Hōkai was built to support our existing Ethics policies and practices, so the application process will operate in the same way. There are differences in Hōkai's system flow that change how student applications get submitted. The application forms ask the same questions in the same order, but some text and numbering have been updated.

Application Sign Off

In Hōkai, only a Principal Investigator can submit an ethics application. This means that submitting an application works differently for Masters/Hons and PhD research.

Masters and Honours students add their Supervisor as the Principal Investigator on their application.

The supervisor will submit the application when it is ready to go to the Ethics team for review.

PhD students act as the Principal Investigator for their application. PhDs add their supervisor as the Supervisor (for PhD Principal Investigator).

PhD students are responsible for making sure their supervisor reviews the application before it is submitted.

The next page shows more detail about how this works.

Feedback on draft applications

You can review all draft applications you are associated with in Hōkai.

PhD applications will automatically grant you View only status to review/download the application. The student can grant you edit rights should you wish to edit the application.
Masters and Honours applications will automatically grant you Edit access as the Principal Investigator.
Comments: Want to comment on certain form sections or questions? You can download the draft application and all supporting documents. The application downloads a Word and PDF version of the draft form. Hōkai allows most document types and images to be uploaded as supporting documents. In ResearchMaster, some Supervisors used a comment box inside the draft form. In Hōkai, there is no comment feature inside the form.

Updated Application Form

Frequent reviewers will notice some updates to the Human Ethics application form. The Human Ethics team and Human Ethics Committee used this project window to improve how we phrase some of the questions we ask on the form.

You may also notice that the question numbering on our forms is slightly different. Keep in mind that the same questions appear in the exact same order on the old and new forms.

We are keen for applicants to be well supported to understand what the Committee needs to know about their research. Work to improve the Human Ethics application process is ongoing, and more substantive improvements are planned as part of the Human Ethics Policy Review over 2024 and 2025.