Top 3 Must-Do Checklist Before Submitting Thesis For Examination
Finished writing thesis is a great relieve. But, there are still many aspects you should consider!
Creating a checklist before submitting a thesis for examination is important. The good arrangement of your content can create an impression to the examiners. It is very important for you to ensure your thesis is errors-free before submitting for examination. Yet it can be challenging to come up with an excellent thesis with no errors. I believe many PhD students want to obtain the grade of B1 (minor correction) with one-month correction. It is possible unless you work hard for it.
That said, checking your thesis for the second time can be a daunting task to some PhD students. That’s why we put together this top 3 checklist before submitting thesis for examination to ensure you get a good mark and reduce the unnecessary delay.
1. Finalize Your Thesis Content
Once you’ve finished writing, you should send a copy of your thesis draft either hardcopy or softcopy to your supervisor for checking. This is very important to ensure you have solid argument or justification and adequate content. Your supervisor may be the one who checks everything that you wrote in terms of sentences structures, grammar, and vocabulary.
Here’re few tips for you to consider:
- Submit the best version of thesis draft with correct formatting to your supervisor so that he can focus what is important.
- Make sure you know your supervisor timetable well. If you know your supervisor is not around this week, you should submit the thesis draft to him at least two weeks earlier.
- Never wait until last minute to submit your thesis draft to your supervisor. Don’t expect them to finish checking your thesis draft within a day. It may take time.
- Alert them after a week if you did not receive any feedback from him after a month.
- Make sure you consider all the comments from your supervisor.
Related: My PhD Goals: How To Get Paper Published In International Journals?
2. Avoid Plagiarism
As a PhD student, you should know that plagiarism is strictly prohibited. Try to reduce it to the minimum.
Check out the best practices from below:
- Use Turnitin to know the similarity index of your thesis for every chapter. It may take one day to generate the report. The benchmark for every chapter should be less than 10%. Low similarity index can also showcase your writing skills.
- Consider using plagiarism checker free online software for plagiarism detection.
- Do not copy and paste. Re-write the original sentences using your own words.
- Make sure you put quotation marks around those original sentences.
- Use appropriate synonym that matches your content.
- Don’t forget to cite the journal papers that you referred.
Related: How To Choose A Good PhD Supervisor?
3. Proofread Your Own Thesis
It is worth to proofread your thesis few times if you can’t afford to pay a professional proofreader. Also, don’t rely fully on your supervisor and make an assumption that he or she will correct everything for you. You supervisor may oversee some mistakes. In fact, you should be responsible for your thesis.
To make thing easy, here’re some suggestions to proofread your own thesis:
- Take a few days off so that you forget your writing pattern and what you’ve written. Through this practice, it’ll reduce the tendency of your mind to anticipate what is next. It’ll help you to focus and identify mistakes easily.
- Print out the thesis and proofread on paper. It can help you to identify the errors easily instead of proofreading on the computer. Mark the errors with pen and amends back to the computer later.
- Use grammar checker and proofreading software to help you.
- Read your thesis backward for every page (from the bottom to the top). You may feel uncomfortable or why on earth the reading speed is so slow. This is normal and you may discover something for improvement.
- Cross check few in-text citations with the references. This will ensure adequate references are provided. You can use this opportunity to check the format of your references.
- Ensure all the page numbers match with the table of content. The numbering of the caption for tables and figures should be in the correct order.
- Make sure all the figures are similar in size and clear.
- Make sure the thesis arrangement and margin is correct.
- Make sure all the formatting is correct and should follow the guidelines.
- Use one type of English language either US or UK.
- Attach your journal publication at the Appendix section. This will convince your examiners about your research findings and why you deserve a good grade.
Related: Case Study: Proofreading Programs vs Human Proofreading And Editing?
Want More Help?
These are the top 3 must do checklist before submitting thesis. Follow this checklist and it’ll make your job easier. You should know that those errors found in your thesis can become last impressions if you’re not careful.
If you are not sure and certainly want to finalize your thesis in terms of grammar, punctuation, spelling, sentences structure and other aspects before submitting, be sure to contact professional and qualified academic English proofreading and editing agency. That way, you have more confident during the viva voce.
Feel free to comment if you have any.
