Failed my dissertation

[Fallulah]

I will start this by saying I completely acknowledge my dissertation wasn’t my best work and I expected to fail due to issues with my supervisor and having to just work by myself which led to issues with my own time management. (When someone is constantly negative, doesn’t answer your questions and is frequently unavailable it is not motivating. I have posted before about my proposal which in the end I had to get approved by another tutor because my supervisor was delaying everything.) But I have unbelievably failed by a long way, which I think is quite undeserved.

All the way through my masters course I have received merits and distinctions. I am clearly capable of working at this level. My final dissertation was based on a previous project for which I received a distinction. I added and discussed even more literature and yet the marking grid has things like ‘doesn’t engage with enough literature’ highlighted. I was praised in the previous project for critical reflection on literature - I’ve done the same in the dissertation and been told I am too reflective. Suddenly out of nowhere, the literature I have used is too old (the main theory is over 15 years old; I can’t help that) when this was never brought up before and age of the research is nowhere in the marking criteria. My supervisor kept telling me to make reference to literature in the write up of the findings and yet in the feedback said there was too much literature.

I have an online meeting with the course leader next week but honestly reading the small amount of feedback I have been given (no specifics, nothing identified as being worth keeping and a highlighted grid, plus one line from the second marker which makes me wonder if they actually read it) it sounds like I need to redo the whole thing, which I don’t think I can do in a matter of weeks there are to the deadline I have been given. I work long hours full time and have other projects lined up now as well as personal issues I have made the course leader aware of. I have also raised the issue of my supervisor but don’t expect anything to come of that because they are close colleagues.

I’ve been told I can’t have any form of extension/extenuating circumstances because I took an interruption of studies previously when a parent died, and my registration is running out. I have checked the regulations and I actually have another year so this is incorrect, which I will bring up.

How do I approach this meeting?

I have asked for a different supervisor. I really can’t engage with the one I had. At the moment I just cry whenever I think of having to work with them again, which is not ideal!

Would it be more sensible to just exit the course? I would have a really high mark diploma if it was a possibility to do this… but my employer paid for me to do a masters, which would probably mean I have to pay everything back and admit I am a failure. Plus I already have a diploma and feel I would spend the rest of my life explaining why I have this other weird qualification - because I failed.

I have lost all enthusiasm and interest in the topic due to this process. I am not sure if I actually can open up the document and be interested in it again. Should I push to repeat the whole year and do something different? Take the credits I have to another university some time in the future?

How many people do actually pass second time from being absolutely roasted on first submission? It just seems like there is so much to do.

Is it worth me trying to contact my original tutor, who was amazing but has since gone to a different university. At this stage I would happily pay for their help, but it’s probably not the done thing!

🤯

Hey there,
Sorry to hear about your situation. I am also sorry that I have no real advice to give, except that you should probably contact your current suervisor first. I know you have a had a difficult relationship with them so far, but fact is; it is their job.
Best of luck!

I'm sorry that you're in this situation and that you were so let down by your supervisor. Please put all this in an email to the course director, also look at the assessment regulations and see if you can appeal because of marking inaccuracies or similar. Essentially, you've acted on your supervisor feedback and are now being told that was wrong.
Please ask for an extended time to work on the resub, and for a new supervisor to support you. I had to do this and I wasn't popular with course management but tough, you deserve the best opportunity to pass.

There will be timescales for resubmission dependent on exam board schedules.

I would go ahead and try to resubmit. Ask for an extension if you can and ask to sit down with someone for proper feedback.

If you think it's truly unjust ask for a remak but if the module has been through moderation it's unlikely to get you far.

First priority is to clear up the errors around the situation.
Second is to get clear information from the supervisor- they should be recommending where to look for current discussions/advances around the theory, topic, etc.

FWIW I've helped several folks with their dissertations in the recent past and the one thing I found common to all was 'rambling' when being concise would have expanded scope for discussion. Not saying that's what you've done but from my own experience of writing them, it's easy to stagnate with things.

Sorry, that sounds really miserable, it must be very disheartening to have come this far but come up against such a hurdle.

