# Does a bachelor thesis have to contribute anything useful to the field? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 21, 2019, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825 "2019-06-21T00:29:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![EdelweissPirate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8491ac/32.png) [@EdelweissPirate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EdelweissPirate)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 5:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/21 "2019-06-21T05:26:20Z")
Anyone who expects undergrad theses to contribute to the advancement of an academic field has obviously never graded undergrad papers. It’s not the undergrads’ fault; they don’t (yet) have enough experience for that. As others have pointed out, breaking new ground is expected for dissertations, not undergrad papers. ---
**Author:** ![Snnipe\_70E](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5a626/32.png) [@Snnipe\_70E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snnipe_70E)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 5:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/22 "2019-06-21T05:42:03Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > I don’t think I’ve even heard of a bachelor’s thesis before this. I guess I vaguely remember some folks doing an honors thesis, or something like that, but I don’t remember anything called a bachelor’s thesis. Certainly wasn’t required to graduate at my school, for sure. I have never heard the term before tonight. Sure did not have to do one for my degree. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 6:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/23 "2019-06-21T06:52:20Z")
A bachelor’s thesis (actually, the name given to it was “senior thesis”) was required at my college (New College of Florida). That doesn’t mean it was necessarily anything great. My senior thesis wasn’t anything great and wasn’t published. During my last year or so at college I did write a paper about some ideas I had been thinking about for years. It was accepted by a journal that year and published the next year. It wasn’t anything great. The journal was very minor. ---
**Author:** ![Filbert](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/filbert/32/3433_2.png) [@Filbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Filbert)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 7:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/24 "2019-06-21T07:34:04Z")
The course I’m currently on -BSc Hons- does say in the guidelines that the thesis should be original research that is a new contribution. However, due to the subject (horticulture) in practice this isn’t too hard, as it largely means trying a fairly standard experiment with a species or cultivar that hasn’t had much attention, and as there’s approximately a gazillion of these and a lot of published research tends to use the same model species, that isn’t too hard to find. There’s whole genera that the only Google scholar results for are plant lists and maybe a mention of historical use. However, if it does turn out that someone else published basically the same research previously but you missed it, that’s just a loss of some marks for a lazy lit review, not a fail. You can still pass even if the project winds up as a total flop (slugs ate all the experimental plants or something), so long as the approach was good and the writeup was adequate. It’s basically an aspiration, not a requirement, but even though there have currently been fewer than 50 students graduating from the course (it’s tiny and new) there have been several BSc theses published. Oh, and they do keep all old ones; I think universities do normally keep 'em, if only to give later students project inspiration. They’re probably not on display, but I remember a friend who was a former student at another university finding his old honours thesis in the library to show a current student that yes, he really did manage to work juggling into his maths thesis. Horticulture is unusual in that it is possible, due to the sheer number of species and cultivars, for a novice to do a project in 6 months that genuinely has never been done before, there can’t be many topics where that’s the case. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 8:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/25 "2019-06-21T08:29:57Z")
In Spain yes, although the “significance” isn’t expected to necessarily be peer-reviewed level. Depending on your field of study, you can do a “research project” (which needs to be novel as far as anybody can tell) or a “design project” (which doesn’t necessarily have to be patentable but it should be original enough to show your chops). My own research was used and cited as part of a PhD thesis; 1.Bro designed a refrigerated truck cabin. Since the split of the former Licenciaturas and Ingenierías (same level, different fields) into Degrees and Masters (lower and middle level), most schools do not require a Project (thesis) at the Degree level and have moved it to the Masters. Engineering and Architecture schools are the ones most likely to require a Project before granting a Degree, but then, before the reorganization they were also the ones which _always_ required one. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 8:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/26 "2019-06-21T08:38:49Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > IME this isn’t true even for Ph.D. programs, at least in US academia. A doctoral thesis is supposed to be publish **able** , and adjudged as such by the thesis committee consisting of researchers knowledgeable about the field, but I don’t think it’s at all usual for a thesis committee to require that the thesis be actually published (or even accepted for publication) before granting the degree. > > Not saying that there might not be some Ph.D. programs that do require this, but I don’t believe it can be considered “usual”. “Published” isn’t the same as “independently published”, and particularly wasn’t so historically for PhD students. All of my universities used to publish the PhD thesis of their students – and make the student pay for printing it. You used to have to go to a binder to have it bound, and deposit a copy with the library, and enough copies so all the examiners would have one. As I recall, the requirement was something like 10 bound copies. The cost could be steep for a poor PhD student. After that, it was a published thesis, in the library, and could be referenced by anybody strange enough to do so. Of course a PhD thesis is ‘peer reviewed’ – that’s the examination committee. Since I never went through that process myself, I don’t know what the relationship was between getting it approved and sending it off to the university printer and sending it off to the examiners. I don’t think they would have made the students pay for the printing and binding before they were pretty sure it was going to be approved, but you never know – academia could be pretty brutal, even then. