Student guide home

Your exam will be approximately 40 minutes.

Your examiners will be your supervisor, and an external examiner. In some but not all cases your co-supervisors (if you have any) will participate as well.

If all participants in the exam speak fluent Danish, the exam may be conducted in Danish. Otherwise it must be conducted in English.

If you after the submission of your report discovers one or more errors in the submitted material, you are welcome to bring a printed copy of an errata page with you to the exam and hand out to the examiners. This may support you if one of the examiners has also discovered this error.

The first part (10 minutes) is for you to give a presentation of your project. If you are two students working on the same project, you will do the presentation together. I recommend that you prepare a presentation including slides, demonstrations etc. and rehearse it thoroughly with some of your fellow students as audience beforehand. The presentation is not directly included in the assessment, however your examiners may ask questions to the presentation and as such include parts of it in their assessment. It is recommended that the materials used for the presentation is prepared in English regardless if the exam is conducted in English or Danish.

It is expected from you that you as a student are able to assess what material should be included in the presentation and how it should be presented. In general you should make a holistic presentation and then you decide which topics that need to be more in-depth. You should focus on the problem that you have identified, how you solved it, the results you have obtained, a discussion of these results, and your conclusions. Try not to focus on technicalities or trivial/practical work. If you have for some reason made supplementary work after submission of your report, you may include this in the presentation.

The second part (25 minutes) is the actual examination where the examiners will ask you questions concerning your project. If you are two students working on the same project, you will conduct the examination individually. Some questions will be general and some will be very specific referring to your thesis report. Please bring a paper copy of your report with you and be prepared to answer questions related to figures, tables, paragraphs, formulas etc.

After the examination the examiners in private will discuss your performance, and you will then receive a grading along with oral feedback. The feedback is always given in private with only you and the examiners present. You may then choose how much you wish to disclose.

Your exam (the presentation and examination) is public in the sense that people from outside may participate. The examiner may however close the exam and reject any third party who wishes to participate. A reason for this could be that your work touches upon topics that are included in or may be relevant for a patent application or proprietary work with a collaborating company. If you for some other reason wish the exam to be closed, please talk to me before the exam.

The students will have individual exams. Grading of the first student will take place right after the first exam.

I highly recommend that the student who attends the first exam refrains from speaking about the exam while the grading is taking place and also refrains from disclosing the received grading before both exams are completed. The reason is that by experience this often negatively influences the performance of the second student.