Minutes
Auburn University Steering Committee
Thursday, December 4, 2014
013 Samford Hall
Submitted by Laura Plexico, Secretary-Elect

Present: Chair Patricia Duffy, Chair-Elect Larry Teeter, Immediate Past Chair Larry Crowley, Secretary-Elect Laura Plexico, Emily Myers, Mike Baginski, Sara Wolf, Emmett Winn, Yasser Gowayed, Drew Clark, Constance Relihan
Absent: Secretary Gisela Buschle-Diller, Kevin Yost

The meeting convened at 3:30 p.m.

The first business following approval of the minutes was a discussion of the revision to repeat policy from academic standards. Due to concern over failure rates in calculus courses, the DFW rates in Math 1610 and 1620 were evaluated for whether student success could impacted by 1) whether the instructor was TT or NTT and 2) whether GTAs were native English Speaker or spoke English as a second language. Based on the data provided, student success rates did not appear to be impacted by TT status and whether the Instructor was a Native English speaker. Constance Relihan provided information on the proposed DFW policy which will impact students who do not pass a course twice and wish to take it a third time. Repeating a course for a third time will require Dean approval. Purpose of this policy is to encourage student advising and career counseling to those students with repeated failures. Larry Crowley expressed that he was concerned that this policy may be punitive to some students and have unintended consequences. Specifically, he was concerned that the repeated failures may be a result of inadequate teaching by inadequately prepared GTAS, might result in a loss of student credit hours to other Universities or Colleges, or that students may opt to take fewer credit hours thus delaying their progress towards a degree and graduation. After discussion it was decided that this policy will be brought to the January senate meeting from Academic Standards and will be presented as a pending action item.

The next item of business was discussion of point number 7 in the Provost’s Administrator Review Guidelines:

In addition to the three to five year review cycle detailed above, annual surveys of faculty, staff, and administrative professional concerning departmental and college/school administrative leadership will become a mandatory component in preparation for the annual review process. This survey will replace the current Administrator Evaluation survey of deans, heads, and chairs conducted by the Senate Administrator Evaluation Committee
.

Patricia Duffy tasked the Administrator Evaluation committee with fixing the inconsistency between the current policy and current practice as it relates to item 7. Specifically, they were asked to consider whether annual evaluations are necessary and what guidelines need to be put in place if annual administrator evaluations are going to be completed.  Yasser indicated that the administrator evaluation committee is not in full support of annual evaluations and have concerns that need to be addressed if guidelines for this existing policy are to be developed. First, How would the committee handle comments and anonymity? Second, How do they encourage faculty participation and communicate back to the faculty that the results are used and their feedback is values? Finally, How do they make the process robust? The committee wants to avoid collecting information that is not going to be used effectively. There was some discussion concerning the merits of providing the annual evaluations to the committees conducting the summative reviews (3 to 5 year reviews).

 
Drew Clark said his office had assisted the Administrator Evaluation Committee in previous years and would be able to take on responsibility for administering periodic surveys on the committee’s behalf. Provided that these surveys are standardized in form and population being surveyed and that they remain reasonably stable over time, it would be possible to summarize their results for use by the special committees convened to conduct summative reviews of the same individuals every 3-5 years. Currently, those special committees are requesting assistance from his office with their own surveys, which vary considerably from time to time in population surveyed, questions asked, and level of analysis required. Some measure of standardization—consistent with the purpose for which these formative and summative evaluations are conducted—would hold down survey costs and improve efficiency.

Steering had a lengthy discussion about Yasser’s concern over the best way to communicate to the faculty that their feedback is valuable and being used. The degree to which the numerical data should be available or provided to the faculty was debated and the way in which comments should be handled was discussed. The discussion ended with charging the administrator review committee with either developing guidelines for how annual evaluations should be conducted or whether the current policy should be revised.

The meeting was adjourned at approximately 5:00.