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 8:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/27 "2019-06-21T08:43:46Z")
I had to do a final year thesis. It was independent and new, but only of interest to my supervisor. Sometimes the primary supervision was from industry. There would have been about 5% that they thought people other than the sponsor might be interested in, and that would have mostly recreational interest from people in the field. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/28 "2019-06-21T11:56:33Z")
> [@scr4](#): > > Sure, that’s not unusual. But I don’t think any bachelor’s program _requires_ this, whereas Ph.D programs usually do require their research to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Not remotely. There is no way to really enforce this is a timely and practical manner. Getting a paper thru a journal review process just takes too long in most cases. E.g., I got 3 journal papers out of my thesis. But that took a while. The _quality_ of a PhD thesis should be similar to the quality of journal papers. As a Computer Science prof I supervised one Bachelor’s thesis and was associated with a few others. Those others were pretty poor in quality. Not anything new or useful. Oddly, one of those won an ACM thesis prize and was published in a journal. :dubious: The one I supervised became a conference paper, won an NSF student prize and was published. It was a really nice result for an undergrad. Masters theses are a bit more likely to contain new, original research. I knew a few of them that ended up being well cited. But most disappear without a trace. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/29 "2019-06-21T14:27:35Z")
I never had to do anything like an undergrad thesis. Even for honors, all I had to do was read a book and take a couple of oral exams (in professors’ offices). I do know one person who did an undergrad thesis that was highly original, eventually was reworked as his PhD thesis and was a basis for his entire research career. But that is highly unusual. As it happens, his undergrad advisor was my PhD supervisor. And, BTW, my PhD thesis was never published (save in the form of University Microfilms). ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/30 "2019-06-21T15:12:20Z")
In my experience, it’s not uncommon for a PhD thesis to be “written with a stapler”: That is, the student takes several of the papers they’ve already written and published on some loosely-connected subject, puts them together, writes a small amount of connecting material, and calls that a thesis. But it’s also not uncommon for a thesis to contain material that’s never been published anywhere other than in the thesis itself, because a thesis is often longer and more in-depth than what you’d see in any single journal paper. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/31 "2019-06-21T15:24:07Z")
How do you define a “useful contribution”? A Bachelor’s thesis isn’t going to contribute anything of great significance to any field (if it did, you’d get more than a baccalaureate from it), but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t make some small measurement or justify one facet of a theory that no one’s looked for before. Heck, amateur astronomers make new and original observations all the time, and they usually don’t get degrees for that contribution to human knowledge. To my mind, that and the results of many bachelor and masters theses are contributing to the overall knowledge of mankind. I had to write a bachelor’s thesis. I didn’t have to do a master’s thesis, but I did so anyway. and I did a doctoral thesis. none of them made really large additions to their respective fields. Arguably my bachelor’s thesis – “A Biomechanical Study of a Karate Strike” – was the most interesting. I got two magazine articles out of it, and it (and the articles) is still cited (to my astonishment). It nudged the boundaries of human knowledge forward a micron or so. But there were other papers on the study of the biomechanics of karate both before and since, so the universe arguably didn’t need my micron of knowledge. ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/32 "2019-06-21T15:24:52Z")
> [@ftg](#): > > Not remotely. There is no way to really enforce this is a timely and practical manner. Getting a paper thru a journal review process just takes too long in most cases. E.g., I got 3 journal papers out of my thesis. But that took a while. Well OK, they usually don’t require a paper to be accepted and published before the Ph.D is awarded. But my university required the research to be accepted and published within 1 year of the Ph.D being awarded, and they reserve the right to revoke the Ph.D if that isn’t done. And where I currently work, they require the work to be submitted to a peer review journal before the Ph.D is awarded. ---
**Author:** ![Horatio\_Hellpop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/33 "2019-06-21T15:31:22Z")
All I can say is, mine sure didn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/34 "2019-06-21T15:57:26Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **CalMeacham** : > > Arguably my bachelor’s thesis – “A Biomechanical Study of a Karate Strike” – was the most interesting. I got two magazine articles out of it… Wait, was one of them in _Scientific American_? I think I read that one. ---
