A Developmental Approach to Graduate Education Review: A New Take on a Traditional Process

In this article we describe the Graduate Review and Improvement Process (GRIP), an innovative evaluation process that makes student input central, now beginning its fifth year of implementation at the University of Minnesota. We begin by contrasting GRIP with traditional graduate program review, and we then explain the conceptual underpinnings of action research and developmental evaluation. We next explain how the process began and evolved from 2011 to the present, including discussion of the perceived benefits that participants reported. The article concludes with four challenges to this process: resources, changing leadership, turnover, and faculty engagement.