Master's Thesis
Students shall register for their Master's Thesis using this form. The registration form has to be signed by your academic supervisor. Please hand in the registration form to Helen Wermuth, Examination Management. The Master's Thesis must not be handed in later than 6 months after its start date.
The supervisor must be an expert examiner of the TUM. An external thesis advisor must first be approved by the examination board: please submit a written request including:
- the title of the thesis confirmed by the supervisor of the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology
- the confirmation from your external contact that he or she is willing to act as the advisor
When submitting your thesis, it is important that you adhere to the correct format and submission requirements:
Language
- English or German
Formatting and legal instructions
- A4 size
- Include the Declaration of Authorship at the end or at the beginning of the pdf
- Please pay attention to the guidelines for the use of AI ↓
- Prepend an abstract of approx. 200 words (in English)
- TUM template for your thesis (Mytum-Login)
- Do not include your student ID number, date of birth, place of birth, email address, home address, telephone number, or registration date.
Cover
- Technische Universität München
- Chair "..."
- Master of Education Research on Teaching and Learning
- TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology
- Title
- First and last name of the author
- Academic title and name of your supervisor
- Academic title and name of your advisor
- Submission date (day on which you hand in your thesis)
- The TUM logo (Mytum-Login)
You need to submit your thesis as PDF document by email from your TUM email account to helen.wermuth@tum.de. It must include the signed declaration of authorship! Ms. Wermuth will then forward it to the respective academic supervior. Please don't submit any hard copy, only if your supervisor asks for it. Furthemore, you need to send the prefilled assessment form.
General information of the TUM about theses and helpful information you can find here.
Students can use AI tools such as Grammarly or ChatGPT according to levels 1 to 4 of the AI Assessment Scale. Further information on the AI Assessment Scale can be found at: Perkins, M., Furze, L., Roe, J., & MacVaugh, J. (2023). Navigating the generative AI era: Introducing the AI assessment scale for ethical GenAI assessment. arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.07086.
An adaptation of the AI Assessment Scale:
| A | NO AI | The (part of the) thesis has been conducted without any AI assistance |
| B | AI-ASSISTED IDEA GENERATION AND STRUCTURING | AI is used for brainstorming, structuring, or developing general ideas to improve the (part of the) thesis. The content generated at this stage is not directly included in the thesis. |
| C | AI-ASSISTED EDITING | AI is used to improve the clarity or quality of expression. No new content is created at this level, only existing content is edited. |
| D | AI TASK COMPLETION, HUMAN EVALUATION | AI is used to generate certain elements of the thesis. The elements generated by AI must be critically evaluated and questioned. |
| E | FULL AI | AI is used as a kind of “co-pilot” with whom the entire work is written together. This stage is not allowed in the thesis. |
To document AI use transparently, the declaration of authorship must state which AI tools have been used at which level (according to the AI Assessment Scale) for the introduction, theory, methods, results, and discussion sections including the purpose (the result produced after using AI, e.g., brainstorming ideas, formulating texts).
The number or combination of AI use levels A–D has no bearing on the final grade, but must be reported for documentation and transparency purposes. Level E is not allowed.
It is not required to indicate the use of Word tools to check spelling and punctuation.
A template for such a declaration on AI use (the complete declaration template, you can find in the section Guidelines and Templates ↑):
| Thesis part | Level A | Level B | Level C | Level D | Description |
| Introduction | ☐ | ☒ | ☐ | ☒ | To brainstorm about the societal value of my topic, I had ChatGPT generate some ideas (level B of the AI Assessment Scale according to Perkins). I handed over the writing plan created on this basis in bullet points to ChatGPT and received the formulated text (level D). I then checked and edited this formulated text. |
| Theoretical Background | ☐ | ☒ | ☒ | ☐ | I used ChatGPT to brainstorm the research question and generate hypotheses (level B). I let Grammarly check my self-written theoretical background (level C). |
| Methods | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | …
|
- For the final thesis, enrollment is mandatory until completion and submission. This also applies if the period for writing the thesis was extended for reasons beyond your control.
- Please pay attention that the assessment of the Master's thesis might take two months. However, the date of the submission of the thesis will become the graduation date (provided that the thesis is the last examination!).
- The completion of the graduation documents might take a few weeks, but a preliminary degree certificate can be downloaded from TUMonline as soon as the process of issuing the graduation documents has been initiated.
Please visit the TUM website for detailed information.