I'm dizzy! A friend wanted me to write a graduation thesis for his college kid......|A brief history of the dissertation

Song Xiangyu and Edogawa Yu

2024-05-17 18:00Published in Hebei social science field creators

A while ago, a friend asked me if I could write a graduation thesis for his child. He said that his child is about to graduate from college and is going to go out to find a job internship, but the school still has to submit a thesis. He thinks I'm a writer, so it should be easy to help his child get a graduation thesis. I was petrified at the time, and I told him that it was illegal to ghostwrite papers. No matter how difficult the child is, he has to write it himself. Then he asked me, is there any point in writing a graduation thesis?

I froze in place, not knowing what to answer.

Later, I searched through all the sources I could find, but I didn't find a single official statement. However, we can look for traces of papers in the history of education.

Let's first look at the history of Chinese education, as early as the Han Dynasty, starting from Emperor Wen of the Han Dynasty, he issued an edict requiring "those who are virtuous and upright, and can speak outright", and set the "countermeasures" and rankings. Among them, "countermeasures" simply means that the emperor personally writes the questions and reads the papers, and those who are inspected answer this question. In fact, it is a propositional composition. In that year, during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, there was an examinee who topped the list with an article "Good Strategies for Virtue". This person is Dong Zhongshu, who later deposed Confucianism in the Hundred Schools.

With the continuous development and improvement of the official selection and examination system, it developed into the later "imperial examination system" after the Sui and Tang dynasties. With the continuous development of the imperial examination system, in the later period, Wang Anshi abolished the poetry and examination of the scriptures, and in the later Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, the Cheng Zhu family said that the intellectuals were harshly controlled, and the form slowly evolved from the four examinations of the Sui and Tang dynasties to the Ming and Qing dynasties with a very uniform and rigid format of eight-strand texts.

The eight shares are composed of: breaking the topic, undertaking the topic, starting the topic, entering the topic, starting the stock, middle stock, back stock, and bundle of shares. Then suddenly look back at our graduation thesis, which includes: title, abstract, keywords, preface, body, conclusion.

……

The poison of the Baguwen to Chinese intellectuals is enormous. Because Baguwen requires you to speak in the tone of Confucius and Mencius, the format must be neat, and the scope of the proposition is very narrow, you can only choose topics from the "Four Books" and "Five Classics", and you must not blaspheme the saints with allusions to the wind and snow, which makes intellectuals no longer able to think and is firmly enclosed in Confucian classics. It has brought culture to a standstill or even regression. Therefore, Kang Youwei said bitterly in his "Please Abolish the Eight Folds: Trial Posts, Models, and Scholars, and Use Policy Folds Instead" to Emperor Guangxu: Wei Ke Jinshi and Hanyuan Qingcai actually did not know what Sima Qian and Fan Zhongyan were generations of, and why Han Zu and Tang Zong were emperors. If you ask about the public opinion of Asia and Africa, the political science of Europe and the United States opens their mouths and glares, and they don't know what to say. And such a person can be hired as an official in the court, isn't it a joke? It can be seen that some scholars at that time only regarded Shiwen as a stepping stone to seek official positions, but they did not have some basic common sense. So Guangxu abolished the imperial examination and began to learn from the West to establish a new school. This propositional eight-strand essay then withdrew from the stage of history.

It was not until April 1935 that the then Nationalist Government promulgated the "Law on the Conferment of Academic Degrees" following the British and American system, stipulating the level of degree awarding, the qualifications of degree recipients, and the method of degree evaluation, which was the beginning of our modern degree system. And the degree system that we are emulating originated in medieval Europe. To be precise, universities in our modern sense are Christian church schools and seminaries that originated in Europe. The first universities to be founded were the University of Paris in the 9th century AD and the University of Bologna in the 11th century AD. In 1180, the University of Paris awarded the first doctorates of theology, and they obtained their degrees by completing and defending a dissertation that demonstrated the author's originality and the professional research ability of the author. Such a dissertation defense system has been imitated by various countries in the future.

In 1981, the mainland passed the Interim Implementation Measures of the Regulations of the People's Republic of China on Academic Degrees, and since then the undergraduate thesis and bachelor's degree have been strongly combined. In 2004, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China issued the Notice on Strengthening the Work of Graduation Design (Thesis) in Ordinary Colleges and Universities, which believed that the graduation thesis played an irreplaceable role in improving the social awareness of college students, cultivating college students to pursue truth, improving their comprehensive practical ability and quality, and carrying out scientific research. In the stage of elite education, the undergraduate graduation thesis is undoubtedly a major weapon to test the comprehensive ability and academic level.

