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Faculty Assembly

11-10-00

The Salary Oversight Committee met throughout AY 99-00 and explored the merit review practices of the various colleges and the library. Based on those discussions this document contains a brief description of the annual merit review processes of each unit and recommendations for establishing a salary oversight process.

College of Business

At the beginning of the year each faculty member completes a professional plan that addresses planned activities in the areas of teaching, research, and service. This plan is reviewed by the Department Chairs and Associate Dean. If adjustments are needed in the plan, these are discussed with the faculty member. At the end of the year each faculty member writes a short description of how the objectives of the professional plan were completed. These self evaluations, along with FCQs, and yellow sheets are evaluated by the Chairs and assigned numerical ratings on a 4 = outstanding 3 = exceeds expectations 2 = meets expectations 1 = does not meet expectations scale. The Department Chairs, Dean and Associate Deans subsequently meet to determine the final merit category of Outstanding, Exceeding expectations, Meeting expectations, and Below expectations.

Library

Each faculty member, independently, or in conjunction with their supervisor develops an annual plan covering the areas of librarianship, service and research/creative work. The evaluation process includes the following: preparing an updated vita and job description, completion of yellow sheets, statement of goals for year under evaluation, discussion of changes to goals and accomplishments of goals set during the last review. Goals for the upcoming year are also included as is a narrative evaluation of the work of each librarian completed by their supervisor.

The Technical Services Supervisor evaluates one faculty member and the Public Services Supervisor evaluates all others; at this time, that being the four Public Services librarians. These evaluations provide the basis for the usual four interval Outstanding to Below Expectations scale. The evaluation packet is forwarded to the Dean of the Library, who meets with the individual librarian and the supervisor for a final evaluation session. Based on each librarian’s rating, the Dean of the library determines a percentage of funds available for the annual merit raise.

The Technical Services Supervisor is rated by one faculty member and four staff members while the Public Services Supervisor is rated by three staff members and four faculty members. Supervisor ratings are done on 51 questions arranged on a O=not applicable, 1=strongly disagree, 2disagree, 3=somewhat disagree, 4somewhat agree, 5=agree, and 6 =strongly agree scale. The Library Dean completes the final evaluation for each of the supervisors and determines their merit raises based on the rating and percentage of funds available as for the other librarians.

EAS

Each faculty member is initially evaluated by the chairperson on the standard four point outstanding to not meeting expectations scale. The inputs used by the chairs are generally the FCQ data and the annual report or professional plan update. No rank ordering is provided. The faculty member may appeal this rating to the college grievance committee. Based on his ratings, the chair (ECE uses a 4 person committee to advise the chair, but there is not advisory mechanism in other departments) recommends raises to the Dean who makes the final determination of the amount awarded. In the past, the only information available to the faculty member is his/her regentially approved raise, and that is not made available until after the regents have approved the amount. To the committee’s knowledge, no department has ever provided comprehensive lists of raises with corresponding ratings. Moreover, the average amount of the pool available for raises has not always been divulged.

LAS

Each faculty member submits a self evaluation, yellow sheets, and FCQ5 to the department chair. All of these initial evaluations are done on a 4=outstanding, 3=exceeding expectations, 2=meeting expectations, and l=below expectations scale. These evaluations then go to the Dean’s Review Committee who can, and usually does, change them. Generally, the final evaluation is an average of the Chair and Dean’s Review Committee ratings. However, the Dean can and does change final evaluations. Faculty are then placed in the usual categories of outstanding to below expectations. However, the correspondence between the initial self and chair numeric ratings and descriptive categories of outstanding to below expectations is changed for the final evaluation. For example in 1997 outstanding=4.O-3.8, exceeding expectations=3.77-3.5, meeting expectations=3.46-2.86, and below 2.86=below expectations.

Education

Each faculty member submits a self evaluation, yellow sheets, FCQs, and statement of goals to their Program Area Coordinators. The Program Area Coordinators "review," but do not evaluate, these materials. Final ratings are assigned by the Dean on a one to five scale where 1=poor, 2=below average, 3=average, 4=clearly above average, and 5=excellent.

