Completion

When your thesis comes to an end, there are some things to do. We tried to gather these here. Please note that we recommend to talk to the dean’s office to avoid misunderstandings.

Course of Action

• The form which contains the three parts “Announcement of a Doctoral Thesis”, “Thesis Agreement” and “Application for Approval of the courses for the doctoral program” must be submitted and approved.
• You must have already finished your 18 ECTS courses as they are approved in the “Application for Approval of the courses for the doctoral program”.
• After the thesis announcement, the thesis has to be entered in TISS (including the key words) by your supervisor. After that, the doctoral candidate is able to fill in the requested data in “My Thesis” in TISS (language of the thesis, Abstract, …).
• You have to submit your thesis for the official assessment in the dean’s office after the thesis is finished completely. Please note that this includes the upload of the pdf document in TISS by your supervisor. At this point the thesis should be corrected, and in case of the doctoral candidates at the Faculty of Informatics the pre-submission must be finished. Please ask the dean’s office for further information about the submission process.
• The responsible Dean of Study has to assign at least two assessors to the assessment of the thesis, who are not supervising your thesis (see § 23 der Satzung Studienrechtliche Bestimmungen). Depending on the faculty it might be possible to make a suggestion about the assessors. Some faculties have regulations about this topic. Please ask the dean’s office for further information.
• The assessors have four months to assess the thesis. If the assessment is positiv, the doctoral examination (Rigorosum) follows. You have to apply for the doctoral examination (please consider that this could take some time). Please ask the dean’s office for further information.
• You need to submit some documents to the dean’s office before you can finish your doctoral program. The website of the dean’s office provides information about the required documents.
• After you have received a passing grade for your courses and your thesis, you may be admitted to the doctoral examination (Rigorosum). An examination board decides about your grade during the doctoral examination. This board consists of at least three people, one of them has to be your supervisor. The two (or more) assessors should be part of the board if possible. Depending on the faculty it might be possible to make a suggestion about the members. Please note that depending on the faculty there might be regulations concerning the members of the board. The examination is split into a part of presenting the work done during the doctoral programme and a scientific discussion about the thesis and an examination about the thematically surrounding field of knowledge.

After examination it will take about 3 to 4 weeks before you can get your degree at the dean’s office.
If you have to get an administrative decision for some foreign courses or something like that, be aware that such decisions may take up to 6 weeks of time.

Information concerning the official submission

It could be an advantage to take a look at the websites of the dean’s office.

You will find important information concerning the official submission process in the subpages of the faculties.