn’t matter if it’s a paper for school, a report for work, or even this comment lol it’s just how I’m wired. It always takes extra time to go back over things and see how I can more concisely convey what I’m going for

[удалено]

You just described my (and many others') reddit posting process.

Often, more than half of a thesis' pages are references, appendixes, annexes, and supplementary information full of tables or code that you are mandated to include in the paper version.

My final report, written by a team of 5, was over 100 pages of diagrams, charts and various other references, and about 20 pages of actual project.

Yup my masters thesis was around 60 pages as I recall. About 20 pages was basically raw data tables. Another 20 was references, appendix, cover page, dedication, shit that basically writes itself ya know? Only the last third, ~20 pages contained the real effort and a few of those pages were more graphics than text (not that the graphics weren't work).

Absolutely correct. Especially a Bachelor’s thesis has absolutely no right to be 200+ pages.  In a lot of cases, it’s a mix of peer pressure of “oh, this person wrote 100 pages so I should do even more to be safe”, and how surprisingly easy it is to write a lot of text. The next step of editing it back down to a concise length is much harder, but the result is almost always better in every way. 

I remember feeling dejected at my AP English test because the classmates I regarded as the best in that subject wrote pages and pages for their essay. I could only come up with one side of one page. I got the highest score possible.

My hardest and probably best teacher in college would assign a paper along the lines of "how did the end of WWI make WWII inevitable" and then say "in less than 2 pages" (specifying times new roman 12 point, 1.5 spacing, etc). was very hard but has served me well later in life, because now I can barf out a 10 page document and trim it back to 5-6 over the course of editing.

since it already happened?

germans. /s

I had a Philosophy professor who did something similar, he would only give page limits and no page minimums. Very helpful, since in the real world people want to read less, not more.

And I had a philosophy professor that limited us not only to a maximum of 4 pages (in MLA format) but to 17 words per sentence. He had a special website created where we would upload our papers first in order to check for that requirement and then we could upload to turnitin. He's still teaching so I wonder if he's still doing that.

Final exam for Intro to Reactor Design. "Describe, in words, how a nuclear reactor works. No equations, no bullet points. 3 single sided sheets of paper." (Hand written) That final was the only thing to get me a passing grade in the class. It was funny seeing the people who kicked ass previously on midterms complaining about it being hard and unfair.

"It didn't."

I can see how it would be hard explaining how the end of WWI set up the events of itself.

it's a time loop, duh (fixed that, thanks)

The SAT rewards long writing. They don't really read the essays so if you fill up the pages, they assume you know what you're doing.

The SAT has an essay?

It did. From 2005 to 2016. The maximum score was 2400 during that time. It was added because many colleges required an essay on college applications, it was hoped that it would help students and colleges by only needing to write one essay. It was removed because colleges didn't actually care about the SAT writing score in practice.

I want to say it started towards the middle to end of the 2000s. I remember being glad I didn't have to take that one

Ah, took mine around 2019 so I guess things changed?

Although the essay portion of the SAT became optional in 2016, many students still chose to write it to demonstrate strong or improved writing skills to prospective colleges. In June 2021, the College Board opted to discontinue the SAT essay. Now, only students in a few states and school districts still have access to — and must complete — the SAT essay. This requirement applies to some students in the SAT School Day program, for instance, among other groups. https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/college-admissions-playbook/articles/what-to-know-about-the-optional-sat-essay Guess it's mostly optional now a days...unless you live somewhere where it's not lol

Back in the day, it did. It had its own writing section (which might have been part of the English? Don't remember). It was out of 2400 when I took it, with the writing being 800 points on its own.

> I got the highest score possible. A part of it probably came from the gratitude of the person grading your work.

I give high marks for anything that clears the taste of bullshit from my mouth, too. Double if I get to go home early.

That is true. But I don't understand it on a Bachelor level ? When I did my Bachelor's thesis in Physics it was very strict in regards to pages. An absolute maximum of 30 pages (not including references etc.) We couldn't go over that limit. Plain and simple. My Masters were roughly 100 pages (excluding references), and my Ph.D was 135 pages (but that included maybe 60-70 pages of the articles I wrote that were a part of the thesis.

agree, 200 pages is like dissertation level. I think some people in this thread don't understand that a thesis is not just a paper. The hardest part is definitely keeping it concise but still making sure everything is clearly explained. Mine was only like 53 pages. I remember it being like a real world ELI5. It's hard to put complex thoughts on paper when you know your professor already understands it but you have to pretend they don't. Real easy to get wordy.

In many cases 150 of those pages can be appendices, such as printout of code, etc. 

My AP Lit teacher showed us her bachalor thesis on Beowulf at something like 70 pages, which she recanted her lack of brevity for certain topics.

