Draft Minutes of The Graduate Affairs Committee meeting Oct 31, 2014

Present: Jacqueline Bermudez, Mike Brudno,  Christina Christara,
Stephen Cook (Chair), Allan Jepson (Grad Chair), Peter Marbach,
Bogdan Simion, Ioan Stefanovic

Regrets:  Ken Jackson

Reminder: New GAC discussion items can be raised by emailing Steve Cook
(GAC Chair) or Allan Jepson (Assoc Chair).

Reminder: Scores for DCS awards are needed from the GAC faculty by next
Friday, Nov. 7.

Item 1:  Increase the value of the max stipend used to compute top-up.

Current Top-up Policy:  OGS and NSERC scholarships are topped up by
the department (their value is increased) 11K, except when the total
value of all scholarships exceeds the maximum stipend for top-up.  In
that case, the top-up is reduced until either the student's stipend
is equal to the maximum or the top-up is zero.

Several years ago, DCS set the maximum MSc and PhD student stipend to
be the minimum salary for an assistant professor at UofT.  However we
haven't updated that, even though the min faculty salary has
increased.  Currently the max stipend (for top-up) for a student is 41K.

Proposal 1.  Update the max stipend for top-up to 47.6K, which is currently
the minimum faculty salary.  This would change the amount a winner of the
NSERC CDSD receives.  (See the link on the GAC web site for the current
table.)

The committee agreed to the following modification of this proposal:
The max stipend for top-up should be the current minimum salary for an
assistant professor at UofT.  In this way the max top-up will be
increased every time the minimum salary for an assistant professor
is increased.

Members of the committee are concerned that in general the current
stipends to our graduate students are not competitive with those
of other universities.  One suggestion was to encourage PhD students
to follow our direct entry program, and increase the stipend difference
between MSc and PhD students.

Item 2  Discussion on graduate course offerings.

2A:  Better bookkeeping and reporting for both course content and when
courses have been offered in the past.  

2B:  Student feedback on courses has not been provided to students.
This is partly due to University privacy regulations concerning student
course evaluations.  Course evaluations will be made available by the Faculty of Arts and Science in the spring of 2015, for 2014-15 Fall and Winter courses (with a sufficient number of respondents).

2C:  Reported lack of suitable introductory courses.  This is partly
due to lack of demand for introductory courses in some areas.  The
current weak breadth requirements are partly to blame for this. 
Another problem is lack of faculty to teach the courses.  The Grad Office should consider a way to determine the demand for graduate courses that have not been offered.