Dissertation Length - No hard rule

Again it depends on the school. I am not disagreeing with anyone on this issue.
I would like your comments regarding the U.K., S.A. and Australian schools that specifically disclose a minimum word requirement for their PhD research programs.
Do these schools want quantity than quality?

 

I was awarded my History PhD in Germany Magna cum laude (2nd highest of four passing grades). Its length was 235,000 words.

 

Rational decisions

I remember a postgraduate studies committee meeting I attended at another University and the subject being hotly debated by the professors was how to stop PhDs and MSc theses getting longer and longer. They had tried imposing a word limit but candidates just ignored it.

My suggestion was that we announce that if the limit was 80,000 words then this is all that would be examined - the rest ignored - and if that meant that the thesis was incomplete, then tough, the candidate would fail. Knowing this, no rational candidate would risk exceeding the limits.

I was astonished - not for the last time in University life - to hear the professors who were most heated about candidates exceeding the already imposed but ignored limits turning on my suggestion and criticising me for making it!

I realised that if students were not capable of making a rational decision I wonder whom in our society would, and second that it was a good thing that professors were not given an intelligence test before their appointments, otherwise we would have fewer of them or at least of the ones represented at that meeting.

A thesis adds to the knowledge base and its length (pages or words) can vary. Newton's Principa is a short book not a multi-volume tour de force.

 

Prof. Kennedy: The man of independent mind, he looks and laughs at a' that
--excess verbiage.

 

My first dissertation was 14000 pages, on the topic of the environmental effect of excessively long dissertations. It was rejected.

My second dissertation:

Title: Dieting Principia: a sociological, ethnological, psychological, physiological and nutritional examination of voluntary weight loss.

The Paper: Diet and exercise.

It was rejected, too, but not on the basis of verbiage, but verblessness. (They argued that it had no verbs; I argued that it had two verbs, but no nouns. They argued also that it should have been "Principle," since there was only one sentence; I argued that there were two principia: diet and exercise.

 

Amid the number-flinging there is perhaps a human concern. The "vehement refusal" to discuss diss size may sound like a protection of academic integrity, but it also enhances the often Kafkaesque process of being required to produce what the committee wants, but never clearly being told just what that is. A refined form of hazing is a refined disgrace to the perpetrators.

I would not care to submit a diss that was one page over a minimum or one page under a maximum, but it seems that the more clearly the expectations are spelled out, the more likely they are to be met, and that in an efficient way. Similarly, I would think that I would raise questions of sufficiency or of surfeit, if a student were to ask me to read a diss that was right along the limits. Those questions, however, would be genuine, not rhetorical--a student in command of the material could answer them fairly easily, while a student not yet in full command of the material might well profit from wrestling with such questions.

 

It is always interesting to hear a discussion on how long a dissertation should be. When I orignally discussed my disseration with my chair, I told him it was my goal to keep in under 150 pages. I wanted to make the points that could be made and make it precise. He argued that length would not be an issue. The paper would be exactly as long as it needed to be to answer the research question and to be complete. One word shorter would not be enough and one word longer would be too much. I think his point is well taken...it is done when you answer the question. His advice was quantiative disserations tend to be shorter than qualitative studies. If you wanted a shorter more precise dissertation, a quantitative paper was more likely to accomplish that goal. A dissertation is done when it is done, not when it achieves a certain page or number count.