Master's dissertation wrong supervisor

[Realityisreal]

My daughter is looking for advice on whether to raise a complaint regarding her masters dissertation support, any advice gratefully received. I'm sorry, it is long.
She has received her provisional grade and comments from 2 professors (I think that's the term?), A and B and feels the v circumstances behind comments from B are unfair.
A was assigned as Supervisor and while they had knowledge of the time period DD wrote on, they had no knowledge of the topic itself for example if the dissertation was on cooking in Wales in the 1600s A's specialism was on farming in Wales in the 1600s.

Whereas B is very knowledgeable on for example cooking in Scotland in the 1700s, B want a supervisor and a such offered no guidance during DD writing the dissertation.
DD followed all advice from A, making every amendment suggested, she felt the feedback his it had from A was balanced and fair.
The feedback from B was very much stilted towards B's specialism, I.e. you should have compared with this example from Scotland, which B thinks is incorrect as she was writing about Wales and cooking behaviours specific to Wales.
DD would like to complain to the University, not about the supervisor themselves but about the fact that while very knowledgeable A's knowledge wasn't in the area DD was writing on so was not the right supervisor to assign. She feels that she should have been assigned B as her supervisor as they had the relevant knowledge and had they been assigned she would have been given the opportunity to put some of the suggestions into practice.
Her complaint is that its unfair to be judged by the expert in her field when she wasn't give them opportunity to learn from them.
She's doesn't expect a change in grade but does feel annoyed.
Would you raise this with the university?

Apologies for the gibberish in there, I didn't go to uni!
This : B want a supervisor and a such offered no guidance
Should read : B wasn't a supervisor and as such offered no guidance

This allocation of a supervisor with expertise in the broad area, but not in the actual specific topic of the dissertation is quite normal. And it’s not bad practice.

The student has to become the expert with supervision. Supervision is not teaching. The situation you describe is quite normal. Even at PhD level, students are not always supervised by experts in their very specific sub-sub-field, and actually, this is a good thing. Post-grad Students need to develop their own expertise.

It’s hard to know how to advise about the comments from the second lecturer. Are they an examiner of the thesis, or have they been called in to give an “outside eye” comment?

Also, is this a post-graduate taught MA dissertation, or an MPhil thesis? It makes a difference, particularly in terms of supervision allocation. If it’s the former, your DD will have done a lot of coursework, and her dissertation will probably only be about a third of her marks. Although this can depend on programme and university.

Your DD should speak first with her main supervisor. If she can’t get further advice, she needs to speak to the Department’s Director of Postgraduate Studies.

From what you’ve said, I wouldn’t see the basis of a complaint - I’d see the need for some extra support for your DD in engaging with supervisory comments.

@FarEast Thank you so much for responding, the course is finished, she knows she's passed, it was part taught / part research.

I'm not sure I understand your final comment, she engaged fully with her supervisors comments, taking them on board and making any relevant improvements. She was unable to engage with the comments from B because her dissertation was already completed and the deadline passed before she received them.

She was unable to engage with the comments from B because her dissertation was already completed and the deadline passed before she received them.

The comments from B will presumably have been made in their capacity as second marker of the dissertation? It’s standard practice for dissertations to be double marked, and then passed to an external examiner (who will have read the dissertation and markers’ comments and approved the mark). It’s very common for markers to make comments / suggestions that invite the student to consider how the dissertation might have been improved, or how it could be developed further.

@GCAcademic @FarEast Thank you both, my daughter agrees with everything you've both said (and also mentored I'd misinterpreted what the issue was!).
Thank you both so much for taking the time to respond.

From your subsequent posts @Realityisreal I doubt your DD has any grounds for a complaint to her university. If she was dissatisfied with her supervision she should have raised this with her Department Director of Postgraduate Studies during her candidature. A good supervisor will recommend that students consult experts if they think it would benefit a student. But to complain after the event looks a wee bit - well, grade-grubbing. If there was expertise available it’s up to the student to take the initiative - maybe read that academic’s published work, for example.

Once work is marked, the only grounds for appeal is on the possibility that an administrative error or error of process has occurred. Students cannot question the academic judgement involved in assessing their work. And as @GCAcademic says, the kinds of comments the second examiner offered are quite usual. This is why work is generally read by two examiners and often a third moderator or External Examiner.

@FarEast My daughter's issue was never about her grade, I did mention that in the original post. It was about the lack of organisation within the department when assigning supervisors with the supervisor and student not being matched in the most effective way.

Perhaps B wasn't available to take on any Masters' supervision at the time of allocation and A was the best option available?

Matching students and supervisors is not an exact science OP - it could be that B was already supervising a number of students on cooking in 1700s Scotland, or that they were on a research grant or fellowship that meant they could not undertake masters supervision, or that they were doing a leadership role which again limited teaching/supervision duties.
At my place students do get a say in their supervisor choice, and I imagine that it they weren't allocated their preferred supervisor they could raise it with the dissertation convenor and an explanation would be provided.

Thank you everyone, I'd already suggested the unavailability to her but my daughter has mentioned that in their course a number of students have experienced the same issue with not being assigned a supervisor with the relevant expertise while also seeing that same expert assigned to students not covering that specialism.
It was that combined with, during the rest of the course always receiving feedback on essays after the following essay is due meaning they were never able to put that feedback into practice within modules.
It could be that where she studied previously (UK) was unusually organised as she is shocked at how disorganised the masters university (EU) seemed and she feels raising this to someone now could help future students.
It's good to hear everyone's opinion as she's aware her experiments is limited to just the 2 universities she's attended.

