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December 12, 2006

College of Arts and Social Sciences Graduate Working Party Report

CASS Graduate Working Party: Monique Skidmore (Chair), Vanessa Gotting, Caroline Bradshaw, Karen Downing, Terry Hull, Jacqueline Lo, Carolyn Strange.

Consultations: Tim Rowse, Terese Douglass

Terms of Reference

CASS has identified a number of HDR issues arising from the CASS planning day, Tuesday 31 October.

The HDR Working Party’s brief was to propose a model for a graduate student management structure (GSMS) for the consideration of the Dean and CASS Executive and to report back to the Dean and Executive by December 15, 2006.

Such a structure would take into account the future role of graduate fields, graduate field convenors, graduate administration and in-program support, strategies for recruitment, funding, and post-award transition issues. The brief also entailed reviewing the business process for HDR applications and incorporating a more efficient process model. The working party’s recommended model drew on the following:

  • The model for the CASS graduate office, as suggested within the RSH Graduate Report
  • The CASS draft student administration structure
  • Report of the 2006 Review of RSSS
  • Final Report of the Graduate Research School
  • Determining the respective roles and responsibilities of the University’s central support for graduates (including the Registrar’s Division).

Executive Summary

  1. All working party members are committed to formulating and recommending a graduate management structure that is effective and efficient. The principles of equity (or parity) and quality assurance (or quality control) are the basis for all recommendations within the report and the proposed model of graduate student management structure. The broader recommendations contained in this report should now be developed in final detail through a series of working parties and then put out to consultation followed by development and implementation.
  1. The first action of the HDR Working Party was to reincorporate itself as the Graduate Working Party. It was the unanimous decision of the working party that the distinctions between undergraduate, honours, postgraduate coursework, coursework Master degrees, Master by research degrees, M. Phil degrees, and the Ph.D. are becoming less relevant as the nature of enrolments and degree structures and course offerings change at the ANU. A stark distinction between HDR and “Others” promulgated by the GRS before its disestablishment created an unhelpful barrier to recruitment of students into HDR degrees.
  1. The eight recommendations made in the GRS final report are all sound and provide a useful beginning point for considering the role of graduate convenors.
  1. The guiding principle, ‘One student, One campus’ should underlie the restructuring changes that are occurring with a move to Colleges and the disestablishment of the GRS. These involve a commitment to equity and parity of access to resources, including professional development and skills training for every graduate student across the University.
  1. In order to reverse the trend of declining HDR numbers, consideration of the budget for academics and administrators involved in creating a new system of graduate management must be a priority. The current system functions poorly and unevenly across campus, largely because of the unrecognized, un- or under-funded positions involved in graduate student management and training. The creation of new Associate Deans and graduate administrators positions within CASS for HDR management in tandem with the creation of new funded roles and responsibilities for Graduate Studies Coordinators will achieve significantly better outcomes for the University.
  1. The days of paper-based files for the University’s graduate student management system must come to an end in 2007. The technological resources of the University must now extend to a web-based graduate student management system that is more efficient and responsive.
  1. We recommend the formation of three working parties to continue to work out this report’s recommendations. These would be:
  • Online Communication and Graduate Student Management

The brief for this committee would be to create a holistic web-based student management system that is accessible to all supervisors, graduate student managers, coordinators, and convenors, and relevant administrative staff. The CECS system and plans for a redeveloped and expanded Student 21 system and the current online admissions module should all be considered as potential starting points. The current document being prepared by Rick Van Haeften should be a necessary background document or starting point for the committee. The committee should also consider the development of a standard template for discipline web sites to maintain the visibility of the individual disciplines taught at the ANU. The anthropology graduate program website () is suggested as a potential model.

Budget Line: Clearly the current system must be rebuilt efficiently via the web. Resources must be channelled into this system and into any necessary training for staff. It is perhaps the most efficient way to quickly arrest some of the decline in HDR numbers.

  • Office of Professional Development and Training

The brief for this committee would be the creation of a visible front office and lecture/workshop facilities so that students and academic staff (particularly early career researchers) are aware of the provision of a suite of professional development and training initiatives by the ANU. The manager of such an Office would coordinate an Office that links together all of the places across campus where training and development currently exists. Following the recommendations in this report, auditing by Colleges of students’ skills and needs upon entry and provision of necessary skills training by academics (who have capacity in terms of their graduate training workload), would be additional considerations of the working party. The creation of a certificate in Professional Development and Training is another consideration for this working party.