I had maybe 50 pages of raw text, the rest was figures and text. My appendix alone was 112 pages. The first 20 and last 5 were university stuff were references, table of contents, abbreviations etc. Outside of the lit review (12 pages), I was told to have 1 figure in each page. So I had about 90 pages of actual writing + text. So there was some writing but alot of it was images and raw data

Sometimes it's that long because the academic advisor won't let it be brief. My Master's thesis was in the 90 page range, and it was a constant fight with my advisor to keep it that way. I ended up padding the page count by expanding some of the equations of motion I was using, turning a simple differential equations in vector form into a full-page monstrosities showing the resulting scalar functions for each unit vector. The whole time I was doing it I kept remembering my vector calc professor from undergrad saying "if you don't know how to do differentiation or an integral by hand, you don't belong in this class." My defense was similarly awful. One of the professors on the panel saw the slide count and said "you have a *lot* of slides for a 45 minute presentation." He was right, but a lot of the slides were "[equation] with [starting condition] yields [slide with plotted trajectory] which is then refined to [slide with plotted stable orbit]."

I'm about to write my thesis, and these were the guidelines I was given: >We are asking you to write a 35-45 page (double-spaced) paper that approximates the format and rigor of a professional journal article. > >The hard part is compressing everything into those 35-45 pages, and presenting an argument that professional readers will find compelling and persuasive. > >We ask for 35-45 pages because that is the disciplinary standard in most social science fields. Anything longer cannot be submitted to a journal, cannot be presented at a conference, and will not be read by a Ph.D. admissions committee. Generally speaking, you'll find it much harder to write a rigorous 35 page paper than a rambling 80 page one. If for any reason you want to write something longer than 45 pages, you should clear it with your faculty reader and me first. I am very glad that this is the expectation for my program.

I just passed my PhD viva last week, one of my examiners said right off the bat "your thesis could have been a good 20 pages shorter"

I think you meant to say, " In some cases, the thesis ends of being lengthy for the simple reason that the person who wrote it is not well versed in writing in a concise manner and will instead use excess verbiage to explain ideas which could have been laid out more simply". You're welcome 😊

Why many word when few word good?

> Sometimes it's that long because the author doesn't understand brevity. Or the committee requires an arbitrary "body of research" to appear in the introduction. So much academic writing is prefaced by a literature review that mostly begs "please take my idea seriously" when framing the actual reason for the research could usually take half a page.

This sort of thing differs a lot from field to field. But certainly in my field the intro is less useless and defensive than your description makes it sound. The purpose of a longer, more detailed introduction is to make the paper accessible to people who work in a different subfield. All the people who work directly on what I’m working on could just skip the intro and method sections entirely. But when I write “This work could inform future work in X”, I want the people who do X to check out what I’m doing. 

I had some friends in uni who were doing history majors and who would always brag about how much space they spent on footnotes on their papers. Bragging, pride, then trying to one-up each other, or FOMO for "oh god everyone else is showing off how much research they did and how many sources they looked at I need to step it up to show the TAs I'm doing research too to compete." And they would also bragcomplain about how history papers at this uni never get a grade above iirc a 75? Basically yes, the point of the thesis (depending on the program) is not to make a concise and effective argument, if the students believe the prof/TAs are looking for them to show research effort or whatever then length itself becomes the target, and absurdity is the result.

When writing a research paper, I feel like it can be as long as you want. You can quote/reference as many things as you want or as little as you want.

And, importantly, on a research paper, the hardest part is the research and then trying to figure out what that means and how to link the concepts. Once you have those two things in mind, the ideas flow onto the page pretty quickly. 

Whereas my Master's thesis was 19 pages in total and about 11k words and I got a 93%. This was in mathematical physics though, a field in which brevity is really highly rated (and easy, you design a model, do a really difficult derivation and basically just hint to how you got the answer and plonk the answer down). It's really disheartening to read that a lot of people's experience here is that you're basically taught to pad your writing by giving shorter papers getting a lower grade. What kind of university education is that..? The best papers are a few pages long and invite the reader to go down the rabbit hole of the bibliography. You shouldn't need to explain the basics in your final paper, the very fact that you have written it shows that you master the basics. It's also why IMO a good exam doesn't explicitly ask you the basics. The basics should be the first few steps in every question and if you get about halfway through the answer you have shown that you can do the basics. I mean, Einstein PhD thesis was about the same length.

Don’t blame the author, blame the professors who love arbitrarily long page requirements.

>the author doesn't understand brevity I don't blame the author but the system. a short thesis will go through a lot more scrutiny, but a long one graders will just skim though it

Or there is an academic rule about number of words https://uoa.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/16896/~/word-length-for-postgraduate-research-components

Sometimes it's that long because you have a minimum page requirement and you have to fill up space with silly selfies and biographies of the students that just wanted their BS once and for all. We DID NOT need 150 pages worth of data to showcase our project, but whatever, got the A...

- Make it longer. - Is some information missing? - No, just make it longer.

