Criteria, Performance Expectations, and Department Procedures Relating to Faculty Excellence Awards

Excellence awards in Teaching/University Service are meant to recognize and reward extraordinary accomplishments or initiatives in these areas, especially those accomplishments that go beyond routine job performance.  Typical teaching/service activities include advising, mentoring, writing letters of recommendation, performing peer reviews, serving on committees, preparing routine course materials, performing the daily functions of an administrative job for which there is a workload equivalency, and so on.  Such activities ought to be reported only if the quantity and/or quality of such duties may be shown to be extraordinary.

Faculty may stand for consideration in one of three ways:  1) teaching alone; 2) University service alone; 3) both teaching and University service.  Strong, accomplishments in both subsets shall rank higher than accomplishment in only one, and neither teaching nor service shall be ranked, in themselves, above the other.  In other words, distinguished administrative work will not be ranked above distinguished teaching, or vice versa.

For all faculty being considered for excellence in Teaching/University service, the bulleted sheet must list, by semester, courses taught and numbers of students enrolled and Section Means and Norms for the Total of Instructor Items 7-16.  It must also list, by semester, each administrative assignment for which release time equivalent to one course was granted and any other circumstances for which a workload equivalent was granted (i.e., dissertation direction, new faculty load lift).  SSI summary sheets for all courses taught must accompany requests for merit consideration in teaching.

The bulleted sheet should itemize specific accomplishments in teaching and/or University service.  Faculty wishing to be considered in both subsets should blend items into one list.  Point values for accomplishments in teaching and service will be assigned following the table in below.  Only documented accomplishments will be considered.  Documentation should be kept brief yet provide sufficient information by which the Committee may evaluate the accomplishment.  In most instances, one or two pages per item (a syllabus, an award, an implemented proposal, etc.) should be adequate.

Point system for teaching and service merit

SSIs:

Meeting or beating the norm                          1 per section

Scoring a 4 or higher                                       ½ per section

No norm to compare                                       1

Other teaching

Teaching Award or Grant                               2-4

Independent Studies                                       1/3

New Course                                                    1

New Prep                                                        1/3

Student Projects

Thesis or Dissertation Director                       1 

Thesis or Dissertation Reader                        1/3 

Qualifying Exams                                           1/3 

Honors Thesis/UG Portfolio director             1 

Portfolio Reader                                             1/4

TESL Portfolio                                               1/4

Student Successes

Student publication                                         1

Student conference                                         ½ - 1

Other student successes                                  ½ - 1

Committee work

Major Non-departmental Committee Work   1 per year

FAC                                                                1 per year

CAC rep                                                          1 per year

Chair, Dept Committee                                   1 per year

Chair, Search Committee                                1 ½ - 2

Member, Search Committee                           1

Program Chair or Coordinator                        1 per year

DuBois, Engleman, Zurava Award judge      1/3

Other

Consultant                                                       1/3 - 1

Bringing in speakers                                       ½ per speaker

Outreach activities                                          1/3 - 1

* Teaching-Related Activities and Publications  [these will be considered on a case-by-case basis and only if the applicant has not listed the activity on the “Scholarship”application]

Teaching a workshop                                                  ½ - 1

Participating as a speaker in a workshop                    1/3

Publication                                                                  same as scholarship merit points

Conference presentation                                            same as scholarship merit points

Faculty Excellence Awards in Scholarship are designed to reward faculty productivity as marked by accomplishment and recognition, that is, primarily, publications, external grants, professional presentations, and honors relating to research.  To be considered for an award, the reported research must have been published (or performed, in the case of presentations) during the announced period.  Research in press at the cut-off date may not be counted.

The goal is to reward excellence in quality as well as quantity.  That faculty disseminate their scholarship through refereed channels and by means of recognized presses of national or international standing is the expected standard.  It is recognized that scholars publish by invitation as well, and that invitations are a mark of one’s reputation in the profession.  Invited publications shall be equated with refereed publications provided that the press or venue is one of established, refereed quality.

Products that are self-published are not eligible for consideration.  Products appearing in presses or other venues that accept submissions without close editorial and/or peer review, or which are obscure, ephemeral, or local in range shall not receive equal merit consideration beside products of similar type published by internationally or nationally regarded presses or venues.  Internet-based publishing shall be judged by the same standards of academic integrity.

No specific subjects or specializations shall be ranked, in themselves, above others, so long as each is legitimately within the purview and mission of the English Department, that is, for example, theory will not be placed above pedagogy; literary criticism will not be ranked above creative writing; work in Victorian culture will not be ranked above work in composition/rhetoric/linguistics; and so on.

The following five tiers shall function as guidelines for enumerating and ranking accomplishments in research.  In recognition of the fact that a tiering system may not always reflect the range and quality of individual products, the Ad hoc Faculty Excellence Awards Committee shall use the system as guidelines of norms, but may, at its discretion, rank items higher or lower than their putative tiers, according to the standards of excellence outlined above.

1^st TIER: single-author books; critical editions; novels; books of poetry or short stories; book-length translations; other publications 200+ pp.; awarded external grants; licensed software

2^nd TIER: multiple-author books; edited collections; monographs; bibliographies; concordances; anthologies; textbooks; technical reports; executive editorship of critical editions; other publications 100-199 pp.

3^rd TIER: awards or prizes for research excellence; journal or book series editorships; noncritical editions; book chapters; articles; proceedings articles; short stories; longer poetry or chapbooks; other publications 10-99 pp.; reprinted books; external grant proposals; plenary talks; videos

4^th TIER: notes