Self-Study Questions

2025-2026

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Self-Study Questions

The most important aspect of the self-study is the final “Looking Forward” section. This section contains your self-identified priorities looking ahead to the next 5-10 years. The earlier sections of the self-study will help you identify what these priorities might be.

Program Context

  1. Briefly describe local/national/international trends in your discipline and profession that will most affect your program in the next 5-10 years. These trends should be informed by perspectives from potential employers and other stakeholder groups.1
  2. Please briefly describe any characteristics of your graduate program that provide important context for the rest of your self-study. While not a strict requirement, anything added here should be referenced later in the self-study. Items you reference might include but are not limited to the following.
    1. Changes you have made to your program during the last five years that would help explain some of your results and ongoing priorities and gaps they may fill. No need to include changes that will not impact your program moving forward.
    2. Unique ways your graduate students contribute to your research, teaching, and outreach missions.
    3. The competitive landscape of graduate programs in your discipline.
    4. Some of the trends, issues, and/or challenges related to access and opportunity in your program or discipline.2
    5. How your program and your students are funded: Revenue-based initiative, research assistantships, teaching assistantships, etc.
       

Student Population Goals and Processes

In this section, we ask a series of questions regarding your goals, processes, and opportunities for growth and improvement with respect to

  1. recruiting and admission
  2. retention and graduation
  3. placement

Throughout this section, as you describe your processes, include information on how you connect your students to College and University processes and offerings as appropriate. Recall that all recruiting, retention, and placement efforts may not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment based on protected identities.

  1. Recruiting and Admission
    1. What are your goals with respect to the following recruiting and admission metrics?
      1. Application pool size and composition
      2. Entering cohort size and composition
    2. Describe your key recruiting and admission processes, ideally connecting them to the goals you outlined in part (a) of this question. Please highlight efforts made to recruit and admit a diverse group of students with potentially unique needs and interests, keeping in mind that any efforts should not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment based on protected identities.
    3. Analyze your application and admitted/entering student data in relation to the size and composition goals you identified in part (a) of this question. Where are you meeting and not meeting your goals (relate to 3a above)?
  2. Retention and Graduation
    1. What are your goals with respect to the following retention and graduation metrics?
      1. Percentage of students who graduate in a timely manner
      2. Time to complete key milestones (especially graduation but potentially other milestones such as completing coursework, completing the qualifying examination, completing the comprehensive exam).
    2. Please describe your program’s efforts to retain and graduate a diverse group of students with potentially unique needs and interests, keeping in mind that any efforts should not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment based on protected identities.
    3. Summarize your retention and graduation data (time to degree and cohort outcome data) in relation to the goals you identified in part (a) of this question. Please summarize your entire student population and statistically significant subpopulations. Where are you meeting and not meeting your goals?
  3. Placement, Career Preparation, and Professional Development
    1. What are your unit's goals for student placement outcomes and how do they align with students' goals?
    2. Describe your program’s career preparation and professional development processes, ideally connecting them to the goals you outlined in part (a) of this question. This answer should include what is offered within your program, and programming offered elsewhere (e.g., your college or the Graduate School or by a professional society). Please highlight efforts made to support a diverse group of students with potentially unique needs, interests, and goals.
    3. Summarize your placement data in relation to the goals you identified in part (a) of this question. Where do you feel you are you meeting and not meeting your goals? Please include results for your entire student population and statistically significant subpopulations.
  4. Based on your responses to the previous questions in this section, as you look forward, please answer the following questions.
    1. What are key priorities your program might focus on to improve recruiting, admission, retention, graduation, and placement outcomes? These might emerge from gaps between your current data and goals identified in the previous questions in this section, or they may reflect strategic opportunities for growth even if there are no such gaps.
    2. What new processes might your unit develop to achieve these priorities?
    3. How will your unit assess the effectiveness of your efforts?
    4. What challenges does your unit need to overcome and what strategies may help address these needs?

Student Learning Outcomes

You can combine your answers for Qs 7-9 into a single table, but if you do, please also provide text that defines key terms, explains how different outcomes are linked, and interprets the meaning of a result in terms of the learning outcome.

