Overcoming Pitfalls in Doctoral Thesis Proposal in Technical Education: A Case Study in UTHM

In UTHM, many students defer their proposal defense to later date, or have their proposal rejected at the first defense. As a consequence these students are not able to complete their research studies within the planned duration. This scenario is mainly because doctoral students are faced with many problems in producing good quality proposals. Therefore, the aim of this study was to identify the weaknesses in PhD thesis proposals. In addition, this research also attempted to find out the contributing factors to the weaknesses, and to make recommendations for improvements in proposal writings. A total of 43 thesis proposal examination reports from the technical education discipline were analysed using thematic analysis technique. Several weaknesses related to introductory chapter, literature review, and methodology were identified based on the data analysis output. Those weaknesses are most probably attributed to a few factors, namely, inadequate reading, weak critical reading and writing skills, insufficient domain and methodological knowledge as well as lack of concern for rigour in research.