Die Wissenschaftlichkeit einer Bachelorarbeit

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of determining the degree of scientificity of a bachelor’s thesis. With the transition of Ukrainian institutions of higher education to the Bologna system, a number of reforms regarding the structure and quality indicators of education took place. In recent years, almost all universities require students to write and defend bachelor theses. As a consequence of the autonomy of the university system, each university has developed its own requirements for writing bachelor’s theses, which are based on the requirements of the Law of Ukraine “About a Higher Education”. The difference in requirements concerns primarily the scientific level of the bachelor's thesis. Most of the requirements formulate the scientific nature of the work as the presence of scientific elements in it, which does not quite meet European standards, where, for example, in Germany, a bachelor's thesis is considered as a research paper in which the student must demonstrate his ability to work scientifically according to standards of scientific probity. It's time to modernize our Uni.check anti-plagiarism program, because scientific publications from the other countries and older Ukrainian publications are ignored in this program, and this fact creates an opportunity for plagiarism. A serious difference to the Ukrainian realities with regard to the bachelor thesis lies in the requirement of the universities of German-speaking countries to formulate the research topic themselves and to narrow it down in such a way that the student's own contribution can be demonstrated.In Ukrainian practice, research topics are given and are often too general for the student to inevitably convey well-known facts in the bachelor thesis. The tendency, which only became apparent in the early 2020s, to offer special courses in academic writing at universities raises the hope that bachelor students will be prepared for academic work and will know exactly that they are writing an academic paper.