Beth El College of Nursing and Health Sciences

Each full time faculty member submits a self evaluation form. The form includes evaluation sections on teaching Research/Scholarly and Creative Work, and University and Community Service. The form utilizes a four point system (Outstanding, exceeding Expectations, Meeting Expectations, Below Expectations). Faculty who have independent faculty clinical practice are encouraged to include their activities under these sections or add one. Administrative faculty are encouraged to list their administrative role separate, or under service. The faculty is encouraged to document their evaluations and goal attainments with FCQ and Peer Evaluations, their Personal Performance Plans/Goals/Activity Fornr and other quantitative/qualitative data. This self-evaluation form is submitted to the department chair, who also completes a Merit Evaluation Form on each faculty. The Department Chair has all the original FCQ repots.

The Faculty Self-Evaluation and Chairperson Merit Evaluation Forms are then submitted to the Dean’s Review Committees (one fvr tenure track faculty, and one for non-tenure track faculty). The Committees then rank the faculty on a scale of one to four (e.g. 3.5) and rank order the list. The lists are then submitted to the Dean. The Dean reviews the materials and makes the final decision. The Dean must also use merit money to balance salary inequities, which is evaluated at this time.

Recommended Changes In College Evaluation Practices

In order to implement meaningful salary oversight we need some uniformity across colleges. That uniformity comes best in the utilizing the same four point "outstanding" to "below expectations" scale. Four problems are apparent. First, the scale currently used by the College of Education might be in violation of the CU policy on post tenure review. Specifically, it does not contain the rating of "below expectations" which is used to trigger the extensive post tenure review process. Secondly, while the numerical descriptors of outstanding, exceeding expectations, meeting expectations, and below expectations do not need to be uniform across colleges they need to be uniform across stages of the evaluation process. In LAS, for example, a chair might think they are giving close to an "exceeding expectations" rating when the shifted final scale will place the faculty member in the below expectations category. Thirdly, every faculty member should receive numerical ratings from more than one source. Some members of the committee felt that the College of Education practice of leaving the entire evaluation up to the Dean failed to provide any protection against a pernicious Dean. Finally, with the exception of the Business College, the review processes in all other colleges attempt to make fine distinctions in awarding raises that lack rational validity. The committee thought it best to focus on rewarding the vast majority of the faculty with cost of living plus merit, and those few faculty with outstanding performances for the year with exceptional raises.

Recommended Review Process

All colleges’ annual merit awards need to be reviewed in two areas. First, the relationship between merit ratings and both absolute dollar increases and percentage increases need to be examined. Lack of correspondence between merit ratings and compensation increases would likely be considered problematic and need to be examined more closely by the VCAA and Salary Oversight Committee. Second, the consistency of the merit ratings/rankings need to be examined across the levels of the evaluation process within each college. While it would be understandable that a given faculty member’s ratings will differ between Chair and Dean, and in the case of LAS-- the Dean’s Review Committee, the VCAA and Salary Oversight Committee should further examine large shifts in the comparative rankings of faculty members. For example, Chairs might tend to be overly generous in their ratings and therefore it would not be unusual to see across the board reductions in those evaluations. What would be more closely examined is when the rank ordering of faculty by chairs is reversed at another level of the merit review process. When such reversals take place the VCAA and the Salary Oversight Committee will ask for a written explanation of the reversal.

In order to implement salary oversight all colleges need to use some standardized spreadsheet software (e.g. Excel) to report to Institutional Research the annual tracking of the college’s evaluation process. Each years tracking will be warehoused by Institutional Research. Data contained in the spreadsheet would include the faculty member’s name, rank, department, self evaluations, Chair evaluations, Dean evaluations, and for LAS, the Dean’s Review Committee evaluations for teaching/librarianship, research/creative work, and service. Proportion of weight given to each of the three evaluation areas will be reported for each faculty member. Compensation data to be included in the spreadsheet would at minimum include the percentage raise, absolute dollar raise, and absolute dollar amounts for any unit merit, extraordinary merit, salary correction, promotional raises and other compensation. Any written rationales for extraordinary merit, salary correction, and other compensation would be welcomed. All data for the previous year merit review process will be due in Institutional Research by August 15th of the following year.