A flexible plan to help grad students finish their degrees

By Brenda Brouwer. The overarching principle at Queen’s is to support students in completing high-quality work in a reasonable time frame. As noted in the column “Queen’s plan to change its graduate policy needs more study,” published on March 27, the Graduate Studies’ Executive Committee (GSEC) at Queen’s University recently approved revisions to our policy on time-to-completion for graduate students. I would like to respond to some of the issues that were raised in that piece.
The old policy, which had not been updated in many years, stated that students had five and seven years from the time of registration to complete Master’s and PhD degrees, respectively, with no mention of mechanisms to safeguard that students were progressing to completion prior to these time points. The revised policy reflects the standard program lengths approved by the province for full-time registration, which is two years for a Master’s and four for a PhD. It also acknowledges that many factors contribute to the time in which a degree is completed. Read more...