Graduation thesis is an important part of undergraduate education, a necessary condition for awarding bachelor's degree, and the main basis for comprehensively testing students' comprehensive quality and school teaching quality in undergraduate teaching level evaluation. [1][2] Writing graduation thesis is of great significance for cultivating students' preliminary scientific research ability and improving students' comprehensive ability to analyze and solve problems by using what they have learned.
Since 1999, China has entered the stage of comprehensive university enrollment expansion, and the number of students enrolled in colleges and universities has been increasing, but the growth rate of teachers has not kept up. On the one hand, the contradiction between students and teachers is constantly expanding; On the other hand, the increase in the number of college students leads to the decline in the quality of students, which poses a greater challenge to maintaining the original quality of undergraduate education. [3][4][5] The above two objective external factors have caused the quality of undergraduate graduation thesis to decline year by year. For this reason, the General Office of the Ministry of Education issued a special document-Notice on Strengthening the Work of Graduation Design (Thesis) in Colleges and Universities (No.KOC-0/4 issued by the Ministry of Education [2004]), asking colleges and universities to further improve the work of graduation design (Thesis) and effectively improve the quality of education. How to improve the quality of undergraduate graduation thesis has become an important task for teaching and management departments in colleges and universities.
Taking mathematics as an example, this paper analyzes the subjective internal factors that lead to the decline of the quality of undergraduate graduation thesis, and puts forward some thoughts on how to improve the quality of undergraduate graduation thesis.
First, the performance and reasons for the decline in the quality of undergraduate thesis
(1) Topic selection
The Notice of the Ministry of Education on Strengthening the Work of Graduation Design (Thesis) in Colleges and Universities clearly requires that the topic selection of graduation design (Thesis) should be closely integrated with scientific research, technological development, economic construction and social development, and one person and one question should be regarded as an important principle in the topic selection work. According to the observation in recent years, we find that the difficulty of selecting the topic of undergraduate graduation thesis is decreasing, and the topic is getting closer to the basic knowledge of textbooks, far from the progress of science and technology and social development. Compared with previous years, there are fewer and fewer innovative topics and the repetition rate is high. This also makes it more and more difficult to select the truly outstanding graduation thesis, and the phenomenon of multiple people asking questions is very common.
Degree of completion
Judging from the completion of the paper, there are many problems. In the past, teachers could ask students to do a little innovation on a certain issue, put forward their own ideas and reflect on their own works. Now teachers only ask students to understand and write clearly, as long as they repeat what others have done, as long as there is no problem with the format and as long as there is no obvious plagiarism. Even if the standard is lowered to this level, many students' papers are still terrible: the format is extremely irregular, the font size is disordered and inconsistent; The chart has no title, table title and serial number, and the chart is not clear enough because it uses screenshots; Unlike abstraction, I can't write clearly what problems I want to solve, what goals I want to achieve, how to solve them and what I get; English abstracts are all translated by software, with unsatisfactory words and unreasonable sentences; Unreasonable text structure, lack of introduction and background introduction, directly cut to the chase; The format of references is not standardized, and there are no references in the text. Some students even copied the papers or dissertations of former students in the network database when writing their graduation thesis, so they didn't even know what they were studying.
On the surface, these problems are caused by factors such as the decline of students' quality, difficulty in finding jobs, short preparation time for papers, and incorrect learning attitude. In fact, it is unreasonable to put all the responsibility on students. We believe that the most direct reason for the decline in the quality of undergraduate graduation thesis is that schools and teachers do not attach importance to graduation thesis. First of all, in recent years, due to the transformation of higher education from elite to popular, the enrollment expansion of colleges and universities has increased the employment pressure of students, and the employment rate of students has become the most concerned thing for school management. The writing stage of graduation thesis coincides with the time for students to find jobs, and the quality of graduation thesis has little to do with employment. Therefore, the competent authorities not only did not put forward high requirements for the quality of graduation thesis, but also indulged students in perfunctory work on graduation thesis to some extent. Secondly, due to the rising ratio of students to teachers, the task of each teacher to guide graduation thesis is aggravated, and the energy invested by the tutor on each student is relatively reduced, resulting in the students' graduation thesis not being fully guided and effectively supervised by the teacher. Finally, due to the lack of incentive mechanism to guide graduation thesis, teachers' hard work is not directly proportional to their returns. Teachers make great efforts to guide excellent graduation thesis, but they don't get any policy and economic reward for evaluating professional titles, so teachers naturally pay less and less attention to guiding graduation thesis writing.
