Role of the supervisor
As a (potential) supervisor of final projects you should make sure that possible projects are announced, for example, on your chair's website. You should be prepared to talk to candidates who are interested to do a final project, even if candidates have their own ideas about the topics of the final project or are already in contact with a company. Supervisors should try to find out if the interests of the candidates match their own expertise. As a BIT graduate also needs two supervisors, one from EEMCS and one from BMS, you could also help by suggesting or establishing contact with a colleague from the other faculty.
The supervisors must have some available supervision capacity (time) to be allocated to the candidate when they agree to supervise a final project.
GUIDANCE
You should cooperate with the candidates in order to reach an agreement on the initial project plan (part of the deliverables of Research Topics). You may consider the writing of an initial project plan as the first activity a candidate has to do in the project, or you may develop it together with the candidate. You must check the project plan and guarantee that it indeed conforms to these formal requirements and reaches the preferred academic level.
You should stimulate the candidates to work independently. You should view the candidates as junior colleagues who are in a learning process. This implies that you should not hand out ready-made solutions to the candidates, but rather let them search for solutions. You may provide the candidates with basic material and should check the suitability of some additional material that the candidates are studying. You should watch out for the progress of the candidates in their final project, intervening only in case major obstacles appear. You may have to take the initiative to call a meeting in case (apparently) no progress is made, and if necessary involve a study adviser. You should also monitor the project planning and suggest adjustments to the planning if it is found necessary. We also expect you to guide the candidate where it concerns our rules and standard with regards to academic integrety. Finaly you should read critically the material produced by the candidates and provide timely feedback.
In an external project, an external organization may give a higher priority to its own interests (for example, the development of a certain product) than to the interests of the candidate (conclude the final project successfully and in reasonable time). In this case, the you may have to intervene in order to guarantee that the candidate’s interests are respected.
Note: Apart from the UT's Mobility Online assingment form which you will have to sign if you approve of the assignment, you don't sign any other contracts with external parties on behalf of the UT. External contracts that have to be signed on behalf of the UT, can be delivered to our Internship Office and will be checked first and then signed by EEMCS's managing director.
ASSESSMENT
At the end of the final project, you need to evaluate the project in its totality, and assign a final mark to the candidate together with the rest of the graduation committee. The graduation committee should consider in the evaluation the work itself, the final report and the presentation. Also each report needs to be check on possible plagiarism or fraude. The assessment criteria on the assessment form for the Final Project give a systematic list that should be used by the graduation committee to determine a final mark. The assessment criteria have not been assigned a specific weight. The rubric is a guideline, meant to give a good idea of what achievement merits what score; they should be applied by analogy in an actual assessment in order for the committee to reach their final mark. When assessing the criteria, the committee should motivate the score on the form.
ACTIONS TAKING BY THE (MAIN) SUPERVISOR(s)
Research Topics
- Discuss possible topics with student and agree on the contents of 'research topics'
- Sign of on Research Topics registration (Standard Registration form in Mobility Online)
- Guide the student through the course of the Research Topics
- Assess Research Topics and when sufficient send a signed Research Topics assessment form to BOZ
Final Project
- Discuss the direction of the final project assignment with the student
- Involve a second examiner from the other faculty (either BMS or EEMCS, depending on your faculty, if this was not already the case for RT). And eventually form a graduation/assessment committee. Note that one of the examiners needs to be a senior examiner.
- If confidentiality applies, the supervisor together with the student need to put in a request with the programme director. In this request it should be clear why and for how long (maximum of two years) (parts of) the final project needs to stay confidential.
- Responsible for supervison and guidance of the student during the course of the Final Project
- At least one month before the final presentation: send green-light declaration to boz-bit@utwente.nl
- Pick up diploma (and assessment form) at BOZ on the day of the colloquium
- Deliver a completed assessment form to BOZ
During the process the student is mainly responsible for the progress of the Final Project and Research Topics. One part of the Master's programme is the ability of the student to succesfully carry out a small scale research project on their own. Nonetheless, if the student is not progressing as one should expect and this causes a substantial study delay, please let them contact a study adviser, or if necessary contact the study adviser yourself.