The student’s program of studies, in conjunction with the requirements outlined in the USask Catalogue, will provide a guide for students to follow to complete their programs. Within the first year of a student’s program, the advisory committee will work with the student to develop and approve an individualized program of studies. For non-thesis/dissertation students, the graduate chair or designate will develop the program of studies with the student.

The program of studies must be approved by the graduate chair and entered into the student’s record by the academic unit.

Changes to course requirements or supervisor and advisory committee composition must be kept up to date in the student record by the academic unit.

Undergraduate courses credited towards a graduate program must be at the senior (I.e., 300-400) level and not exceed the following limits:

• Ph.D. – 0 credit units
• Master’s program with ≤ 9 credit units – 0 credit units
• Master’s program with 10 – 15 credit units – 3 credit units
• Master’s program with > 15 credit units – 6 credit units
• PGD – 12 credit units

Exceptions may be considered by CGPS on a case-by-case basis when a rationale is provided by the graduate chair.

The advisory committee or graduate chair must complete a progress report annually with each graduate student following a synchronous meeting with that student. It is the responsibility of the student and the supervisor to ensure that this meeting takes place and that the report is completed and submitted to CGPS. 

Any report indicating unsatisfactory progress should be communicated to the graduate chair with a clear plan to address deficiencies and for reassessment in a reasonable timeframe.  A second unsatisfactory progress report may lead to a recommendation that the student be required to discontinue and be referred to CGPS for further action (See Section 15).  Within the first year of study, a plan and timeline for completion must be developed by the student and advisory committee and revisited in each subsequent progress report.

A variety of factors can affect time in program. Both the student and the supervisor and/or graduate chair for course and thesis students share the responsibility for time in program.

Time in program is measured from the beginning of the first term of registration for work which is included in the Program of Studies (for example, if a student transfers from a master’s to Ph.D. program, the time in program begins when registration in the master’s program began). Any periods of approved leave or suspension are excluded from time in program.

Program time limits are four years for master’s and postgraduate diploma (PGD) programs, and six years for doctoral programs unless otherwise stated for the specific program in the University Catalogue. Time limits for the completion of graduate certificates are set by academic units, if applicable.

4.3.1. TIME IN PROGRAM EXTENSIONS

4.4.1. TRANSFER BETWEEN ACADEMIC UNITS

4.4.2. TRANSFER FROM OR INTO POSTGRADUATE DIPLOMA

Master's students may transfer into an existing postgraduate diploma at any time during the program with the approval of the graduate chair.

Postgraduate diploma students who were fully qualified as master's students at the time of admission are eligible to transfer into a master's program at any time with the approval of the graduate chair.

Postgraduate diploma students who were not fully qualified as master’s students at the time of admission to the postgraduate diploma are eligible to be recommended for transfer to a master’s program by the graduate chair provided the following condition is met:

• The student has completed at least 9 credit units at the 800-level, and has achieved a minimum average of 70% and no grade below 60% in those 9 credit units. The 9 credit units most recently completed at the 800-level will be considered. Exceptions are subject to the approval of CGPS.

Any recommendation to transfer from a postgraduate diploma to a master’s program shall be forwarded by the academic unit to CGPS.  Maximum amounts of undergraduate course content eligible for credit within a master’s degree shall be applicable to students transferring from a postgraduate diploma to a master’s program.

4.4.3. TRANSFER BETWEEN THESIS, PROJECT, AND COURSE-BASED MASTER'S PROGRAMS

4.4.4. TRANSFER FROM PH.D. PROGRAM TO MASTER'S PROGRAM

Students may transfer from a Ph.D. program to a master’s program with a thesis or a project with the approval of their supervisor, advisory committee, and graduate chair.

Students who have entered a Ph.D. program directly from a bachelor’s degree who do not meet the academic standing required for continuation in the program will be given the opportunity to revert to the master’s degree program in their field, and successful work done towards the Ph.D. degree will be credited towards the master’s degree.

4.4.5. TRANSFER FROM MASTER'S PROGRAM TO PHD PROGRAM

Transfer from a master’s program to a Ph.D. program takes place after the end of the first year and no later than the end of the second year in the program.