I think the first thing you have to do is accept the feedback at face value. Your dissertation will have been marked by two experts in the field, so their understanding of the requirements re e.g. engaging with the literature is going to be better than yours. I would try to work out (either from reading the feedback again in a few days, or from the upcoming meeting) what the one or two major things which caused you to fail were. Sometimes, either because the feedback is written badly or because students are too upset to take it in, the important stuff gets lost in little unimportant details.

If you’ve done well on the course so far you’re perfectly capable of doing this. It sounds like you do need a new supervisor, who will hopefully be able to give an opinion on whether you start from scratch or try to improve the original work. For what it’s worth, the only masters thesis I gave a fail to got sent back to me a few months later with a lot of improvement (as per the feedback) and I passed it, and was very happy to be able to do so. Very best of luck.

I can’t help with the academic side but if this was a course which is being funded by work and important for your professional development or impacting your professional registration, I would definitely have a conversation with your line manager about them allowing you some urgent study leave to work on it. That could either be paid study leave from work (at my company we would make you commit to staying in your role for a period afterwards to justify this) or authorising you to take annual leave at short notice, or taking some of your heavy workload away and agreeing you can work on your dissertation in work time.

if you’ve come this far, don’t throw the towel in just yet!

Do you think maybe if you based this on a previous piece of work you already received credit for, that, while you might not quite have fallen foul of self-plagiarism, it just might not have been original enough for an entire dissertation which is supposed to produce new research on a subject?
It's one thing to use the same approach (e.g. applying feminist GIS theory in all your projects in a geography masters) but it's another to actually do the same project but bigger. There are marks for originality of work so it sounds like you might have lost these which brought your overall grade down, and when other issues were found it pushed you below the pass mark.

However, while it's something you would be reasonably expected to know at this level, this still should have been highlighted by the supervisor in one of their early checks and it sounds like that didn't happen.

I don't think you have any comeback on it as dissertations are externally moderated and the other thing is, this feedback could possibly have come (in part or in full) from the second marker.

The only thing you can really do is take on board every piece of criticism, don't be defensive/argumentative/poor me in the meeting but approach it as a fact finding meeting to get as much detail as possible (at least you're getting a meeting, I got a fail on one module in one of my postgrads and got three lines of nonsense from which I had to extrapolate the problem) and try and improve the piece of work to address every issue (whether you believe they are justified or not) and resubmit within the time frame.

I know this won't sound great, but pretty much everyone who gets a fail when they've done a piece of work feels like it's wrong, unjustified, and the marker clearly hates them, but in reality, this is almost never the case.

I’ve just finished the ACP MSc and this happened to some of my cohort. They got a lot of support from others on the course, after they’d had a cry and dusted themselves off, so is that an option for you? I am a very average student, but going off the feedback on my dissertation I could see where one of them could pull up her marks. Other people also helped her and she got in contact with the course lead too and did pass second time. Couldn’t get more than one meeting with tutor as this was over the summer and like you, was getting conflicting advice from them too before.

Good luck and go back at it. You can do it and you are really not the only one. One poor soul got low 30s for all of their hard work and I really felt for them.

I’m in two minds, the reason is, you’re not taking any personal responsibility and basically blaming your supervisor and alluding to an unfair mark. You can ask for it to be regraded, but the truth is you should be focusing on the errors and how to fix them and not focusing on your supervisor, they aren’t doing it for you

Thanks all. I am 100% in the middle of an emotional response to this even though I expected to fail, I do recognise that. I’ve gone from 70s for assignments to less than 40% for this. I agree that there is no point arguing the mark, but it’s a big shock for it to apparently be as bad as it is, when I have previously demonstrated a more than basic ability to work at this level. On the page where you get the grades they show you a lovely graphic of the highest mark, average mark and lowest mark, and mine is the lowest. 😢

@MakeTeaNotLove Thats interesting what you say about including previously marked material. I was worried about this because of the academic misconduct risk aspect and asked my supervisor about this on two occasions. They said they would seek guidance and never came back to me, so I had to guess and hope for the best.