Second, the characteristics of undergraduate thesis of mathematics major
Mathematics undergraduate course mainly includes mathematics and applied mathematics, information and computing science and statistics. Although statistics is an independent first-class discipline, in most colleges and universities, students are enrolled under the department of mathematics, which is similar to the training method of mathematics specialty. Compared with other science and engineering majors, the graduation thesis of mathematics major has three characteristics: strong theory, strong tool and weak practice.
First of all, mathematics major is a highly theoretical discipline, with emphasis on basic scientific research and training. Mathematics and applied mathematics are the oldest mathematics majors. Its goal is to cultivate talents who can master the basic theories and methods of mathematical science, have the ability to use mathematical knowledge and solve practical problems with computers, have received preliminary training in scientific research, and can engage in research and teaching in science, technology, education and economic departments. In the curriculum of this major, most professional courses are theoretical, and few courses involve specific application links. This leads to the research on biochemistry of undergraduate graduation thesis, which is mostly a simple mathematical theory research problem. For the undergraduate students majoring in mathematics now, it is very difficult to do a good job in mathematical theory problems because of their poor professional foundation, weak foundation or low interest in mathematical research. In the past few years, most of the undergraduate graduation theses of mathematics major are related to mathematical theory. In recent years, the topics of graduation thesis of mathematical theory have become less and less popular among students. Even if students choose, they are just some popular science summary topics.
Secondly, the major of mathematics is very instrumental. With the undergraduate training program more and more inclined to applied talents, in order to improve the employment rate, many instrumental courses have been added to the mathematics major according to its own characteristics. For example, mathematics and applied mathematics majors strengthen courses such as mathematical modeling and financial modeling, statistics majors strengthen courses such as data processing and analysis, and information and computing science majors strengthen courses such as programming, computer application and data mining. This also makes the topic of undergraduate graduation thesis gradually combined with a tool course to study or realize the use process of a tool algorithm. This kind of graduation thesis can not only reflect the professional background, but also exercise students' problem-solving ability, so it is more and more popular among students.
Finally, the practicality of mathematics major is weak, and it lacks corresponding first-line jobs, which is suitable for indirect development and second-hand data processing. Different from practical majors such as architecture, machinery, human resources and marketing, mathematics is a research-oriented basic major, and the knowledge it has learned is more suitable for doing some indirect research-oriented work, such as teachers, researchers, data analysts and development engineers. In other words, mathematics major is a versatile major, and there is no specific counterpart occupation restriction. Students only have tools, and what they do depends on their interests. Therefore, mathematics majors have great flexibility in the choice of graduation thesis, and can make relevant topics according to students' own interests and career planning. Some of our graduation thesis are doing financial securities modeling and analysis, some are doing agricultural data analysis, some are doing data mining, and some are doing social questionnaire analysis. As long as we can solve a practical problem with mathematical tools, we all think it is a good paper that conforms to the professional orientation.
Three thoughts on improving the quality of undergraduate graduation thesis
According to the problems found above, combined with the characteristics of graduation thesis of mathematics major, we put forward the following three thoughts to improve the quality of graduation thesis. These three points are the policy guarantee of the upper level, the economic stimulus of the middle level and the process optimization of the bottom level. These three points complement each other and are indispensable. First of all, the school management should come up with policies to strengthen the status of undergraduate thesis, so as to attract the attention of students and teachers. Secondly, there should be corresponding evaluation incentives and economic incentives, so as to stimulate the enthusiasm of teachers. Thirdly, the original practice should be improved in the specific guidance process, so as to improve the quality of graduation thesis.