Budget Line: Balmain Cottage is ideal for this Office and it would require a manager and a front-office person for students to communicate with. The manager would coordinate the Office and the provision of services, eliminate duplication of current offerings, and identify (through analysis of the skills audit) where new initiatives are needed.

  • Graduate Studies Fields and Boards of Studies

The brief of this committee would be to finalise the constitution of the 12 graduate study fields recommended in this report. These 12 graduate study fields should be mapped closely to the DEST research fields and those already grouped in the ANU’s Graduate Research Field listing. Such a working party should also consider dedicated graduate disciplinary websites in order to maintain the visibility of the individual disciplines taught at the University.

Budget Line:As documented in this report, graduate studies coordinators should be appointed for a term of three years in the position. Depending upon the number of students in the merged disciplinary fields, this should be considered to be an administration position equivalent to .25-.5 FTE. IT support will be needed to create and maintain disciplinary web pages.

Proposed Models

Figure 1: Proposed CASS Graduate Student Management System (Roles and Responsibilities)


Figure 2: Current Business Process: Applications for HDR (APA and GSS Scholarships)

Figure 3: Proposed Business Process: Applications for HDR (APA and GSS Scholarships)

Proposed Business Process

The days of paper-based files for the University’s graduate student management system must come to an end in 2007. The technological resources of the University must now extend to a web-based graduate student management system. This change will reduce the number of students who have wanted to come to the University but whose files have been lost, misplaced, gone missing in the internal mail service, and/or who have received letters of offer from the ANU many weeks after they had already accepted offers from other Australian universities. The current system is woefully inefficient. It causes thousands of hours of time to be used up by administrators, members of supervisory panels, heads of units, delegated authorities, and graduate convenors duplicating, losing, finding, and distributing materials that can easily, as is being done in CECS, be entered into a web-based student data management system.

A major consequence of this change will be an end to the inefficient circulation of files in and out of SAS. Once an email is generated by SAS alerting the relevant graduate studies coordinators of the existence of a file, the coordinator shall assess the application in terms of its academic merit. The coordinator will alert the proposed supervisor or the Board of Studies of the application and assess the capacity in terms of workload for the proposed panel. If, for example, a supervisor already has a dozen students, and other capable supervisors exist, then that capacity should be drawn upon. Once the coordinator has made this assessment of the application and the proposed supervisory panel, he/she will advise the graduate office of the relevant College of the decision to accept or decline the student. The Graduate Studies Convenors will also convene the Boards of Studies to rank applicants for scholarships.

Within CASS, the relevant Associate Dean (Humanities, Social Science, or Creative Arts) will sign off as the Delegated Authority (DA). The CASS admin team will send a letter of offer (made standard throughout the University). One or more of the Associate Deans will attend the central scholarships process. Once the Dean has been informed of the number of scholarships allocated to CASS and of the order of merit list, the Associate Deans will advise the CASS admin team to notify applicants of scholarship outcomes (again, using a standard University template).

As this system is a web-based system, it will require no circulation of files between SAS, various admin staff throughout the University, and a range of graduate studies coordinators, heads of units, prospective supervisors and panel members, local graduate program convenors, and delegated authorities. There is one file per student created by SAS. It is generated by the student when they apply online. All University staff may access the file through the web-based system. The only caveat to this system is that student applications in Visual Art and Music (and possibly others) will include physical materials as well. We do not see this is an impediment but rather simply an understanding that SAS must enter an inventory into the student file and send those materials onto respective graduate studies co-ordinators. Increasingly many samples of work can be scanned or sent as auditory or visual files and a web-based system may have the capacity to attach this material to applicant files.

We strongly recommend that this model be extended to include this web-based application file as one that can be supplemented throughout the student’s time at the University. Using a system such as that employed by CECS, annual reports and other aspects of graduate training can be entered into the web-based file.

University-Wide Graduate Services

One Student, One Campus.

The working party believes that the following set of principles should underlie all aspects of the restructuring process underway with the implementation of the Colleges and the disestablishment of the Graduate Research School. We call this ‘One student, One campus.’