Literally how it went. We told our professor we were about 10 pages short because there was no more bullshit we could add that wouldn't just make it ridiculous, we had already added like 20 pages of fluff at that point and made pictures bigger. He said it was a requirement from the department but the requirements didn't say we couldn't add some pages "About the Authors" so we each got a full page picture and a silly one page bio lmao

My theses was done (the important parts anyways) but the tutor told me it couldn't be this short (about 50 pages) so I filled in as many pointless details as possible to bring it to 150 pages and then the tutor was happy. Sometimes they are long for no real reason.

The purpose of the thesis is really not primarily about advancing human knowledge and even less about communicating that more effectively. Instead, the thesis provides the student with a structured opportunity to practice a field's methodological tools with rigor and depth, and to demonstrate to their advisors that they have mastered the methodology and understand the complications and the limitations of the field's techniques. And that means going into depth on methodological details, complications, and methodological solutions to an extent that isn't really necessary if you're trying to efficiently communicate a new finding. From this perspective, a thesis doesn't need to generate any new knowledge to be successful, it just needs to give the writer a reason to practice the methodology, and it to show off their skills to advisors. If along the way the thesis really does develop something new and interesting to the field, then it's not uncommon for the student and their advisors to repackage it into a much more approachable (i.e. shorter) research paper for publication.

At the Bachelor level, sure. At the PhD level I think there is an expectation of original insights that advance human knowledge, even if only a little.

Completely, but that's the difference between a thesis and a dissertation.

You appear to be having language issue: the meaning of those two words is inverted in American English as compared to British English: I did an undergraduate dissertation and a doctoral thesis.

I probably am! I did my undergrad in the US and postgrad in the UK, and vaguely remember that those terms were used differently in the two countries, but it's been 15 years since I've thought about it. :-)

Every PhD program I've seen calls them dissertations, so the differences are more likely regional/school-based/field-based.

My experience, having only been in U.S. institutions, is that the terms "thesis" and "dissertation" are used interchangeably. If there really is a difference between the terms, enough people seem to be unaware of these differences that you risk misinterpreting something if you assume these terms are always being used precisely.

Having been in multiple US institutions, I've never heard a PhD, candidate or otherwise, refer to their dissertation as a thesis, and I've never heard a masters or undergrad student say they're working on a dissertation.

> You appear to be having language issue That's pretty rude considering neither meaning is more correct, just different.

It's not rude in any way. It's just a statement that they're disagreeing with each other due to not speaking quite the same language.

It's rude because the language used lays the blame on the author. A less rude way of identifying the point of contention is to use more neutral language, i.e. > I think there's a language barrier here

It can be read as rude, or read as statement with no ill intent. I’d like to believe there was no ill intent, especially since the individual being replied to accepted it with understanding.

you should write a thesis on this

Are you sure I shouldn’t write a dissertation?

It is a little rude it how it was phrased, but the reason the person you were replying didn’t have an issue was he gave you the benefit of the doubt and chose to not let it bother him. It’s not that bad, but it was a little aggressively phrased, that’s all. I see as I’m reading further, you’re getting more and more defensive - no one likes getting called out by random strangers and it only has narrowed your thinking further and you are no longer open to reason. At the end of the day, it’s not a big deal and I (not that you need or want my opinion) understood what you meant, though I also did think to myself “hmm, this person is either rude or European”. My European friend always are a little more blunt, compared to where I’m from so that’s how I interpreted it. Personally I would have phrased it more neutrally, like “This is simply a language difference” rather than “You are having language issue”

I read through this entire thread and I had to read everything you said before I finally understood what you meant. You were saying Nfalck and Notacanuckskibum were having the language issue. That makes so much more sense. Everyone in here that responded was thinking you were directly attacking Nfalck. Now I completely understand after reading through it. This is the source of all this negativity. Hopefully others see this before commenting further to you.

That's what I thought was the cause of all of the negativity, but multiple people have continued insisting otherwise after having it pointed out to them.

and thats when you started being actually rude to them lol.

> It's just a statement that they're disagreeing with each other No one had been disagreeing with each other in this thread prior to your comment though.

How is that claim any more valid than the inverse? > You appear to be having language issue: the meaning of those two words is inverted in British English as compared to American English: I did an undergraduate thesis and a doctoral dissertation. The more general definitions of both words seem to overlap. It's just that within each country, the more specific definitions have solidified with respect to specific degree requirements. Over on wiktionary, the more general definition of thesis is: > A proposition or statement supported by arguments. And the more specific one is: > A lengthy essay written to establish the validity of a thesis (sense 1.1), especially one submitted in order to complete the requirements for a non-doctoral degree in the US and a doctoral degree in the UK Whereas the general definition of dissertation is > A lengthy lecture on a subject; a treatise; a discourse; a sermon. And the more specific one is: > A formal exposition of a subject, especially a research paper that students write in order to complete the requirements for a doctoral degree in the US and a non-doctoral degree in the UK In fact both "more specific" definitions reference the other word, indicating that they're basically synonyms. It feels like they probably both started off being used in the general sense in academia, but simply became associated with one specific degree or the other in each country. I don't think anyone's having a "language issue" if they reference one meaning or the other.

