Tales of Supervision: The conclusion

On Monday half an hour before our scheduled meeting, my co-supervisor e-mails indicating that a printed copy of her suggested grading was in my physical mail box. I took a brief look at it, spending most of my time Google Translating the criteria into English. I was also responsible for adding to the blurb that explained our grading choices. The opponent and all supervisors have to sign off on one grading/explanation.

On the way to retrieve printouts of my extended comments (for my co-supervisor and the opponent), I catch my co-supervisor in the hallway as she was leaving for lunch. Even though we had hastily set a meeting time on Friday, she had not written it down (understandable, since two of her other MSc students were defending after our common student.) After pointing out that the opponent would come to the university at 1 p.m. explicitly for the paperwork, my co-supervisor remembers the meeting.

We discussed that the student's goal was to get 3/5 points overall. We ended there, haggling over scores of 2-4 (I didn't think the thesis was that great, and tried to push the grades down in a couple categories). It turns out that the thesis was really well organized, and the literature review was really strong, but reusability was weak. At this point, I learned that my extended comments would be visible to the student, and attached to the credential. The opponent agreed with my blurb, but found the second paragraph harsh (limitations of time and company's externalities). We decided to remove it, leaving the first paragraph which was basically something that followed the sandwich rule (praise, bad stuff, praise) I learned when judging primary school science fairs.

One of the changes that the opponent and student had suggested was a change in the title of the thesis. (This is not a problem in the Finnish system, unlike in the Canadian system in which a title is locked in relatively early in the process.) We printed a set of paperwork with the old title, and then realized our mistake. We copied and pasted the title from the final copy the student had sent early Monday morning into our paperwork, (the paperwork/forms come out of a poorly secured internally developed web application) and then realized that it had a grammar error, and did the paperwork a third time.

And so the thesis was done. Had the student completed it after December, he would receive only 30 ECTS instead of 35. He still has coursework to finish at his leisure. I learned quite a bit about the "constructive research" methodology. And the co-supervisor learned some things about internationalization.

At our Friday department meeting and annual Christmas dinner, we learned that the department had produced 98 of the 100 desired Master's theses (not Master's degrees) affecting the upcoming three-year budget cycle. We also learned that the average number of MScs produced per teaching faculty member was around 0.3, which means that a small number of us are carrying most of the supervising load.