A+Good+Dissertation

In 2005 the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published a study involving 276 faculty members in 74 departments across 10 disciplines at nine research universities. During focus groups, participants were asked to characterize dissertations and their components (the problem statement, the literature review, theory, methods, analysis, and discussion or conclusion) at four different quality levels—outstanding, very good, acceptable, and unacceptable. They were also asked what it means to make an original and significant contribution in their disciplines and what the purpose of the dissertation is. Together, the 272 participants had 6,129 years of experience, had advised authors of approximately 3,470 dissertations, and had sat on about 9,890 dissertation committees. The average focus group participant had been a professor for 22 years, advised 13 dissertations, and served on 36 dissertation committees. The following descriptors of outstanding, very good, acceptable and unacceptable dissertations emerged from this study. • Is original and significant, ambitious, brilliant, clear, clever, coherent, compelling, concise, creative, elegant, engaging, exciting, interesting, insightful, persuasive, sophisticated, surprising, and thoughtful • Is very well written and organized • Is well synthesized and interdisciplinary • Connects components in a seamless way • Exhibits mature, independent thinking • Has a point of view and a strong, confident, independent, and authoritative voice • Asks new questions or addresses an important question or problem • Clearly states the problem and why it is important • Displays a deep understanding of a massive amount of complicated literature • Exhibits command and authority over the material • Offers a focused, logical, rigorous, and sustained argument • Is theoretically sophisticated and shows a deep understanding of theory • Has a brilliant research design • Uses or develops new tools, methods, approaches, or types of analyses • Is thoroughly researched • Has rich data from multiple sources • Offers a comprehensive, complete, sophisticated, and convincing analysis • Generates significant results • Ties the whole thing together in its conclusion • Is publishable in top-tier journals • Is of interest to a larger community and changes the way people think • Pushes the discipline’s boundaries and opens new areas for research • Is solid • Is well written and organized • Has some original ideas, insights, and observations • Addresses a good question or problem that tends to be small and traditional • Is the next step in a research program (good normal science) • Shows understanding and mastery of the subject matter • Has a strong, comprehensive, and coherent argument • Includes well-executed research • Demonstrates technical competence • Uses appropriate (standard) theory, methods, and techniques • Obtains solid, expected results or answers • Misses opportunities to completely explore interesting issues and connections • Makes a modest contribution to the field following earlier work in the area • Is workmanlike • Demonstrates technical competence • Shows the ability to do research • Is not very original or significant • Is not interesting, exciting, or surprising • Displays little creativity, imagination, or insight • Is written in a pedestrian style • Has a weak structure and organization • Is narrow in scope • Has a question or problem that is not exciting—is often highly derivative or an extension of the adviser’s work • Displays a narrow understanding of the field • Reviews the literature adequately—knows the literature but is not critical of it or does not discuss what is important • Can sustain an argument, but the argument is not imaginative, complex, or convincing • Demonstrates an understanding of theory at a simple level, and theory is minimally to competently applied to the problem • Uses standard methods • Offers unsophisticated analysis—does not explore all possibilities and misses connections • Has predictable results that are not exciting • Makes a small contribution • Offers a sloppy presentation and is poorly written • Contains spelling and grammatical errors • Contains methodological and other errors or mistakes • Plagiarizes or deliberately misreads or misuses sources • Does not understand basic concepts, processes, or conventions of the discipline • Lacks careful thought • Looks at a question or problem that is trivial, weak, unoriginal, or already solved • Does not understand or misses relevant literature • Has a weak, inconsistent, self-contradictory, unconvincing, or invalid argument • Does not handle theory well, or theory is missing or wrong • Relies on inappropriate or incorrect methods • Has data that are flawed, wrong, false, fudged, or misinterpreted • Has wrong, inappropriate, incoherent, or confused analysis • Includes results that are obvious, already known, unexplained, or misinterpreted • Offers an unsupported or exaggerated interpretation of the results • Does not make a contribution AAUP (2005). //How to grade a dissertation.// Retrieved February 23rd, 2010 from: [] 
 * Outstanding **
 * Very Good **
 * Acceptable **
 * Unacceptable **