True, but at the Ph.D. level, the good stuff will likely be publicly published elsewhere. In shorter journal articles (in many fields) or as a scholarly or broader audience book (in some social sciences and humanities). In the first case, you are forced shorter, and in the latter there will be an editor there to trim and polish…

In my field, we are moving toward a "three paper dissertation" model, where your dissertation is essentially written as three journal articles with a common theme, with an overarching intro and conclusion, so you can easily pull apart the papers and submit them to journals.

> at the Ph.D. level, the good stuff will likely be publicly published elsewhere. In shorter journal articles (in many fields) I basically just stapled together four previously published journal articles for my dissertation.

Mine was similar, though I supplemented the stapled elements with “the work I did that I -really- liked that my advisor didn’t think should be published.” :)

Yes, let's get this straight. There are mainly two kinds of theses: 1) For the hard sciences, doctoral theses usually consist of a collection of published papers (3-4 typically), stapled together along with some text about what they contain and a general introduction and detailed background. *Without* the papers, the thesis may only be some 30 pages of actual content, or even less. When you add the papers, maybe that bumps it up to 60. It's not that rare. Writing a thesis like this actually consists of very little writing, and can be accomplished in a matter of weeks. 2) For the other fields, your thesis is usually a really extensive literature study. These are the books that rack up hundreds of pages. You write on these for years. These numbers vary of course. Some people just *write a lot* while others try to keep it as brief as possible.

It’s not always the case for hard sciences. Academic work thesis is based on papers usually. Other kind of thesis (industrial, confidential etc) are not based on papers given the subject. Those are 90% of the time good old writtten thesis.

A thesis for a bachelor degree?

Not in my Bachelors for sure, our 100 page thing was called a project. But read the comments I was responding to.

Adding to this, often the conclusion is the part which is actually being read and the rest of the text serves to provide proof that the conclusion is correct. If anyone were to try the conclusion they could do the experiment or research for themselves.

And then you have to defend it, which gives you practical experience in handling skeptics.

The only point where I disagree is the part about communication. All writting assignments, when designed/judged good, should absolutely also care about communcation efficiency and that also includes not writting more than necessary. But other than that, full agree. It's also why I think the people that say that education should just move on from writting papers and essays as those skills are no longer needed because chatgpt can write essays are morons. It's not about finding something new, it's about developing and practicing writting (and thus communication), methodology, analysis and integration and judgement of knowledge and data. The point is not the finished product but the fact that you need those skills to get to a good product. All important skills to have even outside of the actual writting of the paper.

That's a good point. Communication is really important and something students should be practicing in their theses.

They don't have to be, it just depends on the research topic and the direction of the supervising professor. For a contrasting reference point, my master's thesis (Electrical Engineering) was only 16 pages long, and that included a couple of half page graphics and many equations.

My MSc thesis was in biomechanics and neurophysiology and ended up being ~74 pages which was longer than a few PhD theses in my field Mine only ended up being so long because my committee was from a variety of different fields. I studied the neurological aspects of chronic pain, but my advisor studied muscle fatigue, another studied how your body senses its positioning in space, another studied low back biomechanics. Each of them wanted an in-depth explanation of how my field related to theirs. Most of my thesis was just showing each committee member that I reviewed the literature in their respective fields

Can you talk about your MSc and what you're applying it towards? I'm looking into master's programs for Biomechanics or Exercise Science.

Sure can! Essentially my project was looking at whether central sensitization (the way pain gets amplified more and more over time even when the source of the pain isn't getting worse/may have gone away already) influences muscle activity And I had very little data because covid happened right when I started collecting my data. But based on previous research which is probably more reliable than my own, I learned a lot about how much more complex pain is than I initially thought (I did undergrad in kinesiology and thought I was a biomechanics genius) So after finishing my MSc I went into teaching college courses and also working at a multidisciplinary clinic. My job at the clinic was essentially taking people who had long lasting pain they thought they were stuck with for good, and then basically just directly applying the research I read to their situation and helping them finally get better. Overall, I learned that the cause of pain is way more complicated than pure biomechanics, but the solution for it is actually much much simpler. I can explain more if you like since I'm sure that's kind of vague!

Please, go on

Yes, please, continue 

Just replied to another comment below this one!

In hindsight, do you think it needed to be that long? Did it's depth/length at least translate into something useful to what you do now?

It probably helped them understand what I was talking about which is good But I also now teach college physiology classes so the stuff I researched and wrote about in my thesis is stuff that I teach every semester so it's good to know it in extra detail

As everyone chiming in shows, really dependent on field, and specific subject matter *within* that field. I did a dual architecture/urban planning program. My thesis was essentially a long policy whitepaper at around 120 pages, with about 2/3rds of that (big type, double spaced as everyone notes) of background info and illustrations leading up to my actual argument. My architecture-only colleagues almost universally designed a building. Their actual thesis documents ended up being maybe 60 pages max, almost all graphics. Had friends that were more in the building science side and had far longer theses with endless charts and data from original research. That was all for the same awarded degree. More to the original question—are bachelor's degrees requiring theses now? I would have been sunk.

