Supervisors

The progress and candidature policies will

• make the expectations of graduate research progress and candidature clearer, reducing the chance of ambiguity and conflicting messages which take up valuable time
• reduce the expectation to hold progress meetings with your full-time candidates from twice each year (in an RPP meeting) to once a year
• support better progress management and time management by providing tools like a progress support plan with clear pathways (either to improvement, or withdrawal when things don’t go well).

These policies will make it more likely for candidates to complete quality projects on time and will significantly reduce the workload involved in managing the poor progress of a candidate.

Guidance on how to develop a progress support plan is available on the Graduate Research School.

Notification and approval of the initial Progress Committee Chair and independent member of the Progress Committee (if applicable) will be handled through the Induction Checklist. This information will usually be entered by the candidate and then checked by the principal supervisor and GRC before submission to the GRS.

Any further changes to the Progress Committee membership will be managed through the supervisor variation process. Progress committee members and chairs are recorded together with supervisors in the Student Information System and will be visible to supervisors (and other academic staff) through myAcademic.

The Graduate Research Coordinator, in consultation with the principal supervisor and candidate, needs to appoint a replacement Chair. This may need to be for an interim period if the candidate has a pending milestone due date. Details of the new Chair should be reported to the GRS using the Supervisor Variation form.

The Chair will need to

• be a senior La Trobe academic with significant experience as a supervisor
• have had no direct involvement with the research project and
• have no actual or potential conflict of interest.