M.Tech project thesis format

One project, two semesters

In South India nearly every M.Tech project is spread over the full second year. In the first semester you fix the problem and make a plan. In the next semester you build the system, test it and write the thesis.

Take the Anna University Regulations 2021 for affiliated colleges. Project Work-I is in Semester III, and Project Work-II comes in Semester IV as a continuation of it (clause 3.4.1). If Project Work-I is not cleared, you have to do it again in the next semester. Till it is cleared you cannot enrol for Project Work-II. There is one more option. Project Work-II can be done in an industry, a research lab or an academic institution of repute outside the Anna affiliated colleges, for minimum 16 weeks (3.4.4). For this you need approval from your head of institution and from the Centre for Academic Courses, preferably one month before starting. Then the work need not continue Project Work-I. One supervisor from your department and one from the organisation will guide you jointly.

KTU also follows two phases in its M.Tech 2022 scheme. Dissertation Phase I is in Semester III and Phase II is in Semester IV of Track I.

Many students are asking us about Phase I report size. In most colleges it is 20 to 40 pages, covering the problem, literature survey, proposed method and a few early results. Write it carefully, because later it becomes the first three chapters of your final thesis itself.

Front pages, in the usual order

For front pages, engineering colleges don’t differ much. One written example we can point to is the MCA project report guide from Anna University’s distance education centre. It is meant for the distance MCA, not a regular M.E. or M.Tech. Still, lot of college templates keep almost the same order as this list.

1. Cover page, then the title page
2. Bonafide certificate signed by you and by your guide
3. Abstract (in that guide, both English and Tamil, maximum 600 words)
4. Acknowledgement, not more than one page
5. Table of contents
6. List of tables, and then list of figures
7. List of symbols and abbreviations, only if your work needs it

That guide uses small Roman numerals for the front pages, and page 1 in Arabic numbers begins at Chapter 1. Chapter headings are in capital letters and centred. The bonafide certificate is typed in 12-point Times New Roman with double spacing. Margin on the binding side is more, 35 to 40 mm on the left, and on the right it is 20 to 25 mm. In case your college template has different margins or font size, then go with the template numbers only. The general idea will be same anyway.

Suppose you have published a paper from the project. Many colleges then add a “List of publications” page, either after the contents or at the end. Check with your coordinator where they want it.

The chapters an examiner expects

A typical M.Tech thesis comes in six chapters. Names change from college to college, so here is what goes in each.

Chapter 1, Introduction. Write the problem in simple words and why it matters, then your objectives and how the report is arranged. Three to six pages is enough.

Chapter 2, Literature survey. Many students write one paragraph per paper, paper after paper, and examiners get bored reading that. Better to put the papers in groups by approach and tell where each group falls short. In the end of the chapter, state the gap your project is filling. Engineering students commonly add a summary table of 15 to 25 key papers with method, dataset and result, and examiners like to see it.

Chapter 3, Proposed method or system design. Here you give the block diagram, algorithm, circuit, mix design or model, whichever applies to your work. Equations also come in this chapter, numbered chapter-wise like (3.1), (3.2).

Chapter 4, Implementation or experimental setup. Which laptop or board you ran it on, which software and which version of it, which dataset, all that comes here. Put the parameter values you set, and under what conditions you tested. The test is simple, another student reading this chapter should be able to repeat your work.

Chapter 5, Results and discussion. Keep your numbers next to a baseline, or next to some published work. Your accuracy may come 2% less than some paper, that is okay, just tell why it came less. External examiners spend most time on this chapter.

Chapter 6, Conclusion and future scope. Go objective by objective and say what the project achieved. Mention the limitations, and give two or three clear next steps.

In some departments Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 are joined into one, and then the thesis ends up with five chapters. Nobody will object to that. What examiners do object to is a results chapter full of screenshots with no numbers in it. For every result put some measured value. Accuracy or error for a model, time or cost for a system, strength for a civil mix. If there is no number, the examiner will surely ask you why.

Figures, code and references

Figures and tables are numbered chapter-wise, so Figure 5.3 means the third figure of Chapter 5. Put the table title above the table and the figure title below the figure. The titles in your list of tables and list of figures must match the titles in the chapters word for word.