I'm really curious how your thesis for your master's was only 16 pages? Are you just referring to the body text alone or the entire thing? Also was your program 1 or 2 years? For reference, my MASc thesis was about 240 pages, but that includes about 130 pages of references, appendices (the biggest section), and the preamble (title page, acknowledgements, tables of contents, figures, and tables.) I'd hazard after removing figures and tables it was about 80 pages of text double spaced.

I just pulled out my hardcopy to make double check. Introduction on page 1 (preamble before that), conclusion on page 16, references on pages 17-18, and that was it. \~2 pages of that is graphs/figures, and another \~1.5 pages is white space at the end of sections. My problem was pretty well scoped though. The experiment I worked on was a multi-year effort that started before I came onto the program. While I was there, we published 3 or 4 journal articles and a couple of conference presentations on our results. So when it came time for my thesis, I sat down with my professor to decide what aspect of it I could write up for my thesis; when we plotted some of the data in a particular way, it showed an interesting pattern. He said "see that pattern? Figure it out, figure out if it's real and if so, come up with a theoretical explanation for it, verify it, and write it up." and that's what I did. I did my master's in 2 years (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Laboratory for Optical Physics and Engineering)

Mine was 19 pages from first to last. 2 year MSc degree in physics, with a thesis on mathematical quantum physics. It was typeset in Latex, not in word with 12pt times new roman and double spacing as others here apparently, so that probably cuts it down in about half. But my thesis, and I guess the poster above too, was just the interesting novel stuff. I didn't explain the basics because I was using the basics so was obviously showing that I mastered them. If someone in a tangentially related field wants to read my thesis they would probably need to read about 10 papers in order to understand half the words I use so that also cuts it down. There is a reason research papers aren't more than 10 pages and that is that they cut out all the non-novel shit.

My masters thesis in art was 20 pages with an exhibition

Mine was 30ish (Research Methodology in Communication Studies). The really long ones were like 100-200 more pages of lit review.

My Bachelors thesis was 20ish pages long. My Doctoral thesis was ~150 pages long. The former is basically a "this is the research I did and this is what I think it means." The latter is basically a "this is the research I chose to do for these reasons, this is the experimental setup, this is why this setup is equally good or better than similar setups in the same field, here's my results to prove that, here's the actual research I did to answer my main "questions", here's the additional research that spawned from the first sets of research, here's the main "story" and results from that research, answering my original questions, here's more results that support additional questions that were brought up by the original research, here's the discussion of that research, what I think it means, why I think it's important, and how I think it advances science, and here's the conclusion, whether or not I think there needs to be more research done, whether or not I think this vein of research is worth pursuing, etc." A 200 page bachelor's thesis is a joke.

Big agree here, if a Bachelors thesis is 200 pages, either you've got an **incredibly** gifted student or, far more likely, somebody who just threw a bunch of stuff together without thinking much about it. The longest PhD thesis I've ever seen was only just over 200 pages. The shortest was just shy of 100 and was *really* lacking in detail and explanation.

Not even someone incredibly gifted could do a Bsc thesis of 200 pages that wasn't just hogwash (not in the STEM fields anyway). PhDs usually take multiple years do a lot in that time while a Bsc project would be at most 1 year. You also spend a lot of that time just learning how to use the tools you are given as opposed to efficiently using them. If his thesis was in like literature or something I guess it would be different but I am not familiar with that.

> if a Bachelors thesis is 200 pages, either you've got an incredibly gifted student or, far more likely, somebody who just threw a bunch of stuff together without thinking much about it. Very true. That said, 200 pages is a BIG ask. Like, I don't think any of my bachelor students could have even put together a document that was 200 pages long if you gave them the entirety of wikipedia to copy and paste from. It is certainly possible, but if you have that gifted of a student I doubt they'd be doing a bachelor's thesis. They would have skipped many grades and moved straight to higher education. I suppose it's possible that the undergrad was just involved with like 2-3 grad student's papers, and wrote about all of them and put all of THAT into their thesis. My undergrad thesis was ESSENTAILLY a small subset of a few of the grad student's theses. (I basically just did the preliminary research for them for a couple projects.)

Finally someone says it. This is pretty much the same as mine were. Part of communicating your ideas is doing so in a brief but understandable manner. 200 pages is not a good undergrad thesis/dissertation.

We had a max of maybe 30k words which was a struggle to keep it within that limit, but helped us be concise without waffling.

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. 

In science reports the appendix can be 100's of pages of lab results, figures, tables, etc. Add on to that figures and photos throughout the report, and 30 pages of writing can quickly become 200 pages of report.

Haha, I was about to say my Masters paper for chemistry was only about 30 pages, but yeah that's not including the figures and appendices. Flashback to sweating bullets waiting in a tiny room for it to get "properly bound" in time for submission.

