[YorkshireSeason]

And for good reason. A responsible supervisor will typically give PhD students tasks that he has already "kind-of / sort-of" worked out as feasible. I once read the following recommendation for how to set dissertation subjects, I can't recall by whom.

- BSc thesis: what I can do over lunch

- Master thesis: what I could do in an afternoon

- PhD thesis: what I could do in a week

(Here the figures don't mean typing, programming etc, but the core intellectual work). After having supervised nearly 200 theses are BSc, Masters and PhD level, I must agree, this is a pretty great heuristic.

Note: there are exceptions. Some PhD theses go way beyond this, but those are rare. I have no idea about Yuan Cao's work, discussed here.

[kingkongjaffa]

Where are you in the world that the level of sophistication of the work being set is such that this heuristic holds true?

I suppose a BSc thesis or design report etc. is supposed to be more of an exercise in demonstrating some understanding and creating something, but beyond that I would expect some fairly novel impact from an MSc and definitely from a PhD.

I'm very surprised by this as the quality of MSc theses and PhD theses at the universities I attended were all fairly novel, and even if the supervisor had suspected the same conclusion, the amount of work to arrive at that conclusion is non-trivial when doing research.

I fear this devalues the contribution of what these young researchers are doing. I know many people who went on to very good research positions and even founded companies based on their Masters or PhD work.

[eleitl]

None of this applicable for hard experimental sciences like physics and chemistry. You can't shortcut bench time, especially since it involves a lot of trial and error. And sometimes it doesn't work out, at all.

[aggie]

What field are you in? This applicability of this strikes me as wildly different depending on the field and the standards of the university.