Progress reporting

Once a year, you and your main supervisor must submit individual progress reports to the Head of the PhD programme. The purpose of the progress reporting is to detect any challenges in order to follow up the individual candidates in a good way, as well as develop the quality of the PhD education at HVL.

All PhD candidates and main supervisors are obliged to report annually on the progress of the PhD education (PhD regulations Section 4-8). The PhD candidates and main supervisors will receive a link to their personal electronic form by email in the beginning of October. The submission deadline is November 1st. The PhD candidate and main supervisor fill in their forms separately. Note that the PhD candidate and the supervisor will not have access to each other’s reports.

The progress reporting has two main purposes:
to detect any challenges the individual candidates may experience, in order to enable HVL to follow up on this.
to contribute to the development of quality in research education at HVL

You can read more about this in the paragraphs below.

Please note that for candidates who fail to report or deliver insufficient progress resports it may lead to involuntary termination of their doctoral education. Supervisors who fail to meet their obligation to report may loose their supervision responsibility.

The progress reports will be reviewed by the academic Head of the PhD programme and the PhD coordinator. Any delays in progression or other conditions that require measures to be taken (e.g. challenges linked to e.g. supervision, professional environment or duty work) will be followed up so that HVL in the best possible way can support the candidates’ progression. In such cases, the academic Head of the PhD programme or the PhD coordinator will contact you.

The progress reporting is a part of the systematic quality work in the PhD education at the HVL. Based on reports from PhD candidates and supervisors, the Head of the PhD programme prepares a summary report to the program committee and the Dean. This summary report is based on statistics and will not contain any personal data about candidates or supervisors. The report will say something about the extent of different types of challenges the PhD candidates face and the follow-up of these. Data presented in the report cannot be traced back to any individuals. The programme committee decides if any measures are needed to secure the quality of the PhD programme.

The privacy statement for progress reporting in the PhD education describes how the privacy of the individual PhD candidate and supervisor will be protected. You can read the privacy statement here.

Note that progress reports should not contain sensitive personal information. The following is considered as sensitive personal data: ethnic origin, political opinion, religion, philosophical interpretation, professional membership, genetic information, biometric information, health education, sexual relations, and sexual orientation (cf. The Norwegian Data Protection Authority).

Any sensitive personal data that the PhD candidate or supervisor wishes to disclose may be communicated directly to the academic Head of the PhD programme or the PhD coordinator. If a progress report nevertheless contains sensitive personal information, the sensitive information must be deleted. A procedure for this is described in the privacy statement.

The main rule is that all PhD candidates and their main supervisor must report. There are a few exemptions:

PhD candidates and supervisors do not need to report if the candidate has started PhD education after July 1^st this year.
PhD candidates and supervisors do not need to report if the candidate has submitted the PhD thesis.
PhD candidates on sick leave, parental leave, or another long term (more than 2 months) privilege leave do not have to report.
Supervisors for candidates who have been on sick leave, parental leave, or have had another privilege leave during the entire reporting period do not have to report.

Those who are exempt from the reporting obligation must still log in to the digital system, open the current year’s form and tick the box stating they do not wish to report (first question in the form), and then end the reporting.

In the progress reporting form, PhD candidates are asked questions related to the following topics: employment conditions, duty work, training component, status of the research project and supervision. The supervisors are asked questions related to the progress, status of the PhD project and supervision.

The PhD candidate and main supervisor can log in to the digital system at any time to have access to all previously submitted reports.

Click hereto log in to the digital system.

If you are an external supervisor, you must log in using the alternative login, the remaing users can log in using Feide.

If you have questions about the digital loop for progress reporting, or want to report nonconformities, send an email to AFII-PhD@hvl.no.

Modified 10.10.23