Usually, no.

Most teachers at the college level want students to practice intellectual honesty and rigor, not just to "pick a side and defend it." They want students to discover the complexity inherent in difficult questions, and to deal with that complexity.

When the true end-result of inquiry is a simple, definite position, that should be the thesis of one's paper. When the true end-result is something short of that, one's thesis should differ accordingly.

Fortunately, there are many ways to report one's progress on a question clearly, interestingly, and coherently, even when that progress points to an answer which is complicated or uncertain. A few examples...

• If the question at hand is, "What caused the Civil War?", one might demonstrate that the question needs clarification. One might write, "If 'cause' here means essentially the same as 'ignite,' then perhaps the election of Abraham Lincoln can be said to have caused the Civil War. If, however, 'to cause' means 'to help in any way to bring about...

• Or, one might demonstrate that one possible answer should be eliminated. One might write, "It would then seem that, while we cannot say what did cause the Civil War, the issue of slavery did not cause it–at least, not by itself."

• One might speculate, saying, "Have we, I wonder, taken sufficiently seriously the possibility that it was the North's tone of moral superiority, as much as the Northern position, that inflamed the South? An examination of rhetoric, North and South, reveals...

• One might even demonstrate one's own confusion. One might write, "Historians identify no fewer than seven causes of the Civil War. Probably, each cause played its part, and so the question boils down to one of degree: Which of the causes mattered most? Unfortunately, though, determining a single cause's relative importance is almost impossible where causes are as intertwined as in this case. For example...