Experience not experiments!

Hi OP, I hadn't realized it's not a UK but a European university. Big generalization here but I studied in two Southern EU countries (one of them my country of birth) before moving to the UK, and I have kept some connection to universities in the continent through guest teaching, collaborating with colleagues there, etc. I think the expectations regarding student-staff relations tend to be very different, a number of EU university systems can almost be described as "sink or swim": there's no monitoring on whether a student attends classes or fails to submit coursework (they simply get a fail or no credit).
Feedback-giving can also be patchy - I taught a guest seminar in a EU university earlier this year and they asked me to give the students an assignment and to mark it - I asked whether there was a specific format to follow in the feedback and they were surprised, they said that all they needed for me was the grades and if individual students wanted feedback they could approach me for that.

It being an EU uni is quite a significant drip feed....

Thank you @aridapricot , it's a useful reminder that not all institutions think alike!
@titchy @GCAcademic As a long term lurker on education topics I must admit to being a bit 'fan girly' at you responding to my request for advice (I'm 53 and am not really the fan girl type!). This in turn makes me a bit 😳at drip feeding, it wasn't intentional, I only mentioned EU vs UK at this point because I needed to illustrate that the marking boycott wasn't a factor.
I should stress there are no sour grapes, my daughter recognises how much she has gained at both universities. It's mostly frustration that if you don't have the most relevant supervisor, (they weren't able to change, a couple of students did ask at the earliest stage) then you don't have the prompt for wider reading that can inform your dissertation, she of course did her own but her supervisor didn't offer any suggestions for wider reading and after her dissertation had been completed and been marked B suggested multiple books in their comments which was just too late to be of any use.
This is her first master's course and it could be possible that that's just the way it's done, advice is offered after the fact (to inform personal learning rather than the coursework/ dissertation directly) which is why I thought it might be useful to speak to people who know before sending any 'helpful messages to the university.
We really do appreciate the time you've all taken to respond.

Hmmmm, the EU - most mainland European countries have quite different approaches to staff-student relations, to a greater or lesser degree. (I tend to think that you get what you pay for).

Your DD and her class mates needed to raise the issues you outline far, far earlier in their degree programme. And it's likely they would have been told much the same thing that we've all said here: the allocation of supervisors - especially for taught Masters (which are not really research degrees) - can be a matter of availability and workload. I would also say that being supervised by the world expert on, say underwater basketweaving * in the 15th century, is not necessarily always a good situation for students.

• One of my favourite websites, College Misery (now gone the way of all flesh) used "Basketweaving" as their stand-in name for any degree/discipline.

Thank you everyone, it does help to know that this is just how it works and it's not unique to her university.

At Masters level, I'd expect students to find books and articles through their own literature searches TBH.

@worstofbothworlds what a silly comment, we're talking about a master's student here, someone who has already done a dissertation for her undergrad of course she found her own books and articles.
She wasn't asking anyone to do work for her, she just felt that being recommended several books AFTER she had already completed and submitted her dissertation felt like salt being rubbed into a wound.

It depends on how the comments were presented but I think that's pretty standard OP.
Commenting on a student dissertation with further reading suggestions has the aim of illustrating and exemplifying what the shortcomings are. If I were a student myself I would certainly prefer to be given specific examples of reading I've missed and how this has potentially narrowed my perspective rather than be told "secondary literature is insufficient" without any examples.
On students I've supervised, when I comment that they could have used this or that source, normally it refers to extremely relevant, "bread and butter", sources I brought up during supervisory meetings but the student decided not to use without an explanation or without discussing with me. It could also refer to a certain lack of ability when discussing sources: e.g. "You cite Smith 2015 which is a non-peer-reviewed blog but if you're going to cite this author why not go for Smith 2017 which develops some of the ideas present in the blog as a proper peer-reviewed monograph".
When I am marking a dissertation I didn't supervise, I am very aware that each of us approach topics differently and so the bibliography we recommend can also differ to an extent. The Humanities are also very broad, you can find different pockets of relevant bibliography depending whether you narrow it down by time period, by topic, by approach... So I am conscious of the fact that the student might have simply cited what their supervisor suggested, but especially at masters level I would say it is their responsibility to go beyond that and ask whether there might be something relevant out there.

Thank you @aridapricot , that's such a clear explanation and of course, the reasoning behind your feedback is very sound.
Indeed she's hoping to use her undergrad dissertation as an initial prompt for her PhD in the future and any suggested reading when that was marked will go on to be hugely useful in the future.
The supervisors themselves were excellent, it was purely the course administration of i.e. returning essay marks too late to implement in the module (possibly a timetable tweak needed) and the assigning of supervisors that gave her cause for concern and made her think that raising the point may have a positive impact on future students.
I jumped on the comment above from @worstofbothworlds as my daughter was aware she'd set herself a hard task by selecting a topic that didn't have a wealth of previous research (a feature of all her uni essays, she's always tried to ask/ answer unique questions rather than 'set' questions), she spent a lot of time collating the work needed and travelled across the country to different archives, she's also investigating creating a compilation of the work for publishing for future students/ interested parties (she'll discover how, she's a bit of a terrier in that way!).
She definitely doesn't feel the comments made were pointless, more, what else could she have discovered and introduced into her dissertation, as she is someone who would have made full use of any information or advice.
She hasn't mentioned contacting the university again after reading the comments here so could well have put it to bed but if she does go ahead she will at least have an more informed point to make.
Thank you everyone. 😊