The most common way a Graduate Program Advisor will use SPA is via an email. When a progress assessment has been confirmed (ie electronically signed) by the Major Professor an email will go out to the Graduate Program Advisor for that student. The email will contain a link to the assessment questionnaire. The assessment link will remain available to the graduate program indefinitely. Past assessments can also be accessed via https://spa.gradhub.ucdavis.edu or GradHub.
This can vary by program. You should discuss roles and expectations with your faculty and graduate program advisors about what would be most appropriate for your program. For example, a graduate program advisor might be filling out certain sections of the assessment for a student or just confirming the assessment once it has been filled out by the major professor and student.
Graduate Studies recommends that all graduate program advisors meet to collaborate on providing consistency and oversight to all submitted progress reports. Graduate program advisors can provide guidance to faculty, ensure ratings are used consistently and appropriately (satisfactory/marginal/unsatisfactory) and that students have been given fair, objective timelines for improvement. Graduate program advisors can also identify conflicts and assist mentors and mentees in finding resolutions. Several graduate programs have had graduate program advisors meet to discuss progress reports before routing them to the students and Graduate Studies. This has proven very effective for all concerned.
If you have multiple programs, select the program you want to work with.
Under the Send Email column click Send.
The Send / Reminder button might be disabled for a couple reasons; either this is not your student or the student is missing a Major Professor* or Graduate Advisor. *1st or 2nd year students or Masters students not doing research may not need a MP.
An email will be sent to the Student, Major Professor* and Graduate Advisor.
For third year doctoral students a major professor and a graduate advisor must approve the assessment. Note, these can be the same person. For master's students and first and second year PhD students, the graduate advisor can be the sole approver of the assessment, but only if there is no major professor assigned to the student. If a master's or PhD student has a major professor, then the major professor and graduate advisor will have to approve the assessment for that student.
Both the major professor and the graduate advisor have the ability to make comments on the assessment.
Any user can change their settings by clicking their name in the right corner, then selecting “Notification Preferences” from the drop down in SPA.
Some emails also have a link to "Change notification frequency (faculty and staff)" at the bottom.