Self-Study Questions

1. Briefly describe the local, national, and international trends in your discipline and profession that will most affect your program over the next 5-10 years. Base this on input from employers and other stakeholders.0F[1]
    

2. To complement your field-specific information, the Council of Graduate Schools provides potentially helpful broad-based resources.

3. Briefly describe any characteristics of your program that give context for the rest of your self-study. If you include something here, refer back to it later in the self-study. Possible items include:
   1. Changes you've made to your program in the last 5 years that help explain your current results, priorities, or gaps. Skip changes that won't affect your program going 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. Trends or challenges related to access and opportunity in your program or discipline.[2]

   5. How your program and its students are funded (e.g., revenue-based initiative, research assistantships, teaching assistantships).

[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.

This section asks about your goals, processes, and opportunities for improvement in recruiting and admission, retention and graduation, and placement. As you describe your processes, include how you connect students to college and university offerings. Recruiting, admission, retention, and placement efforts must not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment based on protected identities.

3. Recruiting and Admission
   1. How are applications reviewed and admission decisions made? Include who reviews applications, what criteria or rubrics they use, and where the decision rests (e.g., with individual faculty who plan to fund the student, with a research group or area, or with a program-level committee). If faculty decide individually, note any program-level screening such as a minimum bar or first-pass review. Note if degrees or tracks differ.
   2. State any goals your program sets for your application pool and your entering cohort, in both size and composition. Where you do not set a goal, say how you judge whether that area is working and what would tell you it was not.
   3. Describe your recruiting efforts at each of these stages:
      1. Building the applicant pool through outreach, partnerships, and visibility
      2. Getting started applications submitted
      3. Getting admitted students to accept your offers
         
         Include what your program does centrally and what individual faculty do. Highlight efforts to recruit a diverse group of students with potentially unique needs and interests.
   4. Analyze your application, admitted, and entering student data over the last 5 years, including your yield. Based on part (b), where are your recruiting and admission working well, and where is there room for improvement? What do you think is driving each?
4. Retention and Graduation
   1. What are your goals for the following?
      1. Your target timeline for each key milestone in your program, such as completing coursework, passing the qualifying examination, passing the comprehensive examination, and graduating. Give these as time from program entry.
      2. The percentage of students you expect to meet each target in (i). If you do not set an expectation, say what result would concern you. If your milestones or timelines differ by degree or track, please give targets for each.
   2. How does your program identify students who are falling behind the timelines in part (a), and what does it do to support them?
   3. Summarize your retention and graduation data (time to degree and cohort outcome data) in relation to the targets you identified in part (a). Report both actual time to each milestone and the percentage of students meeting each target. Report results for your entire student population and for any student subgroups large enough to report separately. Where are students progressing well, and where is there room for improvement?
5. Placement, Career Preparation, and Professional Development
   1. Where do your graduates end up, and what did your students want? These can differ, since students may aim for paths they do not reach. Placement data shows the first. Only students can tell you the second, through advising conversations, annual reviews, or surveys. Describe what you know about each, and how you know it. Not knowing is a legitimate answer, and more useful to us than a guess.
   2. What is your program aiming for in placement outcomes? Where you know what students want, note any gaps between that and what your program is set up to support. Note also any outcomes you would like to shift over the next 5-10 years.
   3. Describe the career preparation and professional development your students receive; including your own courses, milestones, and advising, as well as offerings elsewhere such as your college, the Graduate School, or professional societies; noting any preparation that is specific to a particular path. Then assess how well this preparation serves the paths you identified in part (a): where does it work well, and where is it thin, particularly for paths students want but do not often reach?
   4. Summarize your placement data in relation to the goals you identified in part (b). Report outcomes by path where you can. Note what share of your graduates you have outcome data for and where it comes from. Where are your placement outcomes strong, and where is there room for improvement? Include results for your entire student population and for any student subgroups large enough to report separately.
6. Based on your responses in this section, what are your program’s key priorities for improving recruiting, admission, retention, graduation, and placement? These may come from gaps between your data and your goals, from areas where you do not currently have goals or good information, or from opportunities you see even without a gap.

You can answer questions 7-9 in a single table. If you do, please also include text that defines any key terms, explains how your outcomes relate to each other, and says what your results show about student learning.

7. List the student learning outcomes for your program and for any associated certificates. If outcomes differ by degree or track, list them separately.
8. For each learning outcome, what evidence do you use to tell whether a student has achieved it, and how do you use that evidence? Evidence should be something students did that shows what they learned, such as performance in a course, a course assignment, an examination, or a milestone like the qualifying or comprehensive exam. Also say what counts as achieving the outcome, such as a grade, an exam result, or a level on a rubric. If you use rubrics for any milestones, say so.
9. For each learning outcome, how well are your students achieving it? Show your results and identify which outcomes students are meeting and which they are not. Include results for any student subgroups large enough to report separately.
10. Based on your responses in this section, what are your program’s key priorities for improving student achievement of your learning outcomes?

