ARCS is the system that the Graduate and Professional School uses to monitor completion of Non-Course Requirements for graduate degrees. To read more about the plan for ARCS development, visit the ARCS page .

You must have a Degree Plan fully approved by the Graduate and Professional School before you will gain access to ARCS.

Go to the "My ARCS" icon in Howdy. Click on the corresponding milestone at the top of the page. The status of your request should be listed in the "Workflow Status" table.

Automated emails will be sent to the designated approver notifying them of your pending request.

A Committee Change Long Form Petition needs to be submitted in the Document Processing Submission System(DPSS) before the Milestone is submitted in ARCS. Please do not submit the milestone request until your committee is displaying correctly.

Try shortening the tentative title of the Proposal, the file name of the proposal document, and the length of the document. The Graduate and Professional School only requires the Title Page, Table of Contents, and Abstract/Introduction. If you are still having issues submitting it, please contact gradprocessing@tamu.edu.

If you have a petition currently routing through the Document Processing Submission System (DPSS) or awaiting approval by the Graduate and Professional School, you will not be able to submit the Milestone. You must wait 24 hours after the petition is approved to submit your ARCS Milestone.

Your degree plan is likely not updated with all the courses that you have taken. You can Run a Degree Evaluation to see how your registered courses fill into your degree plan. If changes need to be made, a Course Change Long Form Petition will need to be submitted in the Document Processing Submission System (DPSS).

The Thesis deadline is for submission, not approval. This submission deadline requires that the manuscript be submitted to Vireo and the Thesis/Dissertation Approval Form be approved by all committee members as well as the department. The Grad School approval is for graduation and will not be done until all revisions to the document have been approved in Vireo.

The automated processes that check Residency and Admission to Candidacy run every Sunday and Wednesday evening. Please check on Monday and Thursday morning. If it is still not completed, you can Run a Degree Evaluation  to see what the issue might be. Research hours that were graded as Incomplete do not count towards the automated process that checks for these requirements to be met. Please contact your graduate advisor and check the Graduate Catalog for further information.

If your request has not yet been approved by the first approver in the approval grid, go to the "My ARCS" icon in Howdy. Select "Change Exam" and make any changes as needed. Once your request has at least one approval, you will need to contact your committee Chair, Department, or the Grad School to make any changes

A tentative title is required (please consult with your Chair for suggestions on a title). The tentative title can be changed by any approver during the final exam/defense request and when submitting your manuscript for approval.

A public examination puts an examination announcement on the Graduate and Professional School’s website on this page. A private examination does not put an announcement on the announcement page. If it is a Private Examination, the student and committee are still allowed to invite outside observers with mutual approval from all parties.

The only requirement that the Graduate and Professional School monitors is that the proposal has a Title Page, a Table of Contents, and an Introduction/Abstract. The committee and department can have more stringent requirements for the proposal.

The Graduate and Professional School approves requests in the order that they are received.

The Graduate and Professional School allows for these milestones to be met in any order. However, individual programs are allowed to require a specific order to complete these requirements. Please check your program’s requirements.

Exams must be scheduled 10 days in advance to provide committee members with enough time to ensure that they can attend.

Exams should be scheduled within one semester of the semester that they are being taken within.

Please put the last date that the exam will be taken on the ARCS request. That date indicates when the committee has sufficient material to begin evaluating the exam and should begin grading it.

In ARCS, the Precommittee Staff Approver role is not required to sign off on the Copyright and Availability form nor the Thesis Approval Form. As a result, Precommittee Staff Approvers cannot view these documents within the ARCS system. A Compass Report in Howdy with the title of SRC_GR_CAA_MANU_RPT_FOR_XX has information about the status of Thesis and Dissertation documents for the students in your department. The last two digits are the two-character code for the College/School that your program is housed within.

1. Any faculty member who appears on the Authorized Signers Card for the academic unit as a Proxy Approver can do so on most Approvals in the Academic Requirements Completion System. They simply need to find and select the student’s milestone in the ARCS Requests – ALL box and approve from there.
2. Proposals
   • Proposals can have all roles proxied for except for the chair of the committee.
3. Preliminary and Final Exams
   • Preliminary and Final Exams allow for proxy approvals while scheduling them, but not during grading.
   • NOTE: For exam grading, an emergency substitute is the applicable method of moving the approval forward in extenuating circumstances. If a faculty member is unable to show up for an exam and an emergency substitute is needed, please contact the Graduate and Professional School.
4. Final Exam Exemptions
   • Exemptions to the Final Exam can have all roles proxied for except the chair of the committee.
5. Thesis or Dissertation Approval Form
   • Proxy Approvers can approve for the Department in the Thesis or Dissertation Approval Form.

If the faculty member has completed the required TrainTraq trainings (2111698: EIS Application Security Statement of Acknowledgement and 11012: FERPA), the faculty member should gain access to ARCS the night after the milestone is submitted that they need to complete. If they don’t, verify that they are present on the student’s committee.

1. After the scheduling of the preliminary exam has been fully approved, the Chair will be able to state the final date the exam was taken when they grade the examination. This is the preferred way to make sure that the record is correct.

If a substitute needs to be added to a Preliminary or Final Examination after the scheduling of the exam has been fully approved, please contact Graduate Records Processing at gradprocessing@tamu.edu.

The date of the final examination can be changed if we are notified before the scheduled date of the exam. Please contact Graduate Records Processing to update the date. If the date has already arrived, the exam needs to be canceled and resubmitted with the new date.

To approve a request by proxy, Proxy approvers should follow these steps:

1. Log into Howdy and Access ARCS
2. Use the search bar over the ARCS Requests (ALL) box and put the student’s name or UIN
3. Select the needed milestone that appears with the correct Role and (PROXY)
4. Approve as needed.

When approving instead of a committee member, the Proxy Approver must choose on a drop-down which committee member is being proxied for. The Proxy Approver of the student’s department can approve for all members, even ones with appointments from outside the department.

All committee members must have an active TAMU email account and nomination in GradCom. Please review pages 16-22 of the 2024 GradCom Guide for detailed information about sponsoring accounts for members not employed at the university.