Well, at this point in history, you should have a general understanding of what the significance and function of the graduation thesis is, right? To put it bluntly, the dissertation is equivalent to a summative assessment. It is a comprehensive exercise and test of students' research ability, knowledge structure and academic thinking.

So why do you have to write a graduation thesis instead of taking a quiz-style exam like the college entrance examination?

Because the knowledge question and answer type test is more suitable for more rigorous screening, and this kind of test reflects more of a person's mechanical test-taking ability, which is relatively rigid.

The writing of the thesis can reflect a college student's critical thinking ability, time management ability, self-discipline ability, expression ability, information collection ability, knowledge integration ability, etc., that is to say, carefully writing a graduation thesis can examine whether a college student has the ability to apply what he has learned, and test whether you have really experienced a process of self-learning, self-thinking, and self-sublimation in the past four years.

Here's the problem, however, is that the dissertation is an assessment tool, not an end. Our aim is to produce qualified college students, not to produce papers.

The key words here are "training" and "qualified college students". This is not only about the unilateral performance of college students, but more importantly, whether our colleges and universities have fulfilled their responsibilities.

We always think that the graduation thesis examines the comprehensive ability of college students, but don't forget, in fact, the overall atmosphere of the graduation thesis reflects the realistic picture of the university's cultivation of talents.

So, do some schools really give college students professional academic writing training? It is cultivating college students' critical thinking skills, time management skills, self-discipline skills, presentation skills, information gathering skills, and knowledge integration skills...... Is it? And can writing a dissertation really cultivate these abilities of college students?

Our current situation is that because some universities blindly pursue academic research results, the most important indicator for evaluating teachers is how many papers they publish, rather than how much communication teachers have with students. Therefore, the main focus of many teachers is not on how to care about training students.

For many undergraduate students' graduation theses, some teachers don't spend much energy, they just give students constant assignments, and then let students turn in their papers, and then give some valuable guidance on the format of the papers. There is no strict management, no fine guidance, no collision of ideas, and students have no direction to write papers, all on their own. Whether the paper is qualified or not, it is hoped that the words and sentences will be constantly revised so that the repetition rate will be reduced to the qualified point. Excuse me, in addition to allowing students to learn how to use office software to lay a solid foundation of skills for moving bricks in the future society, such a process can really cultivate a college student's critical thinking, rigor, creativity and critical ...... Is it?

And does it really make sense to write such a dissertation?

Somehow, a 2022 freshman resonated with many people in his answer about whether he should cancel his undergraduate thesis. He believes that graduation theses bring both physical and mental burdens to some students. Many college students have not received special academic writing training for four years of college, but they are required to write a long essay of more than 10,000 words when they are about to graduate. In the last year of university, in addition to writing a graduation thesis, one of the more important things is employment. There are also people who have to prepare for the public examination. At such an important moment in the life of a college student, the school also has to add a graduation thesis writing task. This can leave many college students feeling physically and mentally exhausted.

Many university teachers, such as Professor Liu Ying of Capital University of Economics and Business, said that "it really doesn't make much sense for undergraduates to write papers", "it is necessary for undergraduates who want to go to graduate school to write papers, but undergraduates who don't plan to go to graduate school face the difficulties of finding a job now, and they are not concerned about their papers, which does not reflect the meaning of writing papers." ”

Lu Xiaodong, a researcher at Peking University's School of Education/Institute of Educational Economics, said that the current undergraduate graduation thesis cannot actually achieve the purpose of passing on knowledge, but causes a huge waste of resources.

Moreover, the orientation of undergraduate colleges in many places should be vocational education, and their goal should be to cultivate vocational and technical talents and applied technical talents. Requiring college students from such universities to write graduation theses is inconsistent with the school's orientation and educational goals.

Therefore, many people say that writing an undergraduate graduation thesis is purely a form rather than a content, and the undergraduate graduation thesis should be canceled.

Those who oppose it say that the reality is that our universities are unable to strictly manage and evaluate the learning process of students. If the graduation thesis is cancelled, then what else can be used to check the quality of training in colleges and universities?

But what I'm trying to say is, if there's a problem, shouldn't we be solving it? If our colleges and universities do not do this, then shouldn't we use pragmatic standards to demand our colleges and universities to supervise our colleges and universities to be strict management of the learning process of our college students, serious and responsible? Why choose to use a formalism to cover up the reality that ignores us?

I am not saying that we must cancel our graduation theses, but I hope that our university education will return to pragmatic standards, break away from the evaluation of teachers' dissertations, and that university education should truly return from formalism to human beings, run universities well, and be truly responsible for students, our education, and our country.

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Personal opinion, for reference only