From the thesis of degree to the degree works: What does the change represent for the Ecuadorian University? A study of the qualification works applied to the University of Cuenca.

The research project is made up of two large axes that act as research goals: (1) A descriptive, analytical and interpretive study of the various genres of qualification work that the University of Cuenca has been demanding as a requirement for the graduation of its students in the last three years, emphasizing the gender thesis, and (2) a theoretical proposal that requires the discursive characteristics and the methodological work that would govern the diverse Genres and types of texts implicit in the degree work that the Higher Education Council (CES) has proposed as alternatives to the degree thesis. Both axes will be vertebrates by theoretical notions about what the university system and the university model required for the change of productive matrix promoted by the national government, and the sense of research in the knowledge society implies. They are also framed in an emerging line of research in the Hispanic environment that seeks to detect the gaps and needs in the learning-teaching process of writing at the university level, under the hypothesis that these gaps affect the low compliance rates of the thesis; And therefore, in the degree. These circumstances led to CES to rethink the degree requirements. The theme of the thesis and the degree deserves to be addressed not only as an administrative or pedagogical issue (as a training requirement) but writing and, as such, in interaction with the factors of the context that is behind the composition and textual production. As a result, it aspires to offer a study that describes, analyzes and interprets the situation of the genre thesis as undergraduate degree work that had maintained the higher education system until 2013, and that explains the introduction of the new alternatives and their implicit genres and offers a theoretical framework to define its characteristics and scope.