How to plan a UK undergraduate dissertation, month by month

Short answer first: a UK undergraduate dissertation takes a third or a quarter of your final year. York and Leeds make it 40 of the year's 120 credits and Warwick's languages dissertation 30, and at the QAA's 10 hours a credit that is 300 to 400 hours. The word limits on those three run from 8,000 to 11,000. Your supervisor guides you and does not direct the research. Ethics approval comes before any data from people. Settle the question by October, submit ethics in November, collect data in January and have a full draft a month before hand-in.

This is the planning side of the dissertation, from the first idea in September to the day you submit. Every rule below comes from a named university, and yours may differ in the detail, so check each one against your own module handbook. The deadline is set by your department, and it is the one date the whole plan hangs from.

What is the dissertation worth?

A full-time undergraduate year is 120 credits, and the QAA's credit framework ties that figure to Europe: 60 ECTS credits make a typical full-time year, and two UK credits make one ECTS. Where the dissertation sits in the calendar, next to reading weeks and exam periods, is covered in planning your study around the UK academic year. The question here is size.

• A credit is about 10 hours. The QAA's Higher Education Credit Framework for England says one credit typically means 10 hours of notional learning, counting class time, directed learning, independent study and assessment. A 40 credit dissertation was designed for about 400 hours, and a 30 credit one for about 300.
• York sets 40 credits. The University of York's long philosophy dissertation is a 40 credit third-year option in 2026-27. A 1,000 word outline and a 2,000 word annotated bibliography in the first semester carry 10 per cent of the mark, and the dissertation the other 90. You need a second-year average of at least 60 to take it.
• Leeds sets 40 credits. The University of Leeds' international business dissertation, LUBS3321, runs across both semesters of 2026/27. Its catalogue entry lists 22 contact hours, made up of lectures and workshops, and 386 hours of private study.
• Warwick sets 30. Warwick's cross-school languages dissertation, LN400, is worth 30 CATS and open to final-year students only. The dissertation is the whole of the module's assessment.

Look at the Leeds figures again. Of 408 hours on that module, 386 are private study, which is time nobody timetables for you. That is the real difference from every module you have taken before. A piece of work worth a third of the year's credit needs a fixed share of your week from September, not a rescue effort in March.

How long is it, and what counts towards the limit?

Word limits vary between universities, and between departments inside the same university. The three modules above show how wide the range is, and how differently each one describes the time you get with staff.

The limit is a ceiling for an argument, not a target for words. Warwick excludes the bibliography and footnotes from its count. Do not assume your department does the same, because footnotes in a source-heavy dissertation add up quickly. Find the sentence in your handbook that says what counts, and paste it at the top of your draft so you see it every time you open the file.

The words per credit are not the same either. York asks for up to 8,000 words for 40 credits, and Warwick for 10,000 to 11,000 for 30. A shorter limit does not mean less work. It means the same amount of research has to be argued in less space, and only a narrow, well-defined question makes that possible. Choosing that question is the main job of your first two months.

What does your supervisor do, and what do they not do?

Your supervisor is there to guide the project, not to teach you the topic. The University of Kent's guide to undergraduate dissertations says the supervisor is not there to direct your research or carry it out with you, but to guide you and check that the work is on target. Kent suggests agreeing a kind of contract early on, covering how often you will meet and what work is expected before each session.

• Supervision time is limited. Loughborough University's code of practice for undergraduate and taught postgraduate dissertations sets a minimum of one hour of one-to-one supervision for every 10 credits. A 40 credit project there carries at least four hours with your supervisor. Warwick's LN400 lists six 30-minute supervisions, which is three hours in all.
• Draft reading has rules. Loughborough requires the programme handbook to say whether a supervisor will look at a full draft or only one chapter, and when they will no longer check written work. Find the equivalent line in your own handbook in September, not by missing the date in April.
• Meetings follow the module's design. York's philosophy dissertation starts with three group meetings with a dissertation coordinator in the first semester, then moves to five meetings about your own work in the second.
• The project stays yours. Kent describes supervisors as mentors who advise, challenge and warn when they need to. The question, the sources and the writing remain your responsibility from start to finish.

