This paper offers an account of a pilot investigation into students’ and supervisors’ understanding and interpretation of university-wide guidelines and criteria for theses in engineering education. The university-wide criteria present both a means and a challenge for enhancing theses quality. To the extent that the means lies in indicating the expected standard, the challenge lies in the difficulty to interpret criteria relative specific student projects in order to decide what the criteria imply for specific engineering disciplines and projects. Consequently, there is a risk that despite articulating guidelines and criteria, the quality of theses does not improve since the discipline’s standards are insufficiently articulated by supervisors and poorly internalised by students. We suggest that revised supervision processes promoting student ownership and their informed engagement in criterion-based self- and peer-assessment might offer ways of promoting disciplinary discursive expertise for internalising standards by addressing the difficulty of understanding assessment criteria
