graduate progress report

As per the Graduate General Regulations: for master’s and doctoral students, the supervisory committee shall report on the student’s progress at least once each year.

Detail about how and when progress evaluation is done may be determined within each academic unit.
The Graduate Progress Report (GPR) in goSFU is a collaborative report to assist with this annual evaluation.
The GPR allows for input from the student, student's supervisor, committee members (if applicable) and Graduate Program Chair.

Resources

For Progress and Progress Evaluation: GGR 1.8
For public facing student, supervisor and committee instructions: Grading + Academic Progress
To access goSFU (use your SFU log in):  go.sfu.ca

Generating Once a Year or Three Times a Year?

Click to learn more ↓

You have the option of generating Graduate Progress Reports once a year, or three times a year. Both of these options have their advantages and disadvantages as listed below.

If you are generating GPRs once a year: it is possible that a student could go upwards of four full terms before their first report is generated. For a student admitted in 1171, and a reporting term in the summer months, the first report for this student would be generated in 1184. The biggest advantage of generating reports once a year is that this process only needs to be completed once in an academic year.

If you are generating GPRs three times a year: every single student will have a report generated after they have completed two full terms in their program, and every year after. In particular, this method works well for academic units and/or program(s) that admit students year round. This procedure does involve some additional work as reports are generated three times a year. However, for senior supervisors that have a lot of students, this does help to spread out the work of completing an evaluation over the course of a year.

How to set Up/include/exclude Committee Members

The decision to include or exclude committee members in the Graduate Progress Report routing is made at the program level. For academic units that have a large number of external committee members, the recommendation is to not include committee members in the reporting cycle as there is extra work required of the external committee member.

Excluding Committee Members

If you are excluding committee members from directly adding their feedback to the GPR, there are still a few ways to capture this information. Click to learn more ↓

Some academic units require their students to complete their portion of the GPR and then setup a supervisory committee meeting to discuss the progress made over the course of the year, and program. At this meeting, the senior supervisor collects information from the committee members and inputs a summary of all the comments made when it comes time to complete their supervisory evaluation.
Some academic units are not including committee members directly in the process, but are instead asking them to email their comments to the program assistant. Once the program assistant has the comments they are able to change the status of the report to 'in review by committee', go into the report, copy and paste the comments into the text box for the appropriate committee member, save, and then change the status of the report back to what it originally was. This process takes less than a minute for each comment provided.

Including Committee Members

If you wish to include committee members, we are more than happy to make the process work for your academic unit and/or program. It does however take a few additional steps, and some additional work from each external committee member. Click to learn more ↓

Identify all external committee members within your academic unit and/or program(s) where a GPR will be generated. If you do not have this information, a query can be run by Grad Studies to identify all committee members that do not have an SFU computing ID.
External committee members will need to complete and sign a confidentiality agreement. Once signed and given back to the program assistant, the program assistant then forwards the form to gpr@sfu.ca so that a computing ID can be created.
If a DOB is not included within the external committee members SFU profile, 2000/01/01 will be used. The DOB information will be passed along to the program assistant so that they can let the external committee member know how to activate their computing ID once ready.
The following day the external committee member should get an email letting them know that their computing ID is ready to be activated. In order to activate their computing ID they will need their DOB and SFU ID number. If an email is not sent to the external committee member, the computing ID can be activated here.
5) Once activated, the external committee member will be able to login to go.sfu.ca. They should automatically be directed to Graduate Progress Reports as this will be the only component that they have access to. They will then be able to go into each report and provide their comments.