I do take personal responsibility - my time management was terrible because every time I did something I just got conflicting advice, negativity or no response, so there was an element already during the process of me becoming disengaged and leaving it to the last minute. My supervisor isn’t doing the work for me but they have contributed to my attitude, enthusiasm and feelings towards it, haven’t always helped when asked, and I don’t feel I can constructively work with them. I am definitely going to push for a new one. It’s not like I can go through the errors one by one and fix them - that would be easy - the feedback is so loose I can’t tell what is ok and worth keeping and what needs redoing.

There is zero chance of any study leave or annual leave being approved for this. I can work on it for the whole Christmas break (joy!), which means I won’t be able to complete things I also need to do for work in that time, but my original supervisor was not available over this time or after it last year so I’m assuming this year would be the same if I was forced to stay with them.

Nobody on the course knows each other - it went remote during covid and there are only occasional face to face things; not enough to establish links with others.

Punch cushions and kick walls for a few hours to get it out of your system and then approach things as @MakeTeaNotLove suggests.

@Missedmytoe
”Second is to get clear information from the supervisor- they should be recommending where to look for current discussions/advances around the theory, topic, etc.”

This never happened. I don’t think my supervisor could do this - imagine my dissertation was in something to do with French and adults; my supervisor’s area of expertise is similar to maths and small children. Absolutely poles apart (and I don’t think the arts/science differences helped here either).

Are you sure your expectations of what a masters supervisor should be doing are actually reasonable? It IS supposed to be an independent but if work with a bit of oversight.

In particular, you say your time management was terrible. Do think this may have affected how you were engaging with your supervisor? Were you expecting them to make time and answer questions at the last minute (this is very common in students and they very often do feel aggrieved that their supervisor wasn’t available to them on demand)? Were you asking questions you should have addressed yourself?

Some of your complaint seems to be that you don’t agree with the feedback and feel it was everyone else’s job to tell you that, for example, you need to use up to date literature. This will have been covered in the course materials - it’s standard. I bet the university library general advice says the same thing.

Again your expectations of the feedback may not be fair. You say that ‘nothing is highlighted as worth keeping’. I’m not sure this is a reasonable expectation. You will generally get directional feedback - especially where the problems are big enough to fail. Expecting line edit or detailed developmental editing from a marker is not reasonable.

I suggest that before you meet with the course leader, you go through your feedback and dissertation and make a list of action points and how you think you need to address them. You’ll get far more out of the meeting if you do that, than if you’re just complaining about how unfair it is.

You cannot appeal on academic judgement. Nor is a complaint that no one told you a lit review based on 15 year old material would not be ok likely to get you very far.

I don’t agree that the supervisor should be telling students - especially masters students - where to look for relevant materials. Unless you mean very general direction (e.g. you could look at both economic and feminist debates on the labour market). A discussion about the topics the review should cover would be where I’d pitch it - but the expectation would be that the student uses their literature searching skills to find the material themselves. And that they contribute to the discussion, rather than looking to the supervisor to tell them what they need to be covering.

Part of what is being examined is whether a masters student can identify the relevant areas of literature and synthesise them to reframe their project. If the supervisor just tells them what to cover, it defeats the purpose.

Sounds like they screwed up totally by assigning that supervisor. Not much that can be done now, other than to request someone else, unfortunately.

Happy to help if I can, in any way. I likely don't have expertise in your field but I enjoy researching and winkling out information.

@NugatoryMatters I wasn't suggesting the supervisor said, "use sources x,y,z" but they could be advising of an interesting paper which has just been published/predates the point of interest, or, if relevant, useful sites to visit for observation.
I discussed such things, plus structure, etc. with my supervisors at Undergraduate and Masters level.

It’s very common for masters students to be allocated a supervisor whose own research doesn’t align with their topic. The process for trying to assign supervisors is hard work - students pick a topic themselves and you have to just figure out how to juggle the available capacity among the staff you have.

Dissertations are marked by two markers and the mark is agreed in moderation in the vast majority of universities.

Maybe you were a well organised and prepared student and such things arose in a fruitful discussion.

But lots of students are not and the supervisor is trying to cover the big ticket stuff: do you have any sense of a reasonable research design? The vaguest clue of what might be relevant? Etc etc.

