supervision agreement: background and examples

The possibilty of a supervision agreement or supervision guidelines has been mentioned several times in our discussions. A recent post suggested to come up with our own proposal for supervision guidelines. Before writing a proposal, I thought it best to gather some information on the subject.

As mentioned already, the German Research Society (DFG) recommends the installation of supervision agreements. The corresponding document is here. Furthermore, the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers (DHV) takes the same position and recommends clear rules on supervision. The DHV and a German network of PhD students (THESIS) wrote a best-practice paper on PhD studies (here). It includes a number of remarkable points, including the explicit recommendation of a supervision agreement between students and advisor, fixing the baiscs of the PhD studies.

Additionally, there are a number of German universities and graduate schools that have installed supervision agreements. Among them are:

1. The Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences "Global Change in the Marine Realm" (GLOMAR): supervision agreement (english).
2. The Graduate School of Politics (GraSP-Münster): supervision agreement, pdf or doc (german).
3. The faculty of humanities at the university of Duisburg/Essen (homepage): supervision agreement here
4. Frankfurt Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences (FGS): supervision agreement (here) , and also in Frankfurt, The International Postgraduate Center Social Sciences (homepage), supervision agreement (here).
5. The Graduate School of Sociology Münster (GRASS): supervision agreement (here)
6. The Faculty for Architecture and Landscape Sciences (hompage) at the University of Hanover: supervision agreement (here)

All these documents, specifically the ones from the DFG and DHV should provide a good background for writing our own proposal of a supervision agreement / supervision guidelines.