11. How well do the graduate courses your unit offers match student demand? Include how often required and elective courses run, where courses are oversubscribed or under-enrolled, and what students do when they cannot take a course they need.
12. Compare your curriculum and program requirements to those at 3 to 5 peer programs, such as Big Ten Academic Alliance universities or others you consider comparable, and say why you chose them. Where your requirements differ, explain the difference in terms of your program’s goals. You may use comparison tables, but include a few sentences summarizing what the comparison shows.
13. Describe your process for reviewing your curriculum and program requirements, including any regular cadence or specific trigger for review, who is involved, and how feedback from students and employers is obtained. When and how did you last conduct a review?
14. What recent feedback have you received from students and employers about your curriculum and program requirements, whether from your regular curriculum review process, from this self-study process, or both? If you do not collect this feedback systematically, say so and describe what you have learned informally.
15. What new changes are you considering to your course offerings, curriculum, and program requirements, whether as a result of your regular curriculum review process, this self-study process, or both?

16. Advising and Mentoring
    1. Advising models vary widely. Two distinctions matter for how you answer parts (b) through (d) below: 
       
       Whether satisfactory progress has visible, objective signals (e.g., GPA and course or milestone completion), as is often true for coursework master's and professional programs, or whether it has less visible and more subjective signals (e.g., research progress), as is often true for doctoral programs.
       
       Whether your program involves a significant, sustained apprenticeship-style mentoring relationship between an individual advisor and advisee (as is typical for doctoral programs and thesis-based master's programs), or advising happens more at the program level.
    2. Answer each part as it applies to your program using these distinctions, and keep your response brief, or note that a part doesn't apply, where it doesn't fit your program's structure.
       1. How are students matched with advisors, and when does that happen? Include whether students can change advisors and how that works.
       2. How do students receive feedback on their progress, in particular, their annual review? If satisfactory progress has visible, objective signals like GPA, briefly describe how this is monitored and communicated, even if it's a largely administrative process. If satisfactory progress has less visible, subjective elements, describe your annual review, including whether students submit an activity report, who provides the feedback, and whether it clearly states whether progress is satisfactory, as well as other mechanisms (e.g., periodic reviews, GPD check-ins, committee meetings, TA evaluations).
       3. When and how do advisors and students discuss expectations for the program and for their research or creative work, and how do advisors support career and professional development? Where you have a significant apprenticeship-style mentoring relationship, note whether you use individual development plans, mentoring compacts, or similar tools, and roughly how widely they are used. Otherwise, describe how expectations and career support are communicated, even if this is primarily a one-time step (e.g., at orientation) plus general career programming.
       4. Where you have a significant apprenticeship-style mentoring relationship, describe your process when concerns arise between an advisor and a student: what the student is told, any remediation timelines, and options if concerns are not resolved (e.g., finding a new advisor, moving to a terminal master's program), and how the student, including funding, is supported throughout. If your program does not have this kind of individual advising relationship, note this. Your response to (a) is sufficient.
17. Student Health and Well-being
    1. What does your program do to support student health and well-being? Focus on what is within your control, such as funding stability, workload and vacation expectations, leave policies, and how students learn about and access university resources. Include any advocacy your program has done for changes at the department, college, or university level.
    2. What does your program do to build community and a sense of belonging among your students? Include students who may be less connected, such as those who are part-time, off campus, or past their coursework years.
18. Based on your responses in this section, what are your program’s key priorities for improving advising, mentoring, and wellness for your students? Consider your entire student population as well as any student subgroups whose outcomes differ.

19. Neither question requires a response, and neither will be scored.
    1. Please discuss any aspirations, achievements, issues, or concerns that were not addressed in the previous questions.
    2. What is your program doing well that other programs might want to learn from? Describe one or two practices in enough detail that another program could try them, including what it took to put them in place. We may share what you write here with other programs.

20. Your responses to questions 6, 10, 15, 18, and possibly 19a identified priorities for your program. Bringing those together:
    1. What are your strategic priorities for the next 5-10 years? Classify them as short term (1-3 years), medium term (3-5 years), or long term (5-10 years). Focus on the priorities that matter most rather than listing everything you might do.
    2. For each priority, what will you do to pursue it? For short term priorities, describe specific steps. For longer term priorities, a direction and a first step is enough.
    3. For each priority, how will you know whether you are making progress? Name what you would look at, such as a data point, a milestone, or a change you would expect to see.
    4. What are your greatest challenges in pursuing these priorities, and how will you address them?
    5. What assistance do you need from your department, college, the Graduate School, or other units?