High road & low road approaches on Research works in Business studies

Quite a number of students in Business Studies doing final year projects find the "task" of producing a dissertation report difficult. I can discern there are a number of approaches to do final year dissertations. I consider these approaches are located along the scale with two ends: the high-road approach and the low-road approach:

a. The high-road approach takes the intellectual curiosity of the student as the starting point. Efforts are exerted on doing literature review and then on formulating a proper research design.
b. The low-road approach takes an academic article as a starting point. Efforts are made on intelligent copying based on the chosen article. Some literature review is based based on the research theme of the chosen academic article; in the process, the research methods used by the student can be a less sophisticated version of the ones used in the chosen academic article.


Both approaches are acceptable; the high-road approach is more challenging but intellectually more rewarding. The low-road approach is  more efficient for achieving a pass, less challenging and less risky; it also makes the supervision task of the academic supervisor more straightforward.



Reference
On intelligent copying: http://josephkkhoworkdiary.blogspot.hk/2013/01/intelligent-copying-is-quite-ok.html