Students have expressed frustration with the rules surrounding optional third-year Law dissertations, saying that “the diss chucks you in the deep end”.

According to the Faculty of Law Tripos Handbook, supervisors can “only read and comment on up to 3,000 words of your dissertation,” amounting to just 25% of the work’s total length of 12,000 words. Students can also have feedback on tables of contents and bibliographies.

Students receive two hours of direct supervision alongside “regular ‘seminars’” for their dissertations. This differs from other subjects such as English, in which students receive four hours of supervisions for a 7,500 word dissertation.

This comes after the University’s watchdog called for “greater structural reform” in Cambridge’s workload, leading to the Cambridge Students’ Union (SU) lobbying for reading weeks and clear boundaries for supervision scheduling to address impacts on students’ mental health.

One third-year lawyer told Varsity: “It just seems like the entire structure of how the diss is done is to make it as independent a project as possible, but I think they’ve gone too far to get that. It just leaves a degree of uncertainty throughout the process, both in terms of writing style and the substance.”

They also explained that because the rest of the degree is exam based, with “no other piece of writing beyond 1,250 words,” the minimal guidance exacerbates uncertainty surrounding dissertations.

This feeling was reiterated by a second student, who feels that “there’s not too much direction and help being given,” and that they “would rather at least more than half of it get marked in order to give us a real sense of where our dissertation is at considering the work we’re putting in”.

However, other students have said that they’re not too frustrated about the rules, with one student telling Varsity: “It’d be great if we got a bit more marked but as far as I’m concerned, as far as it’s standardised across the faculty, I’m not too bothered.”

The University has also recently rejected calls from students and the Office of Independent Adjudicators to introduce exam resits, meaning that Cambridge is now one of the only top universities not allowing students to retake exams.

An internal report suggested that introducing resits could damage the University’s reputation, stating that students might “exploit” them for “academic advantage”.