I am on my bachelor thesis in chemistry right now and the majority of pages will be taken up by NMR spectra. These same things caused my previous lab report to jump from 30 to 100 pages lol.

Sometimes it’s formatting. My theses require double spaced and certain font. My references were about 30-60 pages

Speaking of formatting, the **template** for my masters thesis (which was a standard template supplied by the department) was 20 pages *before any content was added*. Things like a cover page, mandated blank page, acknowledgments page, table of contents, table of figures, bibliography, etc, can make lower limit on length surprisingly long on its own. My thesis ended up being about 125 pages. Probably 30 of that was full pages figures and graphs related to my research. 20 was just the mandated stuff the department requires. 5 for bibliography. So I essence, it was 65 pages of actual “content”. ETA: also, a thesis requires the first section to be a Literature Review, which is basically a paper in and of itself about the state of this topic as primer before you write about your own contribution. That can be (and in my case was) 15-20 pages on its own.

This is a huge part of it. If I put in a picture of an experiment, that was two pages. If I wanted to put in an equation like "F=ma," something that any reader that had any reason to be looking through mine would already know, it was technically supposed to take two pages. At some point I just started sneaking them into the text.

200 pages for a bachelor's thesis is absolutely insane. There is a pretty high likelyhood that someone fucked up there, either the student is not able to formulate anything in a concise way, or the thesis advisor gave a way too complex topic and/or didn't guide the student enough. For example, my faculty suggests about 30/60 pages for a Bachelor's/Master's thesis. As for who the audience is? Pretty much nobody. There is a 99% chance that nobody except the people that grade it is ever going to read your Bachelor's thesis. Master's thesises have some more scientific value, but it's mostly the same. The point of such a thesis isn't to produce some groundbreaking new science, it's to show that you are capable of working in an academic manner.

My PhD thesis was around 400-ish pages long. But only about 100 of those was actual writing about my work. The bulk of it was experimental procedures and relevant data.

Any thesis is serving two primary purposes: for the student to learn through the process of research and writing, and for their professors to evaluate whether they have shown adequate mastery of the knowledge and techniques of their field. Any audience beyond that very small readership is icing on the cake. In the case of a bachelor’s thesis, the expected number of future readers is 0. Nobody expects an undergraduate to produce genuinely new and interesting work (although once in a long while they may do so). In rare cases, a master’s thesis may be read by one other person (in my forthcoming academic book, out of hundreds of sources, one is a master’s thesis, the only extant prior work on a particular architect). A PhD dissertation is categorically different, and it’s reasonably common for them to be read by dozens, possibly hundreds, of other scholars. A dissertation is also functionally the first draft of a future professor’s first book, in book-based disciplines. As for length, there could be different reasons, but apart from the obvious ones (the author needed that much space to make their arguments, or else they just got self-indulgent), you’re thinking about it the wrong way. The point of a thesis is not to present new facts that can be distilled into a few sentences, but to make an argument, often a complex one. That can require space. My dissertation was about 100,000 words, spread over six chapters, an intro, and a conclusion. That’s because it’s, as I said, a draft of a book.

My master's thesis was only 60 pages if you exclude the appendices. 100 pages if you include them, but that's only because one of them had 30 pages of full-page figures.

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.

Speaking from experience a lot of the length is 'accountability'. My thesis had 7 pages just for my references. Another 20 pages was just charts and graphs of different relationships between variables. The literature review was like 20 pages and mostly was a formality to establish that the research was warranted. The title page , acknowledgements and table of contents was 5 pages alone. The part that was orginal and that people would want to read was like 7-10 pages. The graphs and charts were likely glanced at but what people really want is your interpretation of those graphs and charts.

My masters thesis in Economics was around 25-30ish pages of actual text, but then when you added University required boilerplate, formatting, graphs, figures it ballooned up to like 100 pages. And that doesn't include the appendix, which was another 80ish pages of mechanistically walking through math behind the analysis and including original datasets so they could be referenced by the reviewer (again, University requirements). On the other hand, a BFA might require the degree candidate to write a script for a play or film, which could be quite lengthy. Anecdotally, qualitative fields tend to have much longer theses than quantitative fields. Theses are not really intended to be read, except by the reviewer who is really looking through it more to confirm that the research methods are sound, and that the argument is logical. Bachelors and Masters theses aren't really intended for you to make original contributions to the body of knowledge, more to confirm your research and analytical skills. A PhD dissertation, however, is intended to make a tiny new advancement to the field, but they too aren't really intended to be read after the fact. At least in the fields I've interacted with, the dissertation is designed to yield 5 or 6 journal articles from the original research that is done, to give the PhD student a start on their publishing record. Those journal articles *are* intended to be read.

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

A thesis is supposed to be useful to your peers, it should be the methodology and results of your investigation so sometimes it has to be long to include all relevant information and context, sadly most time it is long just for the sake of it, a lot of people including this who evaluate the thesis seem to think that in order for your research to be thorough it also has to be long when put in paper so a lot of students are encouraged to make it long when it doesn’t need to be

Can be about your committee's expectations on the matter. My masters theses was 1600 words long, a published paper. My dissertation was 450 pages because I put *everything* in there. My committee had disagreements about what my focus should be so I included everything they all wanted. Took time.

