London School of Economics (LSE) Impact Blog
Given the choice, most PhD students would prefer to receive individual supervision rather than be supervised alongside their peers as part of a collective. This is understandable, given the undivided attention and precise, directly relevant advice one would receive. However, Hans Agné and Ulf Mörkenstam have compared the experiences of individually and collectively supervised students on the same doctoral programme and found that collective supervision, during the first year at least, is correlated with significantly shorter times to thesis completion compared to individual supervision.
This blog post is based on the authors’ article, “Should first-year doctoral students be supervised collectively or individually? Effects on thesis completion and time to completion”, published in Higher Education Research & Development (DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2018.1453785).