Institute Monitoring of PGR Students
Tracking Progress
Some PGR students make rapid and steady progress throughout their studies and finish on time without having encountered problems of any kind. But research is not risk-free; for instance, there is no way to guarantee that the results you are working on will not be published by somebody else a few months before you finish writing them up. And learning to do research is not easy. So it is inevitable that some students will have difficulties and experience delays. Supervisors are responsible for keeping a close eye on progress and providing advice and assistance in such circumstances. But sometimes a supervisor does not recognise a problem or is not able to provide the right kind of assistance.
All of the School’s Research Institutes are strongly encouraged to adopt mechanisms for monitoring the progress of their PGR students. Whilst it is accepted that local Institute practice may vary, the outline structure of this process should be uniform across the School.
Formal Annual Report
Formal annual reports are the University's official record of the
progress of a PGR student. They are completed by the principal
supervisor, after consultation with the other supervisors, then signed
off and acted on by the Deputy Director of Graduate School. The first
year report is particularly important since it forms the basis for the
decision on confirmation of degree registration.
These forms are available online, the Graduate
School will contact individual Supervisors a few months prior to the required submission date, on a student by student basis, Graduate School will also monitor the completion of these forms A more detailed summary of
the annual reporting process is available at:
Institute Annual Review Meeting
Each Institute should have an annual student review meeting to consider the progress of their PGR students.
Graduate School will assist with the preparation of statistics and reports prior to this meeting, mainly via the live Theon Portal.
The Director of Institute, or whoever he delegates coordinating this meeting to, must schedule the institute meeting at least one month in advance of the meeting itself. This is to allow time for the relevant reports on students to be prepared for the meeting. The primary supervisors are responsible for submitting to the meeting coordinator the relevant report on each of their students prior to the meeting. The relevant report they must submit is as follows:
- If the date of the institute meeting is more than 10 months since
the student's last formal annual report was submitted, then that
student's progress should be reported to the meeting via a new
formal annual report. Completing this new formal annual report will
require a formal review of the student by a review panel, consisting
of at least one external member.
- If the date of the institute meeting is less than 10 months since
the student's most recent formal annual report was submitted, then
that report should be submitted together with a short paragraph that
updates the meeting on the progress of that student since that last
report was written.
The meeting should normally be scheduled for the first few weeks of September; so the scheduling of meeting must happen by the beginning of August (i.e., at least 4 weeks prior to the date of the meeting). All active supervisors are expected to attend the meeting, with the Deputy Director of the Graduate School and the Institutes PGR Selector also present. A member of the Institute's admin team should also be present to take minutes and a note of actions to be taken. Each PGR student is discussed at least briefly. Any actions should be assigned to the Director of Institute, who will be responsible for ensuring that appropriate concession requests, personnel changes or programme updates are implemented in accordance with Graduate School guidance. Institute admin staff can access submitted annual reports via the 'iss/igs/admin/annual-reports/phd' shared directory, and save all review meeting documentation using the appropriate 'iss/igs/admin/annual-reports/institute-review'file space.
