Final year dissertation system turned awry

This case is based on my recent personal experience:

Part-time dissertation supervisors are requested to produce a set of dissertation proposals and to make presentations to pat-time students' who will then adopt/ adapt the supervisors' proposals to prepare their own proposals.

Part-time dissertation supervisors are required to contact dissertation students to arrange meetings, and, subsequently, file meeting reports/ progress logs withe the education centre.

Dssertation supervisors are required to do the turnitin checking for plagiarism on the students' works.

Disseration supervisors are "advised" to introduce students to client systems for conduting case study research.

Dissertation superivors are invited to attend buffets to meet part-time students.

Disseration supervisors are to be paid after certain milestones have been reached, e.g. after students made their proposal presentatins to the academic panel (and dissertatin supervisors are requested to join the academic panel)


Essentially, the dissertation supervision and tracking system is quite bureaucratic and all the admistrative workload has been offloaded to the dissertation supervisors.

One problem is that students have been much spoilt by the supervision system; when I send emails to students to arrange for meetings, the students do not reply; when I share some of the e-resources to them via emails, they never say "thank you". When I finally meet the students at restaurants, they do not bother to order drink and they, again, do not say "thank you" for your supervisory effort. Very often, they just ask me while my dissertation proposals can work, and not, why their own dissertation proposals are good enough... these students are passive and are not committed to study..

The local university administrative team will not be supportive to you; they are mainly concerned about running the formal supervision system according to the rules.. After making effort to try to work with the supervisory system, I finally give up.

Note: do not just pay attention to the reputation of the university or the quaification/ profile of the Programme leader... an education programme and its administrative system (including the people in charge) can be quite corrupted.