Principles of Scholarship Selection

The governing principle for award of postgraduate research scholarships, such as Australian Postgraduate Awards (APA) and Monash Graduate Scholarships (MGS), is academic merit and research potential.
MGS and APA will be offered only to applicants proposing to undertake a PhD, Professional Doctorate or Masters by research. (Note that for Masters students, the research component must be 66% or more.)
Students proposing to undertake a research degree by external mode are not eligible for these awards. An APA award may be made available for enrolment as a research candidate under Monash's external mode regulations, however the support of the relevant academic unit and faculty will be required.

Faculty provisional allocation of scholarships will be based on the government's Research Training Scheme allocation formula for domestic places and takes into account the relative success of faculties in attracting international students to research degree programs. For details see Method of Allocation of the 70% & 30% Quotas to Faculties.
Seventy per cent of the provisional allocation of awards will be distributed to faculties on the basis of this formula and will be notified before selection begins.

The remaining thirty per cent of awards will be allocated by reference to the relative strength of each faculty's Order of Merit List (after subtracting those who have already been accommodated within the initial 70 per cent provisional allocation).

Non H1 applicants will not be offered awards while H1 applicants remain without offer.

Before faculty rank orders are finalised, faculty ranked applicants deemed to be of H1 equivalence will be subject to review by a central H1 Equivalence Panel to ascertain their eligibility.

Faculties will be authorised to pre-offer up to 20% of their faculty provisional allocation (or one scholarship for those faculties with less than five scholarships) between 1 July and 9 November, providing applicants so nominated meet selection criteria. Tuition awards cannot be pre-offered.

Neither faculty quotas nor rankings will be varied by the Central Selection Sub-Committee without prior reference to the faculty concerned.

Applicants should only be ranked by departments/faculties if the resources and the facilities required for the research project are available in the relevant academic unit.

An over-offer of approximately 17% of first round offers will operate with no second-round offers unless the initial acceptance rate falls below the notional level. A reserve list will be drawn up in the event that this occurs.

From 2010 an open mid-year scholarship round will operate. 80% of available scholarships will be offered at the end of year scholarship round and 20% will be offered at mid-year. The proportion of scholarships reserved for both rounds will be reviewed on a yearly basis. A similar timetable will operate for the mid-year scholarship round: applications will close at the end of May and results notified in mid-July. The selection for mid-year will be the same as the end of year round: scholarship allocation formulas will be used, an over-offer will be made and a reserve list will be drawn up.