LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE   Graduate Advising

As an incoming student, you will be assigned a temporary ‘first year advisor’ whose job is to help you devise a course of study that will help fulfill your requirements and develop your particular interests.  By sometime during your second year, you should have some sense of your eventual area of concentration and of which faculty you work with most effectively; in consultation with your first year advisor, the Director of Graduate Studies, and other faculty, you will then shift to a ‘portfolio advisor’ who will guide you through the development of your portfolio.  The final step, after the portfolio, is to find a suitable ‘dissertation advisor’ (who will serve as chair of your Doctoral Committee). 

Each spring, the LPS faculty meets to evaluate the progress of every graduate student in the LPS track.  At that meeting, the faculty will review and discuss grade records from all courses you have taken and all available assessments of your teaching performance.  Course and seminar work is graded on the usual scale of A through F, but for graduate students, a grade lower than B is considered unsatisfactory (and will not satisfy a requirement).  A grade of I (‘incomplete’) can be given under special circumstances, but first and second year students should avoid carrying I grades into the spring meeting (where they are viewed unfavorably).  A grade of S (‘satisfactory’, as opposed to U, ‘unsatisfactory’) in a graduate course or seminar functions largely as an audit grade, that is, it is awarded to anyone who does the reading and participates in all class meetings.  First and second year students are advised not to take courses or seminars for S grades except as an overload (that is, over and above the standard twelve units), because an S provides little useful information at the spring meeting, but more advanced students should feel free to use this option.  After the meeting, your advisor will give you a written summary of the department consensus (with special attention to any problem areas that are identified