Three or four hours across a year is not much. It is enough when each meeting starts from something you have written and ends with a decision. It is nowhere near enough when the meeting is where you work out what you think, because the hour is gone before you reach the part where your supervisor can help.

What to bring to a supervision meeting

Kent's guide advises preparing a clear agenda for every meeting and fixing the date of the next supervision each time you meet. In practice the preparation looks like this:

1. Send a short agenda two working days before. Say what you have done since the last meeting, where you are stuck, and the one decision you need from this meeting.
2. Attach a page of writing. A paragraph of actual argument gets sharper feedback than a description of what you plan to argue.
3. Put your questions in order of importance. Meetings overrun, and the last question on the list is the one that goes unasked.
4. Bring the previous list of actions. Tick off what is done and say plainly what is not, with the reason.
5. Book the next meeting before you leave. Then write down what you agreed while you are still in the room.

Should you record your supervision meetings?

Only if your supervisor agrees. The University of Sheffield's policy on audio recording supervisory meetings permits it only in exceptional circumstances and where both student and supervisor consent, and gives the example of a student whose first language is not English. If the supervisor says no, the policy expects the student to respect that and not record. A recording can also be recommended in a disability support plan, which is a separate route.

The same policy encourages students to take written notes whether or not recording is allowed. It points to the research degree code of practice, which requires a written record of every formal supervisory meeting, partly to show that the student understood the feedback. That reason applies just as well to an undergraduate project. Loughborough's code likewise requires departments to say how a record of supervision meetings will be kept.

There is a practical reason to prefer the written record even when you have permission. A recording keeps every idea your supervisor floated and later dropped. A written list keeps only what the two of you agreed, and in March that is the thing you need. The rules on recording teaching more generally are in recording lectures in the UK.

The action email

Within an hour of each meeting, send your supervisor a few lines. List each action you agreed with a date next to it, and anything your supervisor offered to do, such as reading a chapter by a certain week. Add the date of the next meeting and ask them to correct anything you misheard. Keep every one of these emails in a single folder, and read the last one before you book the next meeting.

By spring that folder is the history of your decisions. It helps when you write up your method and have to explain why the project changed shape, and it settles any disagreement about what was agreed. The habit of writing feedback down as a pair, what you did and what it should be, is set out for tutorials in notes for seminars, labs and tutorials.

When do you need ethics approval?

Whenever your data comes from people. The University of Sheffield requires students to have ethics approval before collecting any data for research involving human participants, personal data or human tissue. Applications go through an online form reviewed by trained staff, and Sheffield warns that approval can take several days or even weeks, depending on the project and the demands on reviewers.

• Plan for weeks, not days. Sheffield advises applying as early as possible so that data collection is not held up.
• One application can cover several methods. Sheffield notes that an application can be designed to cover different ways of collecting data. If you might add interviews after a survey, describe both in the first application.
• Some universities ask every taught student. Loughborough's code requires all taught students to complete an ethical awareness form for their project, in discussion with their supervisor.

Treat the ethics application as an autumn task. It needs a fixed question, a method, a recruitment plan and draft information for participants, so writing it forces decisions you would otherwise put off. Submitted in November, it leaves time for a round of revisions before January. Submitted in February, it pushes data collection into the weeks you had set aside for analysis, and everything after that slides.

How do you keep notes you can cite from?

A dissertation is usually the first piece of work where you read for months before you write. Kent's guide advises keeping clear notes of all your reading, summarising key ideas, terms and arguments as you go, and recording the bibliographic details and page numbers you will need for references. The problem it prevents is a familiar one: a perfect quotation in March and no idea which of forty PDFs it came from.

