Pre-completion Evaluation

Pre-Completion should occur 3 months (FTE) before your expected thesis submission.

What is Pre-completion?

The purpose of your Pre-Completion milestone is to:

• Confirm that your progress is satisfactory and that your project can be completed within the required timeframe.
• Ensure that the scope, originality, and quality of your thesis, including its language and presentation, are of a standard that meets the requirements of your degree and discipline.
• Provide you with constructive feedback on your research and thesis draft.
• Confirm that you can demonstrate the HDR graduate attributes.
• Provide formative feedback to help you prepare for the oral component of your thesis examination.
• At least 4 weeks before your seminar, you must provide a draft of your thesis (or, where relevant, your exegesis or creative work).
  • The draft should be complete enough for the committee to provide feedback that helps you meet this milestone.
  • The Committee will determine if your thesis is likely to be ready to submit for examination within 3 months (FTE).
• You will present a public seminar, either in person or by live videoconference.
  • In your seminar, you should bring together your research, explain your key findings, and describe the significance and impact of your work.

What is required?

Consult the Pre-Completion Milestone procedure (Section 5) for further details. You should also familiarise yourself with the evaluation criteria for the milestone.

Successful completion of this milestone will allow you to go ahead with confidence in making any revisions and preparing your thesis for examination.

Step 1: Booking Your Seminar

This form is to be submitted four weeks for Pre-Completion Evaluation. Complete and submit this seminar form with assistance from your advisors, ensuring you provide all required information. When the form has been submitted, the Graduate Research School will contact you to finalise your seminar booking.

Seminar Booking  form

Step 2: Review Checklist and Assessment criteria

Review how you will be assessed:

Pre-Completion Checklist and Assessment Criteria

Review your Candidate/Advisor Agreement

At this stage of your candidature, you should work with your panel to ensure you have shared understandings of the key expectations of this critical completion phase.

Here are some questions that you might use to inform thinking, planning, and preparation. The questions are offered as guides, and you are free to modify or add to them as needed:

• Do you need to modify your plans for the thesis to bring it to completion on time?
• What is your planned thesis submission date for examination, and what needs to happen to meet that forecast deadline?
• Do you need help articulating your needs with your advisors, especially around feedback timeframes and other important matters? Do you need help interpreting advisor feedback? Do you need help interpreting the feedback from your pre-completion?
• What support do you need from your advisors?
• Build a timeline that accounts for the work to be completed and the requirements of the thesis. Use any timeline format that works best for you and your advisors, such as a Gantt chart.
• Consider whether you need to modify any part of the plan for your research as you move into the next phase. Remember, being ready, able, and willing to modify elements of your research is a normal part of life as a researcher.
• Create a master file that contains all the component parts of your thesis. In each part, include all the written work you have done for that part to date. Review the master file with your advisor and identify what research remains to be done. Consider whether this work is essential to the thesis.
• Discuss and agree on the role of each member of the advisory team. Advisors can divide up the review work to optimise application of their expertise, ensuring quality feedback. Agree on timelines for returning written work, making sure any leave or teaching or service commitments your advisors have are accounted for. Be clear that you want to ensure you have set aside sufficient time for reviews to occur.
• Ensure your timeline is realistic, allowing sufficient time to conduct all outstanding work, including work yet to be written.

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