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Have you encountered such a thing? A thesis submitted jointly by two people? Is that allowed anywhere?

I didn't realize it was even remotely possible until I looked up the MSc thesis of one Benjamin Netanyahu. Turns out he submitted it jointly with a Zeev Zurr, under the name Benjamin Nitay.

Was this common in MIT in the 1970s?

CrimsonDark
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Felix Goldberg
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3 Answers3

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Yes, this is possible. For example it is explicitly stated in the university law codex of multiple European countries that cooperative master theses are allowed if the individual contributions are clearly marked and can be graded separately. This is useful and often necessary in experimental disciplines that require a lot of lab work that cannot be done by a single student.

lordy
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    at my uni in Germany, I knew several students that did joint theses. It is not super common but definitely possible. – Sursula Mar 27 '23 at 10:31
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    At my university in Sweden we were actively encouraged to work in pairs instead of alone for the thesis and it was definitely more common to have joint theses than not. I didn't take the option so I don't know if there was something about marking contributions separately at the time of examination but there's definitely no distinction of what each author did at the published thesis. This was a couple of years ago and I have no reason to believe this isn't still the case. – phan801 Mar 27 '23 at 14:21
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    It's also strongly encouraged here in Denmark. – Alice Ryhl Mar 27 '23 at 20:45
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    Also from Sweden and wrote a joint thesis - you do not need to indicate the individual contributions but you regularly interact with supervisors/examiners who are expected to ensure that both students are contributing to the thesis. – FerventHippo Mar 28 '23 at 14:07
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As lordy’s answer points out, this is allowed in many European countries. In Italy, I actually supervised several MSc theses of experimental nature which were jointly developed and submitted by two and even three students.

At the defence, the students would then divide the presentation allotted time so that each one could deliver a part.

The final grade is generally a weighted average of a student’s exam grades, the thesis work grade and the presentation grade. In the case of a joint thesis, the thesis grade is typically the same for all joint defendants, whereas the exam grades and the presentation grades are indeed independent.

Massimo Ortolano
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To answer the MIT-specific question: at present it is allowed, given departmental approval (from what I can tell, this policy tends to be the same across departments).

Based on a quick survey of some selected publicly available theses (here), it appears to be uncommon but not unusual to submit a joint thesis at MIT in the 1970s.

onetoinfinity
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