Should you take honours?

May 24, 2025 7 minute read university

What is honours?Permalink

Honours is a research year that comes at the end of many degrees in Australia. It involves contacting a research supervisor a few months beforehand, convincing them to supervise you on a specific topic, and then spending a year on research (which leads to a big paper on that topic that might get published in a journal).

What is the difference between a regular subject and research?Permalink

	Regular Subject (6 units of credit)	Research Subject (6 units of credit)
Term Time Commitment	40-80 hours	50-200 hours
Type of Learning	Guided by lectures	Self-directed (guided by existing research)
Pre-requisite knowledge	Usually open to beginners	Many topics great for beginners but a lot of topics allow for much more in-depth research
Direction of Learning	Pre-defined (in course outline)	You go wherever the research takes you
Marking/grading	Rigid and based on assessment performance	Tailored to your research
Assessment Types	Heavily coding	Heavy coding/research + Strong emphasis on communication skills

Honours Overview and AssessmentsPermalink

Each term has a specific set of tasks that build upon the previous terms. Thesis A corresponds to the first term of the thesis, Thesis B corresponds to the second term, and Thesis C corresponds to the third.

Thesis APermalink

This is the first term of the thesis and is dedicated to a literature review. You establish a topic with your supervisor, discuss the current literature established in the research space you are covering, summarise the state-of-the-art, and then look at the gaps in the research. This typically involves a lot of reading of current research papers in the field, taking a lot of notes every day, and having lots of questions to ask to make sure you understand the strengths and weaknesses of all major relevant research.

This term is also used to construct a timeline for the remainder of the research. Ideally, you should be on track to finish Thesis A reading and assessment preparation by the end of Week 6, and then spend the remainder of the term conducting experiments that strengthen your literature review, gathering resources that will help you conduct your research, and through this, you will have a reasonably good sense of what your research timeline is going to look for the rest of the year.

One of the most important parts of this process is to come up with research questions. These do not have to be actual questions, but they should represent what you will be targeting in the weaknesses/gaps of the current literature. You should hopefully come up with 2-4 research questions and these will guide you throughout your thesis.

It is completely normal for things in your timeline to not go to plan. Research is unexpected and often, you do not get the results you hypothesise. At the end of Thesis B, you will modify your timeline to represent the progress you actually made, and adapt the goals for the final term. So, while it is important to come up with a good timeline in your Thesis A, it does not have to be perfect (it just has to be reasonable).

The deliverables for this term are a short presentation that covers the existing literature in the space, and a report that summarises an introduction to your research field, the gaps in the literature, your research questions, and your timeline. This should be very in-depth and cover everything in your presentation but to a significantly greater depth.

The presentation is around 20 minutes long and is for you to briefly go through the most pivotal research you looked into, the gaps in the literature, experiments you have conducted so far, and what your thesis timeline will look like.

Thesis BPermalink

This is where the majority of research is conducted. Most students take a break during the holidays between Thesis A and B, however, my opinion is that it is much better to spend some time during each week of the exams/holidays to reduce your workload throughout the term. It also keeps you ahead of your timeline and allows for a lot of room to move your goals around if there are delays in your research.

Thesis B only has one assessable task, which is a presentation that covers the progress so far. This is quite short and is mostly a formal check-in to ensure that you are making progress, and have a revised timeline for the tail-end of the thesis.

During Thesis B, a large majority of your learning will be independent and there will often be setbacks. It is a good idea to keep track of everything you are working on and communicate setbacks so that your research isn’t a blackbox to your team. There are often people working on intersecting topics, who may have used datasets that you haven’t looked at yet, and knowing who to ask when you are stuck is vital to successful research.

Additionally, it is highly beneficial to start on your final thesis report this term. You will have plenty of time in your final term to write your report, however, it is a really long report, and the more notes you take and time you spend writing in Thesis B, the less time you will spend in front of your laptop trying to piece together your notes while having large weighting deadlines in Thesis C. Write your report in Latex using Overleaf. Even if given other choices, there are rarely benefits to not using Overleaf to write your report. If you have not used Latex before, it is very easy to learn and any short tutorial on Youtube will likely be enough to write your thesis report.

The faculty provides a latex template - use it because it contains a brief summary of all sections required, any formatting, margins, font size etc. It also contains a brief tutorial of latex that may be useful even if you already know latex.

Thesis CPermalink

This is your final term, where you should start wrapping up your research. Whether you have findings or not, it is a good idea to continue experiments for as long as you can, to the extent that you are confident you can meet your report deadline.

The final deliverables for your thesis are (1) a presentation that covers all of your research and (2) a report which covers everything from an introduction to your topic, literature review, experiments, results, conclusions, limitations etc. Your report will range from 40-100 pages and will require a large amount of writing, lots of diagrams, system architectures, tables, and other graphics.

Success in this final term depends on you being able to culminate all your experiments into a cohesive narrative that addresses the research questions you established 2 terms ago. It also depends on the work you have put in throughout the thesis. Even if you do not get the results you wanted, if you had a lot of experiments that targeted gaps in literature, those results will likely still be significant. Communicating your ideas well through the presentation and report, and providing the basis for future research is what distinguishes a thesis.

Should I do an honours year?Permalink

If you answer yes to at least 4 of these, honours is likely a great choice for you. If you answer yes to 3 questions, honours may be a good choice depends on your circumstances. If you answer yes to less than 3 of these, honours may not interest you (however it still might be a good choice that you end up enjoying).

Do you want to greatly increase your depth of knowledge in a specific topic and learn from people who research related topics daily (rather than increase breadth of knowledge and learn through a guided process)?
Are you happy to spend an additional year at university, deep-diving into a time consuming research topic while maintaining 1-2 additional difficult subjects alongside your thesis?
Do you enjoy project based courses within your degree (courses where there is no well-defined assignment spec that tells you exactly what input and output you need)?
Are you fine with failure, completing a series of complex tasks and not achieving the results you were hoping for despite the time you put in?
Do you put a focus on communication skills alongside technical skills (ie. can you already and/or do you want to learn to communicate complex ideas to others simply, deliver presentations in front of experts in the field, and attend conferences to discuss your research)?
Are you alright with spending an entire additional year at university while not increasing your employability in industry measurably?
Can you commit to spending a large amount of time weekly on a single evolving project for an entire year?

ResourcesPermalink

I may add a comprehensive list of resources to look at in the future, but for now, I can provide one link to computer science students. Refer to the thesis management system which contains all thesis topics currently offered by supervisors. This is not a definitive list and you can try convincing a researcher to take on a different topic if it interests them, but this can be a good starting point to find researchers.