Mid candidature review

• This milestone is the most specific to you and your project.  You cannot compare your progress to your peers and colleagues around you.  The conclusion of your CoC should result in clear, precise and well considered goals and outputs that ensure a completion in three years.  These CoC goals are evaluated in the MCR.  Therefore, spend time at the conclusion of the CoC to create valuable and important tasks that will be completed or in progress at this point.
• Ensure that some of the outcomes for the MCR are the completion of tasks:  literature review, research methods chapter, ethics clearance, first fieldwork, first set of experiments, or the reading of a specific archive.
• Ensure that there are other logged outcomes in the MCR that will be in progress at this point: development of a theoretical framework, preparing a conference presentation, or preparing a refereed article.
• Try to create a word length target that you can reach for this MCR.  Ensure that you are writing throughout the candidature. The characteristic of students with a slow candidature is they think they will ‘write up’ at the end.  Timely completion are created when students write throughout the candidature.
• You will be assessed for academic integrity at the MCR.  Therefore, ensure that your note taking is of the highest standards and your referencing is in place.  Text matching software, such as iThenticate, will be used on some of your draft chapters or a refereed article.
• As you are moving into publishing, ensure that you are clear about copyright. Recognize that if you place publications into your doctorate – and they were not published with gold or platinum open access – then you do not have the right to present them in the final thesis to be loaded up to the library portal.  You will need to include the green open access pre-publication document to avoid a copyright breach.
• At the conclusion of this milestone, ensure there is an overt discussion of the required work to submit the thesis in one year. 

• The MCR stage is the most difficult for students and supervisors, as it requires the development of ambitious, verifiable and achievable goals, outcomes and milestones.  Each candidate will have different outcomes and outputs.  Clarity and precision at the conclusion of the CoC is required to ensure that a strong mapping to completion – using a Gantt chart – is developed.  Progress to completion is assessed at this stage.
• The goals assembled must be reasonable, but also ambitious.  Ensure they are agreed – overtly and clearly – between the student and supervisory team at the conclusion of the CoC.
• Mandate that there is one goal that assesses oral communication.  The student’s communication skills can be assessed at a Faculty seminar or something more innovative, including podcasts and video abstracts.  But ensure there is a way to evaluate oral communication skills at this stage.
• Academic integrity will be assessed at this milestone.  Text matching software can be used on a draft chapter or publication.
• Ensure that you can offer the best advice on green, gold and platinum open access so that students understand the consequences of signing away copyright on their publications.  If an article is presented in the thesis in any form – even in an appendix – then the researcher must have the right to reproduce that article.  Check publishing agreements at this mid stage to avoid time-consuming copyright problems in the final stages of submission.
• Log challenges and issues that are slowing completion.  However, it is important to develop strategies and use the resources of the university to submit the thesis in three years.

CDU now provides access to iThenticate for HDR students and their Principal Supervisors to check the originality of research publications, including their thesis, journal articles, milestone documents and more. 

Visit our iThenticate page for more information.