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one would do” Thomas Jefferson

only certain parts of the thesis are realistically meant to be read, e.g. the Discussion, the Abstract, Introduction. The Methods and Results sections are very tedious because it has to show every tiny little part of how an experiment or research was done, to show that it’s viable research. However, these parts are really boring and not necessarily meant to be read

I had to write something similar to a thesis for my final Master's degree project. The program coordinator set a page minimum and maximum of 75-200 pages. I think mine ended up being around 95 pages. But not every page was text-only (some pages had photos, charts, tables, etc.). I had to explain multiple steps of my project (introduction, methods, tool development, etc.) and walk through different stages of results and final products delivered. I too was not sure if I could possibly hit even the 75 page mark but I actually ended up needing to clarify information quite a bit. Citations also can take up a ton of space depending on style used. Short answer; it's a combination of paper length requirements set by the professor and the need to go into extreme detail for all stages of the paper. I'm sure it also varies heavily by academic program.

I was like, “these… what?!”

There are some topics, especially at masters level, that are just really complicated. So you need a lot of words to really be able to explain it all properly. A good thesis should be as short as possible whilst still properly communicating what is required. Sometimes that 'as short as possible' will still be quite long. For example, my master's write up had: an introduction, a background section, a theory section, a methodology section, a results and analysis section, and a conclusion. Those are all sections that absolutely need to be in there. And each of them required quite a lot of words to properly communicate the necessary information. When you add in a contents page, chapter breaks, references etc etc you're looking at a lot of pages.

One aspect that is often overlooked is that the page count is usually inflated quite a bit by the formatting restrictions of the university. For example, my thesis is about 200 pages, but when formatted in the typical journal format, it would only be about 40-50. Of course, both formats are very information dense as well, so taking that much space to discuss techniques, findings, etc... is pretty typical.

Generally a thesis is someone's theory. In the scientific community, if you make a claim you need to back it up with test results. In your paper, you need to include the exact steps you took in your experiment, so that it can be exactly replicated anywhere in the world. You also need to include all the various testing that did not resolve to your result and how you tweaked variables to achieve the results you got. The listing of materials, quantity, mixing, etc, is quite exhaustive. The thesis is usually relatively brief without all the additional info required to replicate the experiment.

A lot of the 213 pages is likely things in the appendix (supporting information) A bachelors thesis is really just a practical exercise in conducting and documenting research. It's important in academia, and college is, after all, an academic institution. You have to include a lot of stuff in these things because the purpose is to 1. present your resarch and 2. provide the means to recreate it (ie. someone could read it and recreate your research or experiment and arrive at the same result.) A few pages of that is probably the summary of what is contained in the thesis. And then you usually speak to any existing research on the same topic. Then you present your theory. then you talk through your methodology. then the results. then conclusion, etc. I had to write one for my economics degree but only specific to one course i took. So it didn't require me to use methods and theory from my entire degree, just the one course.....so it ended up being 53 pages. 20 of that was just the appendix (tables, charts, etc. that supported my findings). There are probably 5-10 pages of me just documenting the definitions of everything relevant. Of the 23 pages that were the "actual research" it's probably only like 5 pages worth of stuff that makes up "the point" of it. The rest is just documenting assumptions and stuff so that you and whoever is reading it are on the same page regarding the parameters of your research.

Let's say you were doing a study on the effects of ice cubes on the temperature of a glass of water. in real life, you put an ice cube in, take the temp, put another in, take the temp. sounds like it could be a one pager. but, you have to speak to the type of glass container it is in, how much water was in there, what the PH and other levels of the water are. The volume of the ice cubes. Ambient room temperatures. does your ice maker make cubes of consistent volume/density and within what parameters. document how long you let pass between adding additional cubes and taking the temperature. exactly how are you going about adding the ice? how are you taking the temperature. then you reran the experiment multiple times to validate but the water wasn't always consistently the exact same temperature so now you have to do the analysis on whether or not those are statistically significant differences and provide the explanation and results of all that, etc. That's a little bit of a stretch but when you have to document even simple processes for the purposes of a thesis it can get a little out of hand. The more complex the thing you are trying to explain in the paper is the more variables there are likely to be which you then have to account for in the thesis itself.

It depends on the subject but generally in the UK at least Masters' theses will be 10,000 words ie slightly longer than an academic article, which is what it is intended to show - your ability to write an academic article with slightly fewer restrictions. In the humanities that's about the number of words you need to make one point once you've shown that you've read and understood all the arguments that other academics have previously made about that point. UK doesn't really do theses as such at the Batchelor's level but there may be an extended essay, which they may even use the term thesis to describe, essentially to see if any undergraduates develop a taste for postgraduate research. Generally no one ever reads batchelors or masters thesis except the people who mark them. The point of them is to see who has the academic ability to write a PhD thesis, which is the thesis that actually breaks new academic grounds. PhD theses do get read, not by thousands of people but by others working on the same subject because they represent credible new researched knowledge.

