Coventry's postgraduate research rules live in a numbered set of procedures published fresh each academic year by the Doctoral and Researcher College. The two that matter most are the Thesis and Submission Guidance and the Examination and Award Procedure, and both are worth reading in full rather than skimming for the bits you think apply.
Check you are reading the current year's version. The documents carry the academic year in the filename, and they are reissued.
Thesis length
The Academic Regulations define maximum thesis length as 100,000 words.
Two things about that number. It is a maximum, not an expectation, and the guidance is unusually direct that shorter is better:
Your thesis should be succinct and well-structured to keep the overall word length to a minimum.
Length varies between research disciplines, and your supervisory team advises on what is appropriate in yours. A thesis that reaches 100,000 words because it padded out a literature review is not meeting the standard; it is just long.
If your thesis includes published work or alternate research outputs, Section 8 of the Academic Regulations limits what proportion of the submission those may make up. Check that limit before you build a thesis around papers, not after.
Layout
The University's recommendations:
| Element | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Main text font size | No smaller than 10 point |
| Typeface | Clear and readable, such as Arial or Times New Roman |
| Line spacing | One-and-a-half or double |
| Quotations and footnotes | Single spacing permitted |
| Page numbering | Consecutive through the main text, including photographs and diagrams |
That last row catches people who insert full-page figures as separate objects and let the numbering skip them.
The thesis must also contain:
- A statement of the material consulted, including an appropriate bibliography, and of any assistance received
- An abstract of up to one side of A4, giving the nature and scope of the work and the contribution made to knowledge
- Where the work was part of a collaborative group, a clear statement of your individual contribution and its extent
The countdown to submission
This is Coventry's most useful published artefact and the reason to read the guidance early rather than at the end.
| When | What has to happen |
|---|---|
| 6 months before | Discuss potential examiners with your Director of Studies |
| 3 months before | Request copyright permission for any published or third-party material; begin the Statement of Contributorship for co-authored work |
| 3 months before | Review your Studentship Agreement for external funder copyright and IP; notify the Doctoral and Researcher College; discuss whether to embargo |
| 2 months before | Complete the Intention to Submit form on SkillsForge |
| 6 weeks before | Check examination arrangements and examiner nomination with your Director of Studies |
| 6 to 1 weeks before | Review the thesis with supervisors regularly and amend |
| 1 week before | Run the plagiarism checking system; allow 24 hours for the report |
| 1 week before | Complete the Candidate's Declaration and get all supervisors to sign |
| 1 week before | Check the thesis includes ethical approval |
| 2 days before | Final check that all sections are correct |
Three of these deserve emphasis.
Copyright permission at three months. If you cannot obtain permission to reuse published or third-party material, it may have to be redacted from the online version in the University repository. That is a real outcome, not a warning, and three months is the time it takes because rights holders are slow. The Research and Scholarly Publications team can help.
The Statement of Contributorship is a submission requirement, not a courtesy. If your thesis contains co-authored published work, you need all co-authors to confirm their involvement. Chasing former collaborators is exactly the sort of task that expands to fill whatever time you leave it.
The plagiarism check needs 24 hours. Running it the night before submission does not work.
Embargoes and funder rights
The three-month checkpoint on your Studentship Agreement is easy to skip and expensive to skip. External funders may hold copyright or intellectual property rights in your research, and if they do, the Doctoral and Researcher College and your Director of Studies need to know.
The embargo decision is taken at the point of final submission, after the examination, but the conversation belongs months earlier, while you still have room to plan around it.
The examination
A minimum of two examiners, at least one external to the University and any collaborating institution.
There is a staff rule worth knowing if you work at Coventry while studying:
If you are a current member of University staff, including hourly paid lecturers, or have been within the 12 months before your examination, two external examiners must be appointed.
This excludes anyone averaging 7.5 hours a week or less of teaching or other paid work for the University, with no more than 15 hours in any one week, during their registration. So light teaching does not trigger it, but a substantial contract does.
An Independent Chair may be appointed, with its own defined responsibilities. For a Professional Doctorate, or a doctorate by alternate format based on creative practice, the panel may also include an experienced practitioner in a relevant field.
The eight outcomes
The examiners may recommend:
| Outcome | Timescale |
|---|---|
| Award the degree | Immediate |
| Award subject to minor amendments (typographical, grammatical, very minor restructuring) | 2 months |
| Award subject to corrections where restructuring is required | 6 months |
| Resubmit for reassessment, with or without a re-viva | 12 months |
| Not awarded, and not permitted to be reassessed | — |
| For a doctorate: award of MPhil subject to amendments | — |
| For a Professional Doctorate: award of MSc or MA by Research subject to amendments | — |
Amendments and corrections are reviewed by one examiner agreed at the viva, normally the internal examiner unless both are external. A resubmission, by contrast, must be considered by all examiners.
The gap between the 2 month and 6 month outcomes is the honest signal in this list: if restructuring is required, you get three times as long, because restructuring is a different order of work from fixing typos.
Two things the procedure says out loud
Most universities leave these implicit. Coventry writes them down, and both are worth knowing.
Neither submission of the thesis, nor any progression decision made by a Progress Review Panel, guarantees a successful outcome at examination or the recommendation of the award.
A passed progression review is not a promise. It means you were cleared to continue, not that the finished thesis will pass.
Where your Director of Studies or supervisors do not support submission of the final draft on grounds other than plagiarism, you may still choose to submit. The Director of Studies then provides a statement outlining their reservations.
That is a genuine right, and it exists for good reasons. It is also not a decision to take lightly, given the sentence above it. If you find yourself considering it, the useful question is whether you disagree about the work's readiness or about its direction, because those need different conversations.
What to check rather than assume
- Margins are not specified numerically in the guidance; confirm with your Director of Studies
- No single citation style is imposed centrally; your discipline decides
- No stated similarity threshold, although a plagiarism check is a required step
- No published university-wide policy on generative AI use in theses in these documents
- Embargo durations are handled through the submission process rather than published as a fixed list
Pre-submission checklist
- Within the 100,000 word ceiling, and genuinely as short as the argument allows
- Proportion of published work inside the Section 8 limit
- Main text at 10 point or larger, in a clear typeface, 1.5 or double spaced
- Pages numbered consecutively including figures and photographs
- Abstract within one side of A4, covering scope and contribution
- Statement of material consulted and assistance received
- Statement of individual contribution if the work was collaborative
- Copyright permissions obtained, or redaction accepted, for third-party material
- Statement of Contributorship signed off by all co-authors
- Studentship Agreement checked for funder IP, and the College notified if relevant
- Intention to Submit filed on SkillsForge two months ahead
- Examiners discussed and nominated
- Plagiarism check run with 24 hours to spare
- Candidate's Declaration signed by all supervisors
- Ethical approval included in the thesis
- Embargo decision discussed with my Director of Studies
Where to get help
The PGR Lifecycle Team handles the process and the forms. Your Director of Studies owns examiner nomination, the academic content and everything the guidance leaves to the discipline. The Research and Scholarly Publications team handles copyright permissions and repository questions.
If the writing itself is the bottleneck rather than the process, our thesis writing support works through it chapter by chapter with you, and our PhD thesis help covers doctoral work specifically.