We see lot of reports where the screenshots are pasted as it is, full screen, and the report looks careless because of that. Before you paste, crop it. Then take one printout and see whether you can read the text in it. Your output may be three lines only, in that case cut out just those three lines and leave the rest of the IDE window. Mostly a graph drawn from the output values looks much better than a photo of the console.

Please don’t paste programs in the middle of a chapter. A small pseudocode or algorithm box in Chapter 3 is fine. For the full source code, use an appendix at the back. Some guides are okay with a link to a repository instead, ask yours. Printing fifty pages of code only increases the page count and gives you no marks. And if you took code from GitHub or from a tutorial, cite it like you cite any other source.

In engineering, references are mostly in IEEE numbered style, cited as [1], [2] in the order they come in the text. A few college templates want some other style, so open the template and see what it says. Create your Zotero or Mendeley library in the first week itself. Don’t keep it for the last week.

Reviews and marks: where the weeks should go

Students mostly read the marking rules at the end, but they should read them first. In the table below we have put the two most clearly published schemes next to each other.

Anna University’s amended clause 6.1 gives three reviews during the semester. Each review is marked out of 100 by a committee of your supervisor, one department expert and the project coordinator. The total is then scaled down to 60. The end-semester evaluation is for 40 marks. Out of that, 10 marks are for the report, and only the external examiner awards those. The viva is for 30, with 10 each from the external examiner, an internal examiner and your supervisor. Clause 6.3 has a strict rule. If you get less than 50% of the internal marks, you are not allowed to submit the report. You have to register again in the next semester.

Clause 3.5 gives the deadline, which is 60 calendar days from the last working day of the semester. If you miss it, you are treated as failed in the project. In case you fail the end-semester evaluation of Project Work-II, you resubmit within 60 days of the results, and the same examiners will evaluate it again.

For KTU, the circular of 20 June 2024 on Phase II evaluation gives 100 internal marks and 100 end-semester marks. The external expert can be from industry or from a research or academic institute, but must have at least an M.Tech. Out of the 100 end-semester marks, project documentation carries 25 and presentation and defence carry 45. The circular also records that U.O. No. 1362/2024/KTU dated 8 May 2024 removed the publication requirement for the dissertation track, and those 5 marks were moved to the viva.

Look at these numbers once more. At Anna it is 30 for the viva against 10 for the report. At KTU it is 45 for presentation and defence against 25 for documentation. Many students spend the full last week fixing margins and fonts. We tell our scholars to use that week for making slides, and to sit with a friend who can ask them questions like an examiner.

Similarity checks for an M.Tech thesis

An M.Tech student cannot use INFLIBNET’s ShodhShuddhi directly. As per the ShodhShuddhi FAQ, UG and PG students are not eligible for accounts. Your college or university will run the check using its own software.

Each university has its own limit. The University of Hyderabad 2026–27 prospectus caps M.Tech dissertations at 10%, which is the same limit as for PhD theses. It also gives a separate certificate format for M.Tech students, called Annexure 2. Overlap with a paper where the student is first author is not counted. When another person is the lead author, the case goes to the supervisor and after that to the HoD or Dean, and the paper has to be attached as an annexure.

In M.Tech reports, most matches come from the literature survey and from the description of standard methods. Write these two parts from your own notes. Sometimes a definition has to be given word to word, and for that one line use quotation marks. A standard equation like the one for RMSE is no issue, everybody uses it. The trouble starts when students copy the whole paragraph around that equation from the original paper, and the software catches that paragraph.

Where we found no published rule

We prefer to tell you clearly what we could not find instead of guessing. As of October 2026, we did not find any Anna University manual on an official site for the layout of regular M.E. or M.Tech project reports. What we found is clause 6.2, and it just says to follow whatever guidelines the Director, Centre for Academic Courses gives for the report. Your coordinator should have the current copy of those guidelines, ask for it. We also found no current VTU M.Tech submission circular on vtu.ac.in, and no official JNTUH similarity limit for M.Tech dissertations.

If your university is one of these, ask the department to give you in writing the template, the similarity limit and the review dates. Looking at a senior’s report is fine for getting an idea of layout. Only thing is, a senior’s report from two years back won’t tell you if any rule got changed after that. Some colleges say thesis and some say dissertation for the same report. If that is confusing you, read our note on dissertation vs thesis once.