Graduation Date vs. Date of Work on Coversheet

[Jason Skoog]

Hello,

We provide a template for our theses and dissertation projects. The template includes anticipated graduation month, and year at the bottom. There is no other date on the template.

Originally, this graduation month and year corresponded to when the project was submitted. But over time, some programs have had students complete projects half-way through their programs. Sometimes the students put the date they are submitted the project, rather than the graduation date. I'm not sure how to best handle this.

• I could emphasize the date is supposed to be the graduation date.
• I could change it to be the date that the paper is submitted.
• I could let programs decide either way.

In our metadata, we list the date of student graduation along with the date the paper was submitted. I look up their date of graduation in a database. I get the submission date from the process of them submitting the paper. I wonder if we need to include graduation date anymore. I've attached a copy of our template.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

Jason Skoog

Viterbo University, La Crosse, Wisconsin

608-796-3262

[Saradina Doan]

Another option is to add another line for the date the paper is submitted. That might be going in the opposite direction of what you're thinking; but it could help the student realize what kind of dates they're supposed to putting down.

FWIW, my institution used to ask for the "present date" on our template, and now when we look at archived theses, we have to infer the graduation term/year. Now, we use the dates from the Access Forms in our database. The students enter their "Term of Graduation" and the graduate office enters their own "Date of ETD Approval." -- which we use to set our embargo dates. And, yes, as you have experienced, the graduation term and the ETD approval dates don't always line up.

[John F]

Jason,

It might be useful to have metadata fields that highlight the date of any committee defense, graduation date, and possibly the date that it was either delivered to your institutional repository or to ProQuest. The first date would essentially be the date created in some schemas. The graduation date is normally more useful for collocation, but could technically be interchangeable with the delivery/published date.  The latter date can be important for establishing when a concept or research data was made public to the world, especially if there is ever a claim regarding someone scooping the student's work. 

Sincerely,

John Fudrow

University of Pittsburgh

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