This page includes a number of complete (marked and finalised) dissertations from students at a few different institutions in South Africa. The documents are also available on the respective universities' institutional repositories.
These dissertations have been identified by the supervisors of the research as being good examples of dissertations.
Reading someone else's dissertation is a good way to prepare for writing your own.
Pick one of the dissertations from the list below, download it from the files below, read it and think about:
- The presentation of the document - what it looks like, what appears in the front matter, what appears in the back matter, how the figures, tables etc. are presented, the language used, the way algorithms are specified, etc.
- The structure of the document - what chapters there are, what appears in the different chapters, how the chapters are logically arranged and connected, etc.
- The research methodology adopted - Is this explicitly stated or only implied? Is it appropriate?
- The contribution made by the research - A master's degree does not have a requirement of a significant and novel contribution but the student should still be able to articulate what they did and what their research adds to the field.
The dissertations:
- Leonard Hagger, A greedy heuristic for axial line placement in collections of convex polygons, supervised by Ian Sanders, Wits, 2004.
- Estelle de Kock, User experience of academic lecturing staff in the use of a learning management system tool: A case study at an open distance learning institution in South Africa, supervised by Judy van Biljon and Adele Botha, Unisa, 2017.
- Yannick António Sumbo, Examining Lecturers’ Perspectives on the Use of Facebook for Academic Purposes, supervised by Colin Pilkington, Unisa, 2015.
- Clive Andre’ Frankland, Evolving Heuristic Based Game Playing Strategies for Board Games Using Genetic Programming, supervised by Nelishia Pillay, UKZN, 2018.
- Caleb Kipkurui Kibet, Analysis of transcription factor binding specificity using ChIP-seq data, supervised by Philip Machanick, Rhodes, 2013. (Note that this is a mini-thesis not a full dissertation).
- Mpho Raborife, Tone Labelling Algorithm for Sesotho, supervised by Sigrid Ewert and Sabine Zerbian, Wits, 2011.
- Uvedale Roy Tristram, Classification of the difficulty in accelerating problems using GPUs, supervised by Karen Bradshaw, 2013.
- Sean Niel Pennefather, FRAME: Frame Routing And Manipulation Engine, supervised by Barry Irwin and Anthony Sullivan, Rhodes 2016.
- Saira-Banu Adams, Gaming and Computer Science: Bridging the gender-gap, supervised by Isabella Venter, UWC, 2019.
- Ghislaine Livie Ngangom Tiemeni, Performance estimation of wireless networks using traffic generation and monitoring on a mobile device, supervised by Isabella Venter and William Tucker, UWC, 2015.
- Warwick Masson, Reinforcement Learning with Parameterized Actions, supervised by Pravesh Ranchod and George Konidaris, 2016.
- Sonali Parbhoo, A Reinforcement Learning Design for HIV Clinical Trials, supervised by Clint van Alten and Pravesh Ranchod, 2014.