A synchronous meeting of the student's advisory committee must be held to determine if a transfer is appropriate. If approved by the committee, the academic unit will forward the recommendation documentation to CGPS. The following conditions must be met to recommend the transfer: 

1. The transfer aligns with the student’s motivations and personal and career objectives.
2. The student has completed at least 9 credit units at the 800-level, and has achieved a minimum average of 80% and no grade below 70%. Exceptions are subject to the approval of the dean, CGPS, or designate.
3. There is evidence the student has the requisite writing and oral communication abilities, research skills, and disciplinary knowledge, to be able to satisfy the requirement of a doctoral candidacy assessment, and successfully complete a Ph.D. dissertation.

The master’s thesis is an opportunity to explore a topic of particular interest and advance research or scholarship in the discipline, area of professional competence, or research creation. The thesis must demonstrate a capacity to critically evaluate current research and show originality in the application of knowledge or communicate complex ideas coherently.

The Ph.D. dissertation must demonstrate original research, advanced scholarship, generation of new knowledge, or competence and innovation through arts project/s. The dissertation must exhibit high level of quality to satisfy peer review and to merit publication in disciplinary appropriate forms. Dissertations must provide adequate evidence of conceptualization, design, and implementation of research or scholarship for the generation of new knowledge, applications, or understanding at the forefront of the chosen research field or across multiple disciplines and make informed judgments on complex issues in specialist field, sometimes requiring new methods and ethically designed research. 

The adequacy of the master's thesis or Ph.D. dissertation is decided by an examining committee consisting of the Supervisor, other members of the Advisory Committee and other persons as appropriate. The thesis or dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree must:

1. Deal in an academically satisfactory way with a defined topic related to the major research, professional practice field, or research creation
2. Demonstrate ability on the part of the candidate to do independent inquiry
3. Be written in disciplinary appropriate style and satisfy the requirements of a style manual approved by the academic unit
4. Comply with specifications of CGPS policies, regulations and procedures regarding the preparation, submission, and examination of the master's and Ph.D. dissertation. 

A thesis or dissertation must include a preface section including a title page, copyright information, abstract, permission to use, declaration regarding the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and table of contents. Issues of copyright must be addressed should one or more of the manuscripts be accepted for publication or already in print. Refer to Section 17 for intellectual property and copyright details. 

All master’s thesis students and Ph.D. students must submit their thesis or dissertation in digital form. The digital form of document will be held in the USask library and Theses Canada repositories. The final thesis/dissertation document submitted to CGPS is intended to be open-source public document once it is posted and many not restrict the reading and examination of the content. 

Provision can be made for restricting access to a completed thesis/dissertation for one year, with the possibility of up to two, one-year extensions. Restrictions beyond three years will be considered by the Dean, CGPS on a case-by-case basis. Access may be restricted completely only under very exceptional circumstances, or made allowable for only on-campus use.

Requirements for non-Ph.D. doctoral study are under consultation. 

A master’s thesis or Ph.D. dissertation may be produced in any of the following styles:

1. A traditional style thesis/dissertation typically consists of distinct chapters such as introduction, literature review, objectives, methodologies, results and discussion and one set of references at the end.
2. A manuscript style thesis/dissertation is a document consisting of one or cohesive series of manuscripts, written in a style suitable for publication in appropriate venues. A manuscript-style thesis is not, however, merely a collection of published or publishable papers. It must meet the principles and objectives required of a thesis/dissertation and include an introductory chapter, and a final chapter / general discussion to tie the manuscripts together. The manuscripts may or may not be identical to the published papers.
3. A research-creation (practice-based research, arts-based research) thesis/dissertation combines creative and academic research practices to support the generation of new knowledge, competence and innovation. It may employ a variety of art forms (such as audio, music, performance, visual art, or artifact-based display) and typically includes an explanatory document to demonstrate research design, methodology, results and discussion appropriate to the disciplines involved or to the interdisciplinary approach taken.

The format and style of a master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation may differ by department, and by discipline. The student’s academic unit will identify an acceptable style and format for the thesis/dissertation and communicate it to students. The selected style must be maintained throughout the document.

Advisory committees will discuss and approve the focus of the thesis/dissertation at the proposal stage including the number of manuscript chapters (in case of manuscript style thesis or dissertation) or the scope of scholarly work (in case of research-creation style thesis or dissertation). The focus may be modified by agreement of the committee as the research progresses; any revisions must be approved by the supervisor and advisory committee.