You might get an ‘oh this is an interesting paper I came across’ if it’s actually in your specialism. But often you’ve been allocated all sorts and you’ve got students seem to expect you to google for them.

I do take personal responsibility - my time management was terrible because every time I did something I just got conflicting advice, negativity or no response, so there was an element already during the process of me becoming disengaged and leaving it to the last minute. My supervisor isn’t doing the work for me but they have contributed to my attitude, enthusiasm and feelings towards it, haven’t always helped when asked, and I don’t feel I can constructively work with them

again. This is totally blaming the supervisor for your own failings. I’m also not sure your expectations are reasonable . However you are reacting emotionally and understandably so, and are upset, so looking to make it someone else’s fault.

This. You should see what I’m supervising this year. Too outing to say what I actually work on, as it’s a small field and not hard to be ‘prominent’, but think someone whose area of expertise is women’s writing of the Romantic period, and whose teaching is pretty much entirely 18th and 19thc supervising dissertations on graphic fictions of the Vietnam war and eco critical themes in contemporary sci-fi.

And you can do it perfectly well because your role is to advise and (to some degree) check up on the process of doing research. It is the student’s job to do the work and know their chosen topic.

But somehow people seem to think that even a master student doing a dissertation should have the kind of support in telling them what to read, how to structure things, what evidence to use as Y9s get in school.

Plus it’s pretty easy to spot the difference between a dissertation well grounded in the range of relevant contemporary debates and one that is missing big areas or doesn’t understand it across all the topics in your area.

A human geography lecturer can generally tell that a student doing a dissertation on stateless nations has missed some big chunks of key geopolitical or identity theory (for example) even if their own research is the feminist geographies of knitting or something.

Similarly, everyone gets to know the key stuff that come up in relation to the popular topics in their discipline - whatever their specialism. Graphic novels are a good example - so many students want to do it every year that you all get to know the key landmarks in the debates! And even if you’re new, you can figure it out.

I do take personal responsibility - my time management was terrible because every time I did something I just got conflicting advice, negativity or no response, so there was an element already during the process of me becoming disengaged and leaving it to the last minute. My supervisor isn’t doing the work for me but they have contributed to my attitude, enthusiasm and feelings towards it, haven’t always helped when asked, and I don’t feel I can constructively work with them.

Sorry, but this is not "taking personal responsibility." This is loading your emotional response onto your supervisor. Leaving things to the last minute is not taking responsibility - if a student does that to me, I refuse to see them, and reschedule our meeting to give me time to read material. We have a lot of other duties and also have lives.

At Masters level (I'm assuming a taught Masters not a primarily research Masters) your supervisor does not have to be an expert in your specific sub-field. It's your job to read and engage with up to date material. And like @SeethroughDress I've supervised - very successfully, actually - in areas way beyond my specific research expertise, but broadly within my field. The success has come from the students' work - they've been diligent.

As @NugatoryMatters says here:
But somehow people seem to think that even a master student doing a dissertation should have the kind of support in telling them what to read, how to structure things, what evidence to use as Y9s get in school.

it sounds like you can do very well in a structured learning environment, where the topics, the reading list etc, plus the week to week teaching, all scaffold around your own work in producing an essay - with all the scaffolding of a module around it. But that you are less good at doing the unscaffolded independent work of research and conceptualisation of a topic required by writing a dissertation. This is normal, really, and undergrad and taught Masters levels. Not many people have the talent, ability, and determination for independent research, even if they are good at writing essays.

What I would do:

1. Absolutely bring up the issue of your registration (not) running out. It might be that whoever told you made a mistake.
2. If you were doing a PGR, then you would have been given a list of corrections to address before the degree can be granted. From what you say it sounds as if you're doing a PGT, and that you didn't get a list of corrections but rather feedback. What I would try to do, is to get clarity on what needs to be done for you to obtain a pass, even a basic one. For example, ask to be explained how the dissertation fared in each of the rubrics, and focus on those on which you fell below the pass criteria. It's not about trying to make the dissertation absolutely perfect but rather to see what boxes need to be ticket before you pass.