(A) formulate policies to improve the status of graduation thesis
The Ministry of Education clearly points out in the Evaluation Scheme of Undergraduate Teaching Level in Ordinary Colleges and Universities (UNESCO [2004] 14) that the graduation thesis (design) level is the main basis for comprehensively testing students' comprehensive quality and school teaching quality in the evaluation of undergraduate teaching level, which occupies a prominent position in the whole index system. Although the competent department of colleges and universities requires colleges and universities to attach importance to the quality of graduation thesis, it does not give a detailed index system for evaluating the quality of graduation thesis. It only vaguely requires that the topic selection of graduation thesis should be closely integrated with scientific research, technological development, economic construction and social development, and take one person and one question as an important principle in the topic selection work. Therefore, in the process of implementation, colleges and universities only need to achieve simple indicators such as the topic is related to the major, the format is correct, and each person has a topic, which leads to the participants' weak willingness to improve the quality of graduation thesis. For this problem, the school management department must take the lead in establishing rules and regulations, improve the proportion of graduation thesis quality in the evaluation of teaching work in colleges and departments, and formulate detailed systems from a series of relevant management regulations such as topic selection, topic opening, mid-term inspection, random sampling and thesis defense to standardize the management of graduation thesis. Whether the graduation thesis can be completed with high quality is a necessary condition for awarding a bachelor's degree, and the requirements cannot be relaxed. The quality inspection of graduation thesis should have detailed quantitative indicators, such as the difficulty of topic selection, the proportion of personal works, the proportion of innovative works and the degree of completion. Only when there are strict regulations on departments and students can we attract the attention of both sides.
(B) improve the graduation thesis award
In addition to setting external pressure to improve the attention of teachers and students to graduation thesis, there should be some internal incentive policies as a supplement to enhance endogenous motivation. Otherwise, no matter how strict the regulations are, they will only make everyone agree on the surface and resist and deal with them from the heart. With the increase of students, in order to encourage teachers to bring more graduation thesis, the college has increased the remuneration for bringing graduation thesis, which has aroused the enthusiasm of teachers to bring more graduation thesis to some extent. However, the effect of this incentive is limited to the topic selection stage. In order to bring more students, the tutor will try to find some good topics to attract students. However, after recruiting students, there is no reward for the subsequent guidance process. Even if you bring out excellent graduation thesis, students and teachers can't get any additional rewards. Therefore, not only the teacher has no intention to cultivate excellent graduation thesis, but also the students are unwilling to spend time competing for Excellence. Compared with the class, if the teaching evaluation score is high, teachers will get extra points for evaluating professional titles and advanced titles, but the quantity and quality of graduation thesis and tapes have nothing to do with evaluating advanced professional titles. Therefore, many teachers prefer to focus on teaching and scientific research rather than guiding graduation thesis. This requires the management department to come up with corresponding policy incentives and economic incentives. Schools should commend students, instructors and units that have made outstanding achievements in graduation thesis teaching, vigorously publicize and praise them, and give certain economic rewards to college-level and school-level outstanding graduation thesis winners. In the regulation of professional title evaluation, the regulation of excellent graduation thesis guidance has been added, and excellent graduation thesis instructors can be the first object of annual evaluation, so as to give full play to the incentive role of evaluation and commendation in teaching practice.
(C) optimize the graduation thesis guidance process
When both external pressure and endogenous motivation are available, corresponding measures should be taken to optimize the graduation thesis guidance process. The measures mainly include the following aspects. 1. Encourage students to enter graduation thesis research in advance. We found that most excellent undergraduate graduation theses were written by students who had established contact with their tutors very early. Some of them participated in mathematical modeling competitions, others joined the tutor's research group, participated in discussion classes and participated in some research work. It is suggested that undergraduate scientific research plan should be carried out in the second year of university, and tutors should be assigned to students in advance through mathematical modeling competition and innovation and entrepreneurship competition, so that students can study and conduct scientific research training step by step under the guidance of tutors to improve their scientific research ability and other abilities. Students can also be encouraged to participate in the tutor's research, understand the frontier of the subject, learn research methods, and cultivate the ability to discover, observe and solve problems. 2. Set up a course for students to write scientific and technological papers, so that students can understand the preparation process and writing methods of dissertations, ensure the correct format and ensure that every link is error-free. 3. Introduce the submission system and pre-defense system of graduate students. If the paper does not meet the requirements, it should be rectified within a time limit, otherwise it is not allowed to reply. 4. Use anti-plagiarism tools to test the graduation thesis, and those who fail the test shall not be submitted for review, and resolutely put an end to plagiarism and other acts that violate academic ethics.
Four. Concluding remarks
This paper puts forward three suggestions on how to improve the quality of undergraduate graduation thesis based on the experience of undergraduate graduation thesis guidance and the teaching practice of scientific and technological thesis writing course. First of all, the management department should formulate a strict system to ensure the status of graduation thesis and improve the attention of students and teachers. Secondly, the incentive policy is introduced as a supplement to enhance endogenous motivation. Finally, in the specific guidance process, students are encouraged to establish contact with their tutors in advance by participating in subject competitions. This series of measures will help to improve the quality of undergraduate graduation thesis.