Considering that you are the main supervisor, and that you help the student not only with his/her research, but also with the writing of the thesis, have you ever jumped into numbers and summed how many hours you spend with the entire process (for one single student)?
The obvious variability is:
*Student's research and writing ability.
*Student's independence.
*Student and supervisor's familiarity with the topic.
*Strength of relationship between supervisor and student.
My actual figures:
From 52 hours for supervision including help in panel-beating the
thesis-book, down to 10 hours for helping only with the panel-beating.
So if the student was an excellent writer, then the research-only part would amount to 42 hours.
A university that I once worked for allowed a nominal, round number of
50 hours of supervision time per year per full-time Masters by dissertation student, plus 20 hours for examining the thesis-book.
For a full-time student finishing in the minimum time of 2 years, then
the grand total per masters student would nominally be 120 hours.
I hope this helps.
So far, N=1. Can anyone else give their figures?
Here are the tensions: Universities must not overload their supervisors.
Students should not expect eternal help. Conversely, supervisors must not short-change their students and should use the research group to provide additional help to their students.
Brilliant! That it exactly the reason I'm so interested in this. How many Master Students I'm able to cope with simultaneously? To which extent should my help go? When I accept to work with a student, what am I commit with? I'm still struggling to get the appropriate balance on this. I hope others give back their experience too.
When you are starting to supervise, you may need more time to correct the errors in communication that occur, as you both learn. Then I should also mention that there may be some variations across different fields of study. As a strategy, try to get your students to work closely together in your research group. That way they can help each other.
Communicate as much as possible by e-mail, even if your students are in the same building or lab as you. This way they can mine their comments to make a prototype paper. Also if there are any student complaints about lack of supervision or quality of your supervision, you can use the E-mails (or lack of E-mails!) as evidence.
You should help by pointing your students to the available resources. Furthermore, you have to know when to say "NO", otherwise you will find that the work and writing is yours, and not your students! Tell your student when the 50 hours for this year are up. Tell your PhD student who has produced no written work and no proposal that you are terminating your supervision. Tough love.
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