MBS Thesis Proposal Format (TU): The FOM Section Order, With a Worked Sample
6 October 2026 · 9 min read
The MBS proposal is short, but it decides the next six months. Your campus Research Management Cell (RMC) or research department approves it at a proposal defence, and from then on your dissertation is measured against it. Objectives you promise here are the ones examiners will look for in Chapter 4. This guide follows the Faculty of Management's Master's Degree Dissertation Guidelines (2019), which is still FOM's current published version. Note that FOM calls the work a dissertation, though most students and campuses still say thesis.
The basics FOM fixes
Length: about 8 to 12 pages.
Title: under 12 words. FOM specifically discourages titles that open with “A Study of…”.
Language: English only.
Supervisor: from your campus. A co-supervisor may come from outside.
Referencing: APA, 6th edition in the 2019 guideline. Ask your supervisor before switching to APA 7, and then use one edition throughout.
Timing: there must be at least 60 days between registration, which follows the proposal defence, and the viva. The viva takes place only after your fourth-semester examinations, so a late proposal pushes your result back.
Weight: the dissertation is MGT 525, a 6-credit course. It is marked 75% on written evaluation by two FOM-appointed external experts and 25% on the campus viva.
The proposal sections, in FOM's order
Background of the study: the context of your topic in Nepal and why it matters now. Keep it to the point; the full dissertation allows two to three pages here, and the proposal needs less.
Statement of the problem: the specific gap or contradiction you will investigate, ending in two to four research questions.
Objectives of the study: one general objective and two to four specific ones, each answerable with the data you plan to collect.
Hypotheses, if any: required for testing studies, typically stated as null hypotheses that match your specific objectives one to one.
Rationale of the study: who gains from the answer, such as managers, regulators or researchers, and why your study is worth doing.
Brief review of literature: a short conceptual review and the most relevant previous studies, including Nepali ones, leading to the gap. A full review comes later in Chapter 2.
Research methodology: research design; population and sample with the sampling method; nature and sources of data; the research framework with each variable defined; and the methods of analysis.
References: every source cited in the proposal, in APA.
Many campuses also ask for a tentative chapter plan and a timeline. FOM's list does not require them, but they cost little and answer the question an RMC panel asks most often: can you finish this in time?
A worked sample outline
The outline below is illustrative. It shows how the sections should connect, not a proposal to submit. Its value is in the links: each objective has a matching hypothesis, variable and test.
Title (10 words): Capital Structure and Profitability of Nepalese Commercial Banks.
Problem: Nepalese banks have changed their capital mix repeatedly under regulatory capital requirements, while studies of leverage and returns disagree in direction. Research questions: Is leverage associated with return on assets and return on equity? Does bank size moderate that relationship?
General objective: to examine the relationship between capital structure and profitability of Nepalese commercial banks.
Specific objectives: (1) to describe the trend in leverage and profitability of the sampled banks; (2) to assess the relationship between debt ratios and ROA and ROE; (3) to examine whether bank size affects that relationship.
Hypotheses: H1, there is no significant relationship between the debt-to-equity ratio and ROA; H2, there is no significant relationship between the debt-to-equity ratio and ROE; H3, bank size has no significant effect on profitability.
Framework and variables: dependent variables ROA and ROE; independent variables the total-debt and debt-to-equity ratios; control variable bank size (log of total assets). Each is defined with its formula.
Method: descriptive and causal-comparative design; a sample of banks chosen for data availability, with the selection rule stated; secondary data from published annual reports over a stated span of fiscal years; analysis by descriptive statistics, correlation and multiple regression in SPSS or Stata.
Look at what the sample avoids: there is no objective without a test, no variable without a definition, and no data source the student cannot reach. That alignment is what the RMC panel checks. A primary-data topic, for example customer satisfaction with mobile banking, uses the same skeleton with a questionnaire, a stated sample-size formula, and reliability testing in place of annual reports.
What gets an MBS proposal sent back
A title of more than 12 words, or a broad topic such as “Impact of Digital Marketing in Nepal” that names no population or variables.
Objectives written as activities (“to collect data from banks”) rather than questions with answers.
Hypotheses that do not match the objectives, or a descriptive study that carries hypotheses it has no way to test.
A methodology that names SPSS but not the tests, or names tests that do not suit the data type.
A literature review that is a list of summaries and never states a gap.
Data the student cannot actually obtain: unpublished internal figures, or a respondent group with no access route.
References in mixed styles, or sources cited in the text that are missing from the list.
After approval
Once the proposal is defended and registered, the 60-day minimum to the viva starts running. Use the approved proposal as your Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 skeleton: background, problem and objectives expand into the introduction, and the methodology section expands into Chapter 3, written in the past tense once the data is collected. Students who rewrite these sections from scratch lose weeks and often drift from what was approved.
Drafting your MBS proposal before the RMC defence? Send it to us on WhatsApp at +977 9768768340 with your defence date. We will check that each objective, hypothesis, variable and test lines up, and that the format matches FOM's guideline.
Not sure if your work has plagiarism? Don't worry. Send it to us.
Tell us what you need checked and when it is due. Your document is checked without being stored in any student-paper repository, so the check never counts against your real submission. The reports come back with what each match means, not just a percentage.
Plagiarism report — The full similarity report on your assignment, proposal or chapter: every matched source listed, every flagged passage marked, and a plain read of which matches matter and which are your reference list doing its job.
AI report — The AI writing indicator read separately from similarity, because the two scores behave differently. If the flag looks like a detector artefact on work you wrote yourself, we tell you so, and what evidence answers it.
Thesis report — Similarity and AI reports for a full thesis or dissertation, run chapter by chapter so a problem in the literature review is found while you can still fix it, with each flagged passage explained for your supervisor.