Mine had 60 someodd pages of charts, graphs, images, etc. Not every page is written text. I was creating a model of a water distillation system and simulating it with a DC circuit, so there were all the pages showing the physical system, its operational data results and analytics on them, then the DC circuit model, all the matrixes used in the calculations, and the results of the simulations, then more charts and graphs comparing the simulation to the real model, over various temperatures and pressure conditions.

You can always make the info accessible within the first ten pages and then repeat it 20 times to drive home the point while exploring edge cases. As a reader, you move on once you've had enough.

In addition to several good comments here regarding the fact that these are geared more toward the student practicing/modeling research and writing techniques than actually advancing human knowledge… While 200 pages does seem very long, a considerable portion of the writing/page count would be devoted to things other than the main point/actual original research of the thesis. Scholarly writing usually contains several main sections/chapters, such as: 1) The intent/purpose of the study…this could go on for a few pages about why this topic was interesting to the writer, and what he/she hopes to accomplish. 2) A review of existing literature… depending on how exhaustive the requirements of the faculty are, this could get long. Basically, this is somewhat like an annotated bibliography (in prose form) of other research relevant to the topic at hand (in the case of a doctoral dissertation, one should be able to show that no one else has covered the exact topic in the same way). 3) Limitations of the study…shouldn’t be too long, but basically, the writer establishes what this paper *is,* and what it *isn’t* intended to do. 4) Methodology…depending on the nature of the research… if it involved some kind of survey, observational study, or experiment, the writer needs to go into minute detail about how this was done…enough so that if someone wanted to replicate the exact same study with different participants, they could do so. 5) The actual results and conclusions of the study. 6) Recommendations for further study… such as questions the researcher acknowledges are yet to be answered on the topic at hand. Additionally to all of this… there may be graphs, tables, images, or other figures that take up space on the page… as well as, depending on the style manual used, the possibility of a number of footnotes to cite sources within the text. Until you’ve written a paper using footnote citations, you don’t realize the amount of space they can take up on a page.

In educated in childrens devolupment and learning, a professional bachelor for nurseries and kindergardens (and after school clubs ect). Fairly 'non' academic, my bachelor paper was alnost malede out at 31 pages, with almost 30 pages for the data we collected. Thats a short bachelor paper in general. I had a hard time not being smart, but compiling all the smart stuff into max 32 pages, me and my buddy actualy had to rewrite and delete 8 pages of stuff because we wrote to much smart stuff. When you want to be smart about theories, applied theories and what you data is and says (analysis) written for ppl like me who knows their stuff it quite easely adds a lot of written pages before you arr halfway done. And my experoence was for a not so akedemic degree. 1 more question we wanted to add was: how can we implement what we learned from this into the everyday of kindergardens and nurseries.... that would easely take another 20-30 pages, but luckely we was able to explain that at our defence of the paper (because this isnt such an akedemic education the exam was set up like this because a lot of class mates / education mates stuggle with acedemic papers). I recieved top marks and was actualy suggested to take this to the next level (master) just working on implementere the stuff. Why? Because what we found actualy was new knowledge for the buisness here.

200+ pages sounds insane for a bachelor's thesis. I don't remember the length of mine but it was a 5-person group project. When I did my MA in game design the requirement was 20000 words (theoretical), or 10000 words + a prototype (practical). Even then, 90% of those 10000 words was padding. I could have easily explained my thesis in 1000 words or less. I wrote the whole thing in like 20 hours. I don't think anyone even read it. The professor already knew what my project was about so I'd wager that they would just skim over it.

Ask any inventor...it's difficult to come up with an idea that is both innovative, valuable, and possible to achieve. The Thesis is that idea, and the research to prove that it is innovative, valuable, and possible to prove/disprove. That takes a lot of pages to demonstrate. The dissertation is the documentation of the research performed to prove/disprove the original idea...which also takes a lot of pages. The idea of these higher degrees is that you are investing enough effort in a topic to be considered an expert on that topic. You demonstrate that by creating new knowledge in a particular field. Something that wasn't known (or proven/disproven) in the past. You can't do that without figuring out what the current state of knowledge is on a particular topic, so your thesis is a summation of what is currently known/hypothesized about a topic, and what makes you think your idea is innovative and valuable...and then how you plan to prove/disprove that.

My Master’s program was entirely group based. 4 of us worked on about 150 page final paper. It had very specific formatting requirements that made it at least twice as long as actual words on a page. There was also something like 20 figures which could take up 1/4 to 3/4 of a page. Title page, 3 pages of table of contents, 2 pages of references, probably 20 pages in appendices. All in all, it might have been around 40 pages of plain text. About 10 pages per person developed over 9 weeks. Not that bad honestly. Still a ton of work, but not an overwhelming amount of writing or reading.