When a prospective student considers the ANU for graduate training it is vital that the student have what is in effect a ‘free pass’ to the entire University. The College system must not become a series of barriers to students. All students should have the same access to professional development and skills training. Equity and parity are key goals to be achieved in a restructuring of the graduate management system. All graduate activities should be organized from a ‘whole of campus’ perspective. Several issues flow on from this principle:

  1. In the past a combination of other barriers has prevented equitable access to resources, including departments not allowing students to take courses in other graduate programs or budget centers, staff refusing to sit on supervisory panels outside their budget unit, and contradictory regulations being set by different areas of the University.

HDR students should have the opportunity to take ANU based coursework needed for their research without additional charges. There are already some fields like Economics that require HDR students to complete a year of coursework before undertaking two years of thesis work. In other fields HDR students are required to attain a specific level of skills obtained in courses before they can commence their thesis. In disciplines involving fieldwork, the student may be required to undertake language study, or fieldwork methodologies before being allowed to travel. The University Working Rules for HDR need to acknowledge the potential coursework needs of HDR and build them in as accessible options rather than as expensive add-ons that require students to extend their candidature. Such coursework should be considered part of the recurring course options that departments offer.[1]

Coursework for Masters level degrees should be designed and approved in the same framework as undergraduate courses. There should be substantial overlap between 2nd/3rd year undergraduate courses and graduate coursework. This is important for the efficiency of coursework teaching, and to broaden the options available for all students. We realize this has practical and funding implications that would need to be examined.

  1. There are many important issues about which the University community will require continued discussion and consultation, including the creation of policies relating to rules and standards that the ANU wishes to set as a baseline for all students to achieve and be bound by. In addition, in planning coursework and HDR academic content there is a need for Colleges to collaborate to ensure consistency of disciplinary standards and reduce overlap and internal competition.

Many important services should similarly remain as University-wide concerns. These include:

  • Within SAS: the Counselling Centre, the Disability Service Unit, Jabal Indigenous Education Centre, and the University Health Centre.
  • NCIS
  • The important roles of the Graduate Degrees Committee and the University Education and Research Committees, such as the setting of rules, standards, and policies relating to University-wide issues on intellectual property, plagiarism, etc. Since the colleges have their own Education and Research Committees, the Chairs of these Committees should be members of the University Education and Research Committees.
  1. The idea of One student, One campus extends to the vision of where we want to stand as one of the world’s leading universities with a specialisation in graduate studies. What can the ANU offer towards graduate training and preparation for professional life that is not offered by other Australian universities? We strongly believe education at the ANU should be a holistic experience: all graduate students should have access to the same level or suite of integrated training initiatives that appear at the bottom of a student’s academic transcript as the successful completion of a Certificate in Professional Development. This is a range of services that the University, rather than individual Colleges, should provide for every student. Some of these services currently exist in different locations around the University and others, such as Preparation for Academic or Professional Life, were initiated to be developed by the GRS and should ideally continue to develop in one visible location for all graduate students, withoutduplicating programs. All students should have equal access to the suite of skills that this area would provide. Balmain Cottage has been suggested as one location for this Office of Professional Development and Training. The Certificate in Professional Development should not be an optional degree “add-on.” It should be an integrated part of the academic education provided by the University for all students.

College-Level Graduate Offices

  1. The working party considers the formation of a CAP/CASS Graduate Office to be an essential element in any streamlined and efficient graduate student management structure. In the event that it is not possible to create this combined office, then a liason committee would need to be formed to create and maintain clear communication and cooperation between the Colleges as so many disciplinary fields, supervisory panels, and students cross the Colleges. We see the eventual formation of a combined CAP/CASS office, with the addition of Associate Deans of Pacific and Asian Studies and of Economics and Governance to be the most common sense way to maximize efficiency and eliminate many of the problems that now exist with so many graduate fields crossing the two colleges.
  2. If there is some important reason why a CAP/CASS Graduate Office cannot be formed, then aCASS Graduate Office is still a necessity. This Office would report to the Dean. Within the graduate office, there would be three part-time Associate Deans who would take on the role of delegated authorities. They would elect a rotating Chair. The Working Party proposes Associate Deans of Creative Arts, Humanities, and Social Science.
  3. Functions of the CASS Graduate Office will include graduate scholarships and graduate admissions procedures, recruitment and fieldwork funding. The CASS graduate office is the place where, for all graduate matters in the College, the buck stops. By this we mean that it is the job of the Assistant Deans to ensure that students across the College have the same parity of funding and resources and that they are enrolled quickly and notified of scholarship round outcomes in a timely manner.

  1. Roles of positions in proposed management structure

Associate Deans (Humanities, Social Science, Creative Arts)