If you haven’t resolved your complaint through stages 1 and 2, you can submit a stage 3 complaint. This is a formal, written request for resolution and involves a formal investigation by complaints officers with no previous involvement in your complaint.

How to submit a formal complaint

You’ll need to submit your formal complaint within six months of the issue (and as soon as possible after trying to resolve it through stages 1 and 2). If your complaint relates to a unit taught for a period longer than six months, you must submit it within six months of the event, or four weeks from the release of results for that unit, whichever comes later.

How you submit a formal complaint depends on the area it concerns.

Support and advice

You may want to get some support and advice from your student association to help you prepare a formal complaint – they can give you advice that’s confidential and independent of the University. Go to student advocacy and support for details.

If you’re a Monash Malaysia student, go to Student Advisory and Support service.

Confidentiality

Your complaint is confidential. A staff member can only discuss it with someone:

• assisting in the investigation
• providing information or advice relevant to the investigation
• implementing the decision or
• correcting a systemic issue in the investigation.

A staff member may be required to disclose information to prevent a serious threat to life, health, safety or welfare, or to comply with reporting regulations.

Anonymous complaints

You can choose to submit a complaint anonymously, but that does limit our ability to investigate the issue, verify all facts and offer a resolution.

Our student complaint policies and procedures don’t automatically apply to anonymous complaints, so we can only investigate your complaint if:

• it relates to University operations or policy in a general way
• documentary evidence supports your complaint (and can be independently verified) and
• the subject of the complaint doesn’t need to know your identity in order to respond.

What happens next?

Here’s what to expect after you submit a stage 3 formal complaint.

Within five working days

You’ll receive an email confirming that we’ve received your complaint.

Within 10 working days

We’ll start a formal investigation of your complaint and let you know if we need more information.

If we can’t investigate your complaint, we’ll let you know why not and what you need to do next.

Within 20 working days

We’ll email you the outcome of our investigation. You’ll then have 10 working days to accept or decline our recommendations – if you accept them, we’ll act on them immediately.

If the investigation is taking longer than expected, we’ll update you on when we might reach an outcome.