Is it alright to cover some information in the defense but not the written thesis? I will soon finish my thesis and I researched a lot in this technological area. Basically I want to say: “I have these n methods that all didn’t work out; that’s why I’ve decided to pursue this final method.” However I’m lacking time for extensively testing all these misleading alternatives, thus I could only state that I barely had empirically tested these hypotheses (which is a bad style to write down in my opinion).

Since part of the thesis is giving a presentation of it, I could imagine to mention all the dead-ends I went in before and describing the difficulties that occurred. But then again I'm not sure if its alright to present data in the presentation that the document never covered.

Hence, would it be acceptable to present the methods I didn’t dare to write down (because of the missing tests) as some kind of introduction to my final choice, or is it a total no-go?
n+1 methods were trialed; Method X [the one you ended up using] was the most promising [say in what sense], so it was chosen for further study.


I would not plan to cover something verbally without documenting it in your written thesis.  However, if someone asks you about something that's not in your written thesis, you may go ahead and answer to the best of your ability, even if the thesis doesn't have the answer in writing.