1. Conventional Supervision of Master’s Theses in Law
As a university lecturer in criminal law, I have supervised more than one hundred academic theses over the past few years. Today, almost all of my students complete their theses within one semester and achieve good results. For a long time, however, this was not the case.
I still remember my very first thesis student well. He was an ambitious young man conducting research on the Dutch ‘crown witness’ (kroongetuigen) scheme. At the time, I was only about a year older than he was, and the ink on my own master’s diploma had barely dried. The role of thesis supervisor was new to me, and I could only rely on my own recent experience as a student.
That experience itself had been very positive. My supervisor was a renowned professor from an older generation with extensive expertise in my research topic. He supervised only a limited number of students and therefore had sufficient time to read carefully and provide clear and constructive guidance when necessary.
But who was I as a thesis supervisor? I did not have in-depth knowledge of the crown witness scheme. I was working intensively on my PhD research on a different topic and teaching several other criminal law subjects. I simply did not have the time to fully familiarise myself with the complex subject matter of my student’s research.
Moreover, I was unsure about how much feedback to provide. What if my student went in the wrong direction? And to what extent should I correct language errors? Since setting deadlines was not customary at the time, I found myself repeatedly waiting for him to submit new drafts.
Eventually, he defended his research well. However, the second assessor concluded that the student had not sufficiently engaged with certain relevant literature. I blamed myself for this. That very first supervision experience left a somewhat bitter aftertaste.
As I supervised more theses, I gradually gained better control over the supervision process. Experience also played a role. With each academic year, the age difference between my students and me increased, which made supervision slightly easier. Nevertheless, the success of a thesis still depended largely on the individual student. And at my alma mater in Nijmegen, it was customary at the time to place full responsibility for both content and process on the student in the name of academic freedom. I later encountered the same approach at the University of Groningen, where I continued my career from 2011 onwards.
As a result, some students graduated quickly with excellent grades, while others completed their theses only after many months of work and with less satisfactory results. These cases often left me dissatisfied, especially when such outcomes proved to be a major disappointment for the student.
As the number of students under my supervision grew and the time available per student became increasingly limited, the quality of their work began to decline. I also lost track of students halfway through the process. Sometimes they would suddenly reappear and submit dozens of pages of poorly developed text at once, often precisely at moments when I myself had important research deadlines.
At its peak, I was supervising twenty-one students in a single semester, and the situation became unsustainable.
Something had to change.
Many of my colleagues in Groningen were facing similar challenges and were unable to offer an immediate solution. However, one colleague, Caroline Fournet, told me that she imposed a strict final deadline each year for the submission of international master’s theses. At the time, this approach was regarded by others as unconventional and insufficiently academic. Yet her students complied with the deadline without difficulty, and during the summer recess her desk was the only one that remained free of theses. I found this observation both striking and thought-provoking.
My own experiences, together with those of my colleagues, led me to explore alternative working methods for the supervision of academic theses. Brainstorming sessions with professionals from entirely different sectors contributed significantly to the development of a new strategy for effective thesis supervision. The outcome of this process is presented in this manual.
This work is not intended as a scientific publication. It is a practical guide for both experienced and novice thesis supervisors who may benefit from the lessons learned in practice. This manual is therefore not aimed at students. Its focus is exclusively on the role of the supervisor.
However, this text serves a similar purpose to publications aimed at students, namely the strengthening of skills education. Although it is primarily written for the supervision of legal science theses, this manual may also be relevant to other academic disciplines and to universities of applied sciences.
In Chapter 2, the concept of ‘agile working’ and its core values and principles are explored. Chapter 3 applies this concept to the context of thesis supervision, referred to as agile mentoring. Chapter 4 presents a practical step-by-step plan with checklists for each phase of the supervision process. Chapter 5 summarizes the main benefits of this method. Chapter 6 includes several students’ reviews.
For reasons of readability, masculine pronouns are used as a generic form and refer to all genders.
