The composition of abstracts is typically subject to regulation by educational institutions, which supervise the production of master's theses. Abstracts represent the initial pieces of work encountered by readers when perusing theses. They function as a concise summary of the thesis’s key points, providing readers with a synopsis of the content.

The inclusion of an abstract is a common requirement for master’s theses, and it is expected that it will encompass a reference to the main problem or related background, the main point of the research, key discoveries and conclusions. However, some institutions differentiate between a descriptive abstract, which provides a summary of the thesis’ structure, and an informative abstract, which is a condensed summary of the student's work.

This article explores the similarities and differences in abstract writing in master’s theses written before the pandemic years (2020-2021) and after these years, when students at Trnava University were educated online. The second criterion for the selection of analysed abstracts was that they were required to belong to the topics related to modern methodologies in teaching or testing language competence in English under one supervisor to ensure that the instructions given to the supervised master's degree students were consistent.

Therefore, 32 master’s degree papers were formally inspected, 10 of which matched up to the criteria. The abstracts that were selected for the analysis were divided into two groups: five abstracts written between 2014-2019 and five abstracts written between 2021-2023.

The criteria for evaluation will contain a typical structure of an abstract and the language of abstracts. These criteria will be used for a detailed analysis of the selected abstracts, focusing on the quality of students’ performances and the relevance of their abstracts to the aim of their theses. All the achieved data will be analysed quantitatively, supplemented by a qualitative analysis of particular issues, which will serve for drawing up the conclusions.

Keywords: Abstracts in English, Master’s theses, evaluation, comparison, a typical structure, the language of abstract.