How long is too long for an undergraduate thesis, and should page count be a measure of academic excellence?
That question reignited debate online after a civil engineering student from the University of Negros Occidental – Recoletos (UNO-R) revealed that his group’s undergraduate thesis spanned a staggering 9,500 pages.
Charlie Gelotin Jr.’s Facebook post congratulating his groupmates quickly went viral, not for the topic of their research, but for its unprecedented length, drawing a wave of criticism from netizens and academics.
“In my opinion, regardless of discipline, a bachelor’s thesis should never go beyond 100 pages,” said Jecon, a social scientist. “We’re not in the 1950s–70s anymore, where bachelor’s and master’s degrees were treated as terminal degrees.”
Many commenters echoed the same sentiment, arguing that the quality of research should not be judged by the number of pages.
“It does not mean that if your paper has fewer pages, it [the paper] is less valuable. It also does not mean that if your book-bound thesis is thick, your paper now has more impact and value,” one post read.
Others, however, applauded the effort put in by the group while urging future researchers to prioritize clarity and accessibility.
“It’s nice seeing people dedicated to their studies and research. But at the same time, we should strive to create research papers that are accessible and understandable to the ordinary people,” a netizen added.
One commenter even said that the thesis likely covers the entire class’s individual research papers, noting the sheer volume.
“Imagine—19 reams of 500-sheet bond paper! That’s nearly four feet tall. It’s like one box per section of IMRAD. It would take at least a month just to read through it all,” he said.
“If this is accurate, it might just qualify for the Guinness World Records as the longest college thesis ever written,” he added.
Amid the backlash, Gelotin clarified that the bulk of their thesis was not composed of prose, but of technical computations and tabulated data that could not be easily summarized.
“The massive page numbers are mostly composed of computations and tabulations. We can’t just summarize those numbers,” he explained in a follow-up post. “Trust me, we did everything just to shorten our thesis, and this is the shortest it can get.”
At the end of a possibly long day, Gelotin and his groupmates—Miguel Cepeda, John Lawrence De Asis, Nathaniel Figueroa, Ritzmon Jan Mentigar and Redalyn Pahuway—successfully defended their thesis titled A Proposed Six-Storey Thirty-Five Classroom Annex Tertiary Education Building at UNO-R.