**Author:** ![Inigo\_Montoya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inigo_montoya/32/124_2.png) [@Inigo\_Montoya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inigo_Montoya)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/35 "2019-06-21T17:46:53Z")
> [@zoid](#): > > I was referring to my masters thesis which I now see is completely irrelevant too this thread. _to_ FFS > [@Chronos](#): > > I didn’t even have to do a bachelor’s thesis at all. Me neither, but I did have a board. Me across the table from three professors grilling me about Lord Byron–an author from a period I intentionally omitted from my studies. I was given one week to prepare. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/36 "2019-06-21T19:00:24Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Wait, was one of them in _Scientific American_? I think I read that one. You lucky dog. Scientific American April 1979 page 150. There’s a picture of Ron McNair apparently smashing a stack of cement blocks into powder. The picture (which I didn’t take – that was Charlie Miller of Doc Edgerton’s Strobe Lab, before I came on the scene) is a bit of a scam. Charlie put talcum powder atop each of the blocks, so when Ron struck it, it generated a big cloud of what the naïve viewer thinks is brick dust. Ron would go on to be one of the astronauts on the ill-fated _Challenger_ shuttle. The three of us (Mike Feld – our professor, Ron, and me0 co-authored the SA article and another that came out in the American Journal of Physics three years later. That one had the math in it that they left out of the SA article. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/37 "2019-06-21T19:14:40Z")
Yup, that’d be about right. The astronomy department at my undergrad had a complete set of Scientific American in the stacks, going back to the 19th century, and I often whiled away spare time reading through the old ones. ---
**Author:** ![Fretful\_Porpentine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fretful_porpentine/32/2873_2.png) [@Fretful\_Porpentine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fretful_Porpentine)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/38 "2019-06-21T19:20:46Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > How would someone who only has a Bachelor’s know enough to contribute something useful to the field? They’ve only gotten a brief overview, they haven’t specialized and they certainly haven’t sub-specialized. Depends on the field, but it’s certainly possible. Of the many undergrad honors thesis projects I’ve supervised or evaluated, there have been several that would certainly constitute a significant contribution to the field; e.g., this last semester, we had an international student whose thesis consisted of translating a major poet from his native country, whose work hadn’t been translated into English before. His translations may not have been as good, or as impactful, as the work of a professional poet / translator, but they were certainly significant, original, and potentially useful. Likewise, we’ve certainly had history students who undertook oral history or archival research projects that involved sources (and sometimes topics) that no one had looked at before. ---
**Author:** ![Topologist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/topologist/32/3208_2.png) [@Topologist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Topologist)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/39 "2019-06-21T19:51:17Z")
At the primarily-undergraduate institution where I work, if the science faculty want students to work in their labs, it’s going to be mostly undergrads. So I’ve seen undergrads going to conferences to present the work they’ve done with the faculty and having their names on published papers. It’s a plus for the students and helps the faculty advance their own research. And some of the same work goes into honors theses (we don’t call them bachelor’s theses). Personally, I never wrote what I would call a thesis until my PhD dissertation. And that wasn’t publishable in a journal, as it included a lot more background material than a journal article should. I was required to submit a clean copy to the library, who bound it and put it on a shelf somewhere. My first published paper, submitted after I got my degree, was my thesis with the “extraneous” material removed. I think things have changed, though, in the 30+ years since. From what I hear, there’s a lot more pressure on PhD students to publish while still a student if they want to get an academic job. As with everything, it’s also going to vary with field. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2019, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825/40 "2019-06-21T20:10:01Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > In my experience, it’s not uncommon for a PhD thesis to be “written with a stapler”: That is, the student takes several of the papers they’ve already written and published on some loosely-connected subject, puts them together, writes a small amount of connecting material, and calls that a thesis. Yeah, this happens in Computer Science but the papers are conference papers. (Cf. other threads about how CS conference papers can be considered quite respectable.) So my thesis was based on 4 such papers. As to the question of how on Earth does an undergrad manage to do anything respectable for a thesis? In the good case I cited above, the student spent the summer between junior and senior year doing a fellowship at a top notch research lab under a top notch researcher with lots of experience in handing out problems to people that were at a suitable level. The student came back and worked with me on the problem and I continued the shepherding process. In terms of brain power there are undergrads that are just as smart as PhD students. It’s just a difference in a bit of experience. And when it comes to a “new” problem, the experience issue is less of a problem. And Computer Science has a _lot_ of new problems. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-a-bachelor-thesis-have-to-contribute-anything-useful-to-the-field/835825.md?page=3)