Hey everyone,

I've recently completed a first draft of my thesis, consisting of nine chapters and approximately 80,000 words. What do you think is a reasonable amount of time that I could expect my supervisors to look through this and get back to me with comments?

2 weeks a chapter?

I think it depends on a couple of things- 1. Has your supervisor already seen drafts of each chapter? By the time I submit a full first draft my sup will already have seen each chapter and he expects not to be suggesting huge changes by that point. But if your sup is seeing the chapters for the first time and is making a lot of comments it might take a while.
2. Have you agreed a deadline for you to submit the work? If you have done so in advance I'd expect comments back earlier than if I hadn't. The best thing is probably to agree a timescale in advance.

======= Date Modified 11 Apr 2011 16:56:09 =======
Hey Redjesta! Depends on your supervisor- how long do they normally take to get back to you for a single paper/chapter? My first supervisor would probably get through the whole thing in a couple of weeks but she's pretty special when it comes to turnaround times. My second supervisor takes around a fortnight to return each paper with feedback, so although I haven't reached that stage yet I expect he will want quite a while to get through the whole thing (i.e. a few months!). Personally I would ask them for an estimated turnaround time so you know roughly what to expect, and then they have also sort-of committed to a date! The other factor in this equation is when they last saw the work- if they've already approved drafts of the chapters then it won't take so long, but if it's all new then it will take a lot longer and you would be expecting much more extensive feedback! Best, KB

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

Been having some significant trouble with this. I submitted 6 of the chapters in the middle of January and agreed a two week turnaround. However, one of my supervisors has gone off on an unexplained absence leaving me with feedback from only one chapter since then (in nearly 3 months!).  Speaking with my second supervisor, he is not able to review this as he has to pick up my other supervisor's taught classes, research commitments, etc and has not seen any of my thesis previously. As such, he does not seem to want to review this. My drop dead date for submission is January 2012; however, even if my first supervisor returned today AND the two weeks a chapter turnaround starts now I am still not going to have feedback on the whole thing till the middle of August leaving only four months to do any major changes.

Do you think it would be appropriate to ask for another academic within the department to review this instead of my current supervisors?

I think it about time there was a universal time for reviewing chapters. It is really bad that some will do a quick turnaround and others take forever. My supervisor has taken four months to look at changes I made to one chapter, the other supervisor has failed to look at the same chapter for a year (I kid you not). I've had to complain higher up, but the result is not really that good. They take on these things and should know what is expected, and then they just push it to the bottom of their 'to do' list. I don't want them to do much. most of the time I'm just getting on with things myself, but a bit of feedback would be good - and they are being paid to do it after all, and they are not the only ones with busy lives. Ideally they should get back to you as quickly as possible, the first draft will obviously need alterations so a broad sweep is what I guess is needed after that a more reflective approach would take longer, but not so long that it makes it difficult for you to finish in the time available. I would send them a timeline of your proposed progress to the finish, so that they can see how long they have! :-)