I frequently be asked how many pages do you expect?, where work means a bachelors thesis, master thesis, et cetera. My answer to that question is: I don’t answer that questions and I tell you why.

This post is intended to save some repetition and point out the why.

Quantity is not Quality

While a large number of written pages may relate to a lot of work done, indicating a large effort (in writing things down), it does not say anything about the quality of some work. The sheer amount of pages may be produced by

  • repetition
  • imprecision
  • out of scope contents
  • verbosity
  • formatting

All of these are not attributes of a high quality work.

Quality

A high-quality work is

  • easy to read
  • interesting to read
  • precise
  • focussed
  • clearly structured
  • based on (well selected and argued for) methodology
  • systematically and thoroughly executed
  • well argued
  • well documented

High Quality produces some Quantity (in many cases)

For most kinds of student works, high quality will show the above mentioned characteristics. Reaching these characteristics will inevitably require some pages. Thus, a high quality work will have a certain quantity of pages.