Tag Archives: evaluations

Dec. 2012 Executive Committee Meeting Minutes

Meeting Minutes from 12/7/12 Executive Committee Meeting

(more or less in order of importance)

 

 

Course evaluations: They are happening!

  • We’ve worked on a number of drafts of the evaluations, getting lots of feedback from various faculty
  • The goal is to collect information that will be valuable primarily to students in choosing classes, but also helpful to the EO and faculty
  • There will be evaluations for this past Fall semester, which will be used as somewhat of a trial run to see how well the designed evaluation works, collect preliminary data, etc.
  • The current plan is that the results will be available online, potentially on the Political Science Student Representation website
  • Fall 2012 Course Evaluations were sent out to the student listserv last Friday, and by Margaret earlier today. The link is here.

 

New Fellowship program: will go into effect for incoming Fall 2013 class

  • A fixed number of students: 12, all of whom will receive funding
    • 9 “GC Fellowships”
      • expectation to be full-time students
      • 3 Tuition-only fellowships
        • directed to incoming students who have full-time jobs and/or other sources of funding
      • There was much debate about whether 12 is an absolute cap
        • President’s office and Provost’s Office say yes
        • Questions about whether we could add more if there weren’t fellowships attached, or if there was other money in one way or another
        • If there’s going to be any effort to admit more than 12, it will be on an individual, concrete case-by-case basis
          • More-or-less a consensus among the faculty on not wanting to make hypothetical challenge/request for flexibility
      • Our department has been at the 12 number give or take a few for the past couple of years
  • Process/logistics
    • The GC Fellowships will be a $25,000/year stipend, with NYSHIP, for a 1/1 teaching load (probably can be adjusted to a 0/2 or 2/0 depending on student and campus needs on a case by case basis)
      • Will probably be able to “bank” up to one year leave of absence
      • The Admissions Committee will be ranking all candidates and go down the ranked list to fill the 12 spots
        • MA students applying to the PhD program will apply like everyone else, and will essentially be like “new” people in the applicant pool
      • Will not lose department Grad B’s
      • There will be money (unclear from where?) provided to campuses to hire more adjuncts
      • MA programs will be used to “fill bodies in classes”
  • Concerns and Criticisms
    • Some departments (especially Sociology) has voiced concerns about the cap on the number of students
      • Especially if there is money at the department level to support more students
      • Concern that this will lessen the number of minority students
      • Possibility that this will make it more difficult for international students given visa-related and other restrictions they may be facing
  • We raised the (in our minds completely legitimate) concerns that many of you have voiced regarding the inequities that this creates: in addition to the current funded/no-funded stratification, there will now be another stratification where incoming students will be receiving $7,000/year more than current ECFs for half the work/year, not to mention the inequality created between incoming funded students and people without ECFs. The response was unsympathetic. The common responses included that this benefits us all in the long-run (reasoning: better students and a better reputation) and that isn’t a matter of great concern.
  • From the administration’s perspective, this is  a done deal in all regards.

 

Moving forward: this spring, EO wants to discuss the possibility of more strictly capping enrollment in courses

  • Concerns include too many students in some classes, too many students from other programs, too many MALS students
    • Possibility that non-political science students would have to “apply” to take (all?) (some)? POLSC classes
  • One potential problem is that if the department was to limit the number of non-political science students in POLSC classes, it might make it more difficult for us to enroll in non-POLSC classes.
  • Stay tuned…

 

Archiving of select dissertation proposals: per a request from the DSC, the department will (soon?) be implementing an online archive of select dissertation proposals

  • In attempt to collect only the “good” ones, this will be a decision made by each student’s committee at the send of the Second Exam
  • There was also discussion of adding a central database of titles of those currently working on dissertation
    • Perhaps they get added after passing Second Exam?
    • How to systematically collect for people who have already passed Second Exam?

 

Student Satisfaction Survey

  • We received results from the GC-wide student survey from this past Spring
  • EO and other faculty understood the data very positively (and there are some things to be positive about)
  • Also much to be concerned about in the report, which we plan to bring up at future meetings (discussion was cut off due to time constraints)
  • Data to be used in future professional development workshops and other areas
  • Still a question how public this data is going to be made – our hope is that at the very least all students have access to it
  • EO wants the raw data so that further, more refined analysis can be done to it

 

Career Development Office: A new Career Development Office will be opening in February

  • Will centralize letter-writing services (as opposed to using Interfolio)
  • May help with workshops on the departmental level 

 

Budget: Effect of Hurricane Sandy on budget is unclear

 

 

 

Update on student evaluations for department classes (addition to Exec Committee minutes)

Joe was very enthusiastic, both at the Exec Committee and in a separate meeting about this yesterday, and most of the other faculty were enthusiastic as well. The hope at this point is to have evaluations in place for classes at the end of this semester, with perhaps some tinkering to be done before a more final system is in place for the spring semester.

We expect this will be an online system. The reasons for doing this are multiple – easier data collection, no need to rely on individual professors to actually go through with paper evaluations, etc. There will be some details for us to work out with Joe before we confirm it will be online, so there’s still a chance we’ll end up doing paper evals.

Our expectation regarding access to the results is this: all students will have access to the numerical data resulting from the evaluations; the EO and the faculty member (as well as potentially the DEO) will be the only ones with access to the written comments – this is probably necessary to get some faculty on the Exec Committee to agree with it, which we will need.

Joanna, Aleta, and I will be putting together a more formal proposal and draft evaluation for the next Executive Committee meeting (either October or November).

For now, we would like your input on 1) questions – for both the numerical and written response components of the evaluation – that you would like to see on evaluations for courses and 2) any general thoughts/suggestions you have. Please feel free to either discuss on the list or email jointly myself, Joanna, and Aleta off-list if you prefer.