Annual progress review
After you pass your transfer, you’ll have a meeting every year to check how your research is going. This is called the Annual progress review (APR).
It happens each year around the same time you started your studies, until you submit your thesis.
The meeting is a chance to plan your upcoming work, discuss any problems, and talk with your supervisors about any challenges you’ve faced. It will also review your arrangements for ethics approval (if needed), your data management plan and any other training or support you might need to help you complete and submit your thesis.
How APR meetings work
There are two ways the meeting might happen:
Model A: You meet with your supervisors and someone else who isn’t part of your team. This is used in the Faculties of Biological Sciences, Engineering and Physical Sciences, and Medicine and Health.
Model B: You meet with just your supervisors. They’ll write a report about the meeting, which gets checked by other staff in your school. This is used in the Faculties of Arts, Humanities and Cultures, Business, Environment, and Social Sciences.
What you need to prepare
You can see the deadline for your APR on your GRAD record. Your Graduate School will contact you before this with information about what you need to do and the work you will need to submit.
Before the meeting, you need to fill out a form on the GRAD system and include:
- A reflective account about how your work has been going, including any problems.
- A timetable for completion of your thesis (like a Gantt chart).
- Any written work your supervisors or Graduate School have asked for
- A Data management plan (if you started after September 2019).
- Confirmation of your ethics approval (if needed for your research).
If your Transfer assessment panel, or an earlier APR assessment, identified any ethics review actions, you need to show that you have addressed their points. If there have been changes to your study that needed an amendment to a previous ethics review, you should also show that this has been done.
If you have external ethics approval for your work, you need to make sure that the University of Leeds has oversight of the decision. Please include evidence in your APR of the University of Leeds Chair’s confirmation of ethical scrutiny of externally approved studies.
A report will be completed after the review meeting, which you will be able to see in GRAD later.
Further information on the process, timescales, deadlines, and outcomes is available in the Annual progress review (post-transfer) guidelines on the Postgraduate research policies and procedures page.
Other things to do
If you started after September 2023, review your PGR-supervisor agreement with your supervisors as part of this process. If you make changes, upload the new version to GRAD.
You can revisit the Research practice resources at any time, and particularly before assessment points, for guidance around academic integrity and avoiding plagiarism, ethical review, and data management. Your engagement with the ethics review and data management processes will be reviewed as part of the APR, so check your ethics review, if you need one.
What if something isn’t going well?
The APR is meant to help you reflect and plan, not to test you. But if there are serious concerns about your progress, your supervisors might start the Progress support process for extra support to help you.