The last meeting of the year, still a few things to go through:
tl;dr: Lots of master’s theses this year, good. AI-checkers will become part of master’s thesis submission for the faculty to see if text has been written by AI, the committee had a lot to say about this.
The meeting started as normal with the approval of master’s thesis grade proposals, but we apparently reached a new record of 35 theses this year, when typically it stagnates around 15-20. Another small change to the programmes was the addition of Finnish and Swedish translations for the programme names. This is more of just a visual difference and won’t have any special effect on courses etc.
One slightly more imperative topic discussed was a change into the master’s thesis submission, which will now include a mandatory Turnitin report to show the similarity to other works, as well as a AI-check tool, which should find text written by artificial intelligence. Turnitin should be used by the student even before submitting the thesis while working on it, as it is available on MyCourses, whereas the AI-checker would be used at the end by the supervisors and wont require any work from the student. The idea would be to limit accidental plagiarisms also.
The discussion became quite heated for the standards of the committee as to why AI cannot be used as a tool for refining the quality and spelling of a text, even if it is for a thesis as spellcheckers etc. have been valid tools in the past. This also sparked a discussion about equality for students with English not being a native language. The professors do like well structured and easily readable theses, so they also would benefit from AI being used for that. The conclusion was to wait for the guidelines from the university.
Finally the submission for TEK and SCI awards for excellent master’s theses is open and supervisors will be submitting theses that they feel like should be awarded or recognised.
The meeting was concluded and the next meeting will be on January of 2025 with a new cast of student representatives. Good luck to them.
