5.1 Faculty Evaluation Procedure Summary

Governing Policies

Section 7, Faculty Handbook – Performance and Evaluation

Procedure

As defined in the Faculty Handbook, annual performance evaluation is required for all tenured and tenure track faculty, all teaching faculty, all library faculty, and all research faculty holding a named rank. Annual evaluation of the faculty is undertaken in order to

  1. Encourage professional development, enhancement, and/or renewal;
  2. Encourage individual excellence and achievement within a framework of shared and accepted standards of equitable professional judgment;
  3. Encourage participation in activities that are essential to the missions and goals of the university and its departments;
  4. Recognize individuals for providing satisfactory or better performance, or to give appropriate counsel to those individuals whose performance is unsatisfactory through a motivational, rather than demoralizing process;
  5. Document performance: (a) for use in academic planning, programmatic review, and other internal activities, (b) for consideration, along with other pertinent information, in personnel decisions regarding salary, retention, promotion, and/or tenure, and (c) for use in preparing university documents for external reports.
  6. Set individual faculty goals.

Annually, all faculty members defined above must complete a Faculty Evaluation form in OnBase. The schedule for completing the OnBase Evaluation form is provided by Academic Affairs as part of the Academic Affairs Calendar. Typically, the completion date by which faculty must submit the evaluation form to their Department Heads is during the early portion of the Spring semester. Faculty are assessed on scholarship, teaching, and service, as outlined in Section 5.2.

Instructions and resources for completing the Faculty Evaluation form in OnBase are available online on the Academic Affairs website. Note that Institutional Research (IR), working with Departments, portfolios, and individual faculty, will provide and verify institutional data (e.g., courses taught, enrollment, student evaluations, students advised, students graduated, research funding) for each faculty member from which the narrative is to be constructed. This is called the Faculty Data Sheet and is the only required attachment in the OnBase Evaluation form for all faculty. For research-active faculty, a list of archival publications and external presentations must also be attached to the Scholarship section. Faculty are also evaluated by students in their classes; the student evaluation scores and comments are provided to the faculty member and department head. 

The Department Head instructions and resources for the Faculty Evaluation Process in OnBase can also be found online on the Academic Affairs website. As detailed in the evaluation process instructions, Department Heads submit their draft evaluation of their faculty to their respective Dean for review and approval via OnBase. Once the Dean has reviewed and approved the faculty evaluations, they will return them to the Department Head queue in OnBase. The Department Heads then meet with and finalize the evaluation with each faculty member. All signatures are electronic in the OnBase form. The faculty member has seven days to electronically sign the evaluation form before it gets automatically forwarded onto the Department Head for their signature. The faculty member has the ability to submit a rebuttal by attaching it in OnBase during the signature process. Deans shall advise the Provost of any faculty who receives overall evaluations of “needs improvement” or “unsatisfactory.”

Last Revision

July 21, 2022