Miscellaneous Issues

Advising

Each graduate student's schedule of classes for each semester should be approved by the student's Academic Advisor. This can be done by scheduling a short advising session in the preceding term.

Satisfactory Progress

Part of the advising procedure will include monitoring the student's academic progress, the quality of work, and progress toward meeting deadlines for taking required examinations. Graduate students are expected to maintain a 3.0 average in all work attempted at Kent State University. Failure to do so makes the student liable to dismissal. A graduate student who receives more than seven hours of "C" or lower grades, or more than four hours of grades lower than "C", is subject to dismissal. When the Department has determined that the number of "IPs" or Incompletes on a student's record indicates poor progress toward completion of a degree, it may recommend dismissal of the student to the Division of Research and Graduate Studies. It may also recommend dismissal in those cases where the student has failed to meet deadlines with respect to taking the Qualifying Examination or the Candidacy Examination.

Graduate Student Grievance Procedures

• A student who has a grievance concerning a graduate course must first contact the professor in charge of the course in order to try and resolve the dispute.
• If the student is dissatisfied after Step 1, the student then contacts the CS Graduate Coordinator.
• If the CS Graduate Coordinator is unable to reach a solution satisfactory to the student, the student will then contact the Chairperson of the Department.
• If, after Step 3, the student's grievance still exists, the student will contact the Division of Research and Graduate Studies.
• A graduate student who has a grievance concerning policy of the Department should start the grievance procedure at Step 2.

Schedule of Core Course Sequences

Since the enrollment in 60000/70000-level courses is small, these sequences are offered on an alternate year basis according to the Graduate Course Rotation Schedule.

Departmental Facilities

Every graduate appointee will be assigned a mailbox and office space by the department; typically an office is shared with several other graduate students. Instructional- related copying privileges are available to each graduate appointee; copying of personal materials will be done at the student's cost.

Committees and Colloquia

One graduate student is elected each year by his or her peers to serve on the Graduate Student Council. Also, the departmental Curriculum Committee and the Graduate Studies Committee will ask a graduate student to serve on their committee.

The Department of Computer Science sponsors a series of colloquia during the academic year. These talks, covering many areas of computer science, have several purposes: to acquaint the audience with the frontiers of research in a particular topic; to give an exposition of some problem, study, or topic of wide interest; or to give an historical perspective and/or survey of some problem, study, or topic of wide interest.

Graduate students benefit from the colloquium series by being exposed to computer scientists, from outside the University, who may be actively involved in problems or topics in which they are interested or have worked. In addition, graduate students will, in some colloquia, be exposed to topics of computer science that are not emphasized within the Department. Thus, the colloquium series helps to reinforce and broaden the student's graduate education and experience. For these reasons, graduate student attendance at department colloquia is strongly urged.