Postgraduate students' constraints in doing a Masters degree thesis

Abstract

Many students fail to complete their theses on time. According to the statistics provided by the Ministry of Education regarding domestic students who started a qualification (Honours/Masters) at public providers in 1998, by end of 2002 (5 years later) only 59% had completed their degrees successfully, 2% were still studying towards completion and 39% left without completing. "On-time" completion rates of Masters Degree of Management Studies (MMS) at Victoria Management School, VUW is only 3.56% (on average from 1995-2003) reported by the director of the Victoria MMS program. Combining personal interest with the researcher's future career, this research explores the problems encountered by postgraduate students while pursuing their Masters Degree theses at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand. The researcher applies the Theory of Constraints (TOC) Thinking Process (TP) tools to analyze the major problems experienced by those students as well as to develop win-win solutions, to identify the obstacles and intermediate objectives to overcome those obstacles. Multi-methodology is employed to enhance the triangulation findings through triangulation: a questionnaire survey, a semi-structured interview with 16 students and 4 supervisors, and a focus group discussion with 5 thesis student from 4 different schools at VUW. A comparison of major problems experienced by both Masters Degree thesis students who are native English speakers ("local student"), and those English is not their first language ("International students) are compared and contrasted. In addition, the findings of this research are compared with previous research conducted by the Association for Support of Graduate Students (ASGS) in the USA. The problems surfaced through the questionnaire survey provide only symptoms or undesirable effects (UDEs), not the core problems and/or the root causes. By applying the TOC Thinking Process tools, the researcher is able to analyze the reason for these problems by identifying core problem and the linkages to undesirable effects (UDEs). Then win-win solutions are developed by framing the core problems as "Evaporating Clouds", constructing and testing the solutions prior to identifying the obstacles to implementation, and intermediate objectives to overcome these obstacles.