Evaluation Committees
Annually, the Programme's Academic Committee will evaluate each Doctoral Student's Activity Document, her/his Research Plan, as well as the reports to be issued by the tutor and thesis supervisor, and the general progress of the doctoral thesis. In view of these documents and reports, a decision will be taken on whether or not to continue in the programme for those enrolled in the PhD Programme, which must be reasoned. A positive evaluation by the Academic and Quality Committee will be a prerequisite for continuing on the programme. In the event of a negative evaluation, which shall be duly justified, the PhD student must be re-evaluated within a period of six months, for which purpose a new Research Plan must be drawn up. In the event of a second negative evaluation, the PhD student will be definitively withdrawn from the programme, which may be appealed before the Postgraduate Commission of the University of Malaga.
The Academic and Quality Committee will appoint one or more tribunals each year to monitor doctoral students. Each panel will be made up of three full members and three substitute members, lecturers on the doctoral programme. One of the members will act as President and the other as Secretary.
The examining board will convene two assessment sessions per year, approximately every six months, which students may attend in order to be assessed. The members of the examining board may not judge the persons they tutor or supervise the thesis, for which the corresponding substitutes will act.
The assessment criteria used by the examining board will be those defined by the Doctoral Programme for each of the years of development of the thesis, which must have been approved by the Academic and Quality Committee and the Postgraduate Committee of the University of Malaga. The information on these criteria must be public, posted on the Programme's website, and form part of the Documentary Commitment signed by the student upon enrolment. These criteria must guarantee that doctoral students are making adequate progress towards meeting the requirements of the Doctoral Programme for the defence of their thesis.
Assessment criteria.
The Committee will evaluate positively or negatively the annual work carried out by the PhD student, and may issue a report, with proposals for improvement if it considers it necessary. This report will be compulsory in the case of a negative evaluation. In the Doctoral Programme in Equality and Gender, the report is also compulsory in case of positive evaluation.
The evaluation should take into account the student's dedication. If part-time students complete their thesis in five years, they will have to be assessed five times to fulfil the requirement to undergo an annual assessment, instead of the normal case of three assessments. The dedication will also be taken into account for the consideration of the activities carried out, in order to consider a flexibilisation of the evaluation calendar to make it compatible with the requirement of annual evaluation; likewise, a corrective coefficient will be applied to the score obtained in the evaluation.
The student requests the annual assessment in the DAD application, in which the different documents drawn up by tutors, directors and tribunals are also provided.