The reading log

Keep one log for the whole project, in a spreadsheet or a reference manager, with a row for each source and these fields:

• the full reference, copied from the library record rather than typed from memory;
• a page number for every point you may quote or paraphrase;
• the source's main claim, in one or two sentences of your own words;
• your view of it, and the evidence for that view;
• the section of the dissertation where it belongs.

Put quotation marks and a page number on anything you copy at the moment you copy it, so your words and the author's can never blur. Then draft from the log, not from the PDFs. Nothing reaches the draft without its source attached, which saves hours on references in April and protects you from accidental plagiarism. If most of your reading arrives as PDFs, turning PDFs into notes and flashcards covers the extraction step.

What does a month-by-month plan look like?

The table assumes a hand-in in late April and a project that collects data from people. If your deadline is in March, compress it. If you work from texts or archives, the ethics row shrinks and the reading rows grow. At York the outline and annotated bibliography fall in the first semester's assessment period, which is roughly where this table puts the equivalent work.

Two months carry most of the risk. November is where ethics slips, and a late approval eats January. March is where the dissertation collides with coursework deadlines in your other modules and the start of revision for summer exams. Finishing the full draft in March is what turns April into a month of editing rather than a month of writing.

Working back from your deadline

1. Put the hand-in date in your calendar. Take it from the module handbook, not from a friend or last year's page.
2. Set the full-draft date four weeks earlier. That is your real deadline for writing.
3. Find the last date your supervisor will read work. Loughborough makes handbooks state it, so look for the equivalent line in yours, and send your chapter a week before it.
4. Mark every other deadline and exam. Move any dissertation milestone that lands in the same week as one of them.
5. Match milestones to meetings. Each supervision should have a piece of writing attached to it.

What do you do when it stalls?

If your dissertation stalls, it is most likely at one of two points: the move from reading to writing, or the wait for data. The fix depends on the cause. In every case the first step is the same, which is to make the next task small enough to finish today and tell your supervisor what has happened.

If you cannot start writing, write something too small to fail: a 300 word summary of one source and what it means for your question. Because the reading log already holds the claim and the page numbers, that takes about an hour. It also breaks the belief that you are not ready to write yet, which is usually what the stall is made of.

If the data has not come, change the scope rather than hoping the deadline will move. Tell your supervisor what is missing and propose a narrower question you can answer with what you have. That conversation is an ordinary one in January. In April it is an emergency, and the options left are worse.

If the question has stopped making sense, go back to your September statement and read the action emails in order. Projects drift one small decision at a time, and the emails show where yours turned. Your supervisor can help you decide whether to return to the original question or rewrite it, but only if you raise it first.

If illness, bereavement or a family crisis is behind the stall, use your university's mitigating or extenuating circumstances procedure, and apply before the deadline rather than after it. What counts, and how extensions work at one named university, is set out in how UK university exams work.

The two-hour restart

1. Open the last action email. Choose the one action closest to being finished.
2. Close everything else. Put the phone in another room and keep one document open.
3. Work for 50 minutes, then break for 10. Do it twice.
4. Stop with something written. 300 words, a finished table or one coded interview.
5. Send your supervisor two lines. Say what you did and what comes next.

Where Notibo fits

A dissertation is mostly reading, writing and a handful of meetings, so the fit is narrower than for a lecture module. Notibo turns PDF, PPTX and DOCX files into notes and flashcards, which helps with a first pass through a pile of articles. It does not replace the reading log. Page numbers and your own judgement of a source still go in by hand.

If your supervisor agrees to a meeting being recorded, Notibo can record it, or take an audio file you upload, and return a transcript and structured notes, from which you still write the action email yourself. Without that agreement, do not record. You can try Pro free for 14 days, with 240 minutes of recording and no card. After that the free plan covers 30 minutes of recording a month. Pro is 9.99 euro a month or 88.99 euro a year, and uploads are capped at 50 MB. Files are stored in the EU, on Supabase in Frankfurt, while transcription and the AI notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses. If your ethics approval says participant recordings must stay on university systems, do not upload interviews to Notibo or any tool like it.