4.6.1. LANGUAGE

The official language of USask is English and all theses/dissertations are expected to be written in English. The thesis or dissertation can be written in other language in cases where the language of assessment is approved in the program requirements (e.g. MA in French or Cree). If the language of the thesis or dissertation is other than English, required sections of the preface (including the abstract) in English language must be included. The preface section in the original language can also be included.

4.6.2. COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSION TO USE

The author holds the copyright to the thesis/dissertation and grants permission to the USask Library, College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and the Academic Unit to provide access to the document. Creative Commons attributes for copyright and permission to use are permitted. Authors should consider potential implications for published scientific papers or future publications.

The thesis/dissertation must indicate in the preface and on the first page of the chapter when copyrighted and/or co-authored material such as, but not limited to, figures, survey inventories or computer code have been included in the document either “with permission” or “under license”. Any payment which might be required by the rights holder(s) is the responsibility of the student. Copies of the letters of permission or licenses must be available upon request and may be included within the thesis as appendices.

4.6.3. USE OF GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (GenAI)

Academic programs determine whether and how GenAI may be used by graduate students and provide information and guidelines to the students on the uses of GenAI that are permitted or not permitted for master’s and doctoral research or scholarly activity and thesis/dissertation writing. Use of large language models for autonomous content generation and scientific exploration (including but not limited to search, design, outline, draft, write code, analyze data, write, or generate images or other content types) and for editorial purposes through standalone software or as embedded components in the word processing software will be considered use of GenAI and must be declared. Common word processing editorial functions such as spelling corrections, hyphenation, word/syntax/grammar suggestions, reference management are considered as use of artificial intelligence, and such use is permitted and need not be declared unless the academic unit policy prohibits such assistance from humans and/or technologies or requires specific forms of assistance be declared.

Student author and co-authors (in the case of manuscript style thesis/dissertation) must confirm the originality of scholarly contributions and human accountability of work presented in the thesis/dissertation. Large language models do not satisfy the authorship criteria. The writer should not cite a source unless they have read the source and should exercise caution in the use of GenAI to avoid infringement of copyright or other intellectual property protections.

A GenAI declaration must be included in the preface section regardless of whether GenAI was used or not. Methodological details regarding the use and purpose of GenAI must be included in the appropriate sections of the thesis or dissertation. Search histories, prompts used, and other details may be provided in appendices, if appropriate. Students must ensure that any data provided to a GenAI tools does not contravene compliance with any of the Data Management Policy of the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Saskatchewan Human Research Ethics Policy, and any conditions of the ethics approvals.

4.6.4. FORMATTING

All pages in the document must be numbered. Preface section is numbered in lower-case roman numerals (example: i, ii, iii, iv, …). Page number is not printed on the title page. Pages for the chapters and appendices are numbered sequentially in natural numbers (example: 1, 2, 3, …).

Accepted rules of grammar must be followed, and forms of spelling and punctuation must be used with consistency.

When previously published or submitted manuscripts are included as chapters, they must match the formatting standard of the thesis or dissertation, including but not limited to numbering of tables and figures. Previously published manuscripts must be assigned page numbers that are sequential within the document and must not be inserted into the document as copies of journal pages (reprints). For jointly authored manuscript/s, chapter title page should have the thesis/dissertation writer and other co-authors contributions stated in detail (for example but not limited to: conceptualization, creation, data curation, formal/statistical analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, resources, supervision, visualization, writing – original draft, writing -review and editing).

Reference and citation styles differ between disciplines and departments, but a single and consistent style must be used throughout the document. References can either be listed as chapter-by-chapter or be presented in a single list at the end of the thesis or dissertation. If the chapter-by-chapter approach is adopted, each chapter, including chapters that are not manuscripts (such as the introduction and concluding chapters), require a list of references. If a single list appears at the end of the thesis, all references cited in the chapters must be included in the list.

4.6.5. PREFACE SECTION

The preface section of the thesis or dissertation is mandatory and must include a title page, abstract, permission to use and copyright information, a declaration about the use of GenAI, and a table of content/outline. The preface section may also include additional optional items such as disclaimers, acknowledgment page, dedication page, keywords, list of abbreviations, list of tables and figures.

Description of Required and Optional Elements in the Preface Section

In addition to coursework, examinations and research, a student may be required to complete one or more non-credit safety courses.