PhD Student Handbook

Limitations of Time

Full-time students are commonly admitted to candidacy sometime during the fourth academic year, upon successful defense of their dissertation proposal. Students accepted on a part-time basis are typically admitted to candidacy by the close of the fifth academic year from the date of entrance to the Program.

Students shall complete all course requirements and all examinations (preliminary and candidacy) within a period of seven consecutive years.

All dissertation requirements are to be completed within a period of five consecutive years since registration for dissertation tuition. Students who have not completed all requirements for the Ph.D., including the deposit of the dissertation, within five years of their first registration for dissertation tuition, face the ever increasing risk that their dissertation research is no longer at the frontier of current research in their field. Such students (who were admitted or re-admitted after July 1, 1993) cease to be candidates for the Ph.D. unless they satisfy the re-evaluation criteria designed by the Social Welfare Graduate Group and approved by the Graduate Council of the Faculties or, in the absence of an approved re-evaluation procedure, they retake and pass either the preliminary or the dissertation defense final examination.