Some people especially in selected disciplines supervise large number of students ( eg more than 20 students) at a time for M.Phil and Ph D degress ? Its totally depends on the amount of time the person spend with each students however in case of Management and some sections of Social Sciences /Humanities science people use secondary data then accommodate more number of students conveniently. Will it be possible or allowable to do such supervision?
The answer to your question depends on HOW the person supervises. I know advisors who are deeply involved with their students in choosing the research topic, data collection and analysis methodology, and development of the discussion.
But here in ResearchGate, I often get questions from masters or doctoral students that make clear they they get little help at all from their advisors.
If the advisor has a "hands-off" policy, more students can certainly be supervised.
To have a "hands-off" approach is good because it also forces the students to become independent thinkers. Then the supervisor has to be tough about the final deadline.
One secret to successful group supervision is to only accept student topics that are closely related so the students can help each other. The next secret is to only accept smart students, because of the 80:20 rule. A third secret is to ensure that the students all have a common understanding of the research process before they start.
How many students a PhD supervisor has are considered 'more' is probably the first question to be answered.
Furthermore, universitiies in different countries tend to have different arrangements of PhD/MPhil supervision. Some universities do have a cap for how many PhD students a supervisor can have because the amount of time and effort put into PhD supervision are immense particularly on business and management topics. It is, however, not a usual practice for a PhD study in some management or social science areas to be purely based on secondary data. Even if this is the case, students would often be expected to analyse a rather large set of data to provide sufficient findings for a PhD thesis. Supervisors not only support data analysis is only one type of work invovled in PhD study, but also the training and development of students' critical thinking and general research skills. Therefore, I would not see a causal link that supervisors can have more PhD/Mphil students who mainly conduct secondary data analysis.
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