  1. List the student learning outcomes for the program and for any associated certificates.
  2. For each learning outcome, explain your assessment method(s) for determining whether the learning outcome is achieved by a given student. More precisely, for each learning outcome, describe what evidence you use and how you use the evidence to determine if the learning outcome is achieved. The evidence should be direct qualitative or quantitative evidence of student performance, i.e., something students did that demonstrated the extent to which they achieved the outcome. Examples of evidence include a course as a whole, a course assignment, a licensure examination, and a program milestone such as a qualifying examination and comprehensive examination. Examples of how the evidence is used might include passing the qualifying examination or achieving a specific grade in a course or course assignment.
  3. For each learning outcome and associated assessment method, analyze how well your students are achieving each learning outcome. Please consider your entire student population and statistically significant subpopulations. Please show the results of your analysis, identifying which learning outcomes are achieved by which student groups in your program and which learning outcomes are not successfully achieved by which student groups in your program.
  4. Based on your responses to the questions in this section, as you look forward, please answer the following questions.
    1. What are some key priorities/goals your program might focus on to improve student achievement of your learning outcomes?
    2. What programmatic changes would be needed to achieve these goals?
    3. How will you assess the effectiveness of your efforts?
    4. What challenges do you need to overcome?
    5. What help might you need and from whom?

Curriculum & Program Requirements

  1. Compare curriculum and program requirements (curriculum for the rest of this section) for your program to those at an appropriate peer group for your program (e.g., Big Ten Academic Alliance universities). You may want to put this information into comparison tables, but if you do, please provide one or two sentences summarizing the data. Differences in requirements make sense, particularly if programs have different goals.
  2. What feedback do you have from employers or students with respect to your curriculum?
  3. What review process do you have for evaluating and potentially modifying your curriculum?
  4. Based on your responses to the questions in this section, your program context from section 1, feedback from employers and students, and your placement data, as you look forward, please answer the following questions.
    1. What, if any, changes will you make to your curriculum?
    2. If you plan to make changes, how will you assess the effectiveness of these changes?

Support for Holistic Student Success

  1. Classroom Instruction
    1. How do you assess the quality and effectiveness of classroom instruction of graduate students in your program (courses taken by graduate students, not taught by graduate students? Focus on courses offered by your unit.
    2. Briefly summarize the overall trends and any important outliers from your assessment of the quality of classroom instruction.
    3. How does your program address any issues that arise during this assessment in part (b)?
    4. How does your program encourage and reward teaching development for your program’s instructors? As part of this effort, how do you connect to resources and efforts provided by your college, MSU, professional societies, or other networks?
  2. Advising and Mentoring
    In the questions below, please compare your efforts and results to the MSU Guidelines on Graduate Student Mentoring and Advising.
    1. How does advising and mentoring typically occur in your program?
    2. Please describe your annual review process. Do students submit an annual activity report? Who provides feedback to the student? What feedback is provided, particularly about whether they are making satisfactory progress?
    3. Please describe when and how advisors and mentors discuss program and research expectations with their students, and how do advisors and mentors support students in their career and professional development? In this discussion, please include the percentage of your faculty that use individual development plans (IDPs) and/or mentoring compacts/agreements when talking about expectations and career and professional development?
    4. If your program has thesis or dissertation committees, what are your expectations for how committees advise and mentor students?
    5. How do you address issues and conflicts that arise between advisors/mentors and students, and how do you manage faculty who have a history of conflicts with more than one student?
    6. What are you doing to proactively improve mentoring and advising in your program?
  3. Student Health and Well-being
    1. Please describe any ongoing or prospective efforts your program does to improve the health and well-being of your program’s students. These efforts could include changes to your program as well as advocacy and input to larger changes at the department, college, or university levels.
    2. Please describe any ongoing or prospective efforts your program does to create a community or a sense of belonging for your students.
  4. Based on your responses to the previous questions in this section, as you look forward, please answer the following questions. Please consider your entire student population as a whole and statistically significant subpopulations.
    1. What are some key priorities/goals your program might focus on to improve the advising, mentoring, instruction, and wellness of your students?
    2. What new processes might you develop to achieve these priorities?
    3. How will you assess the effectiveness of your efforts?
    4. What challenges do you need to overcome?
    5. What help and resources might you need and from whom to achieve your goals?

Additional Information

  1. Please discuss any aspirations, achievements, issues, or concerns that were not addressed in the previous questions.

Looking Forward

  1. Based on the opportunities for improving your program you identified above, please answer the following questions:
    1. What are your strategic priorities for the next 5-10 years, classifying them as short term (1-3 years), medium term (3-5 years), and long term (5-10 years)?
    2. What do you foresee as your greatest challenges as you map out your strategic priorities?
    3. How will you address these challenges?
    4. What assistance do you need from your department, college, the Graduate School, and/or other units to meet these challenges?

1 To complement your field-specific information, the Council of Graduate Schools provides potentially helpful broad-based resources.
2 STEM disciplines may find relevant trends and benchmarks from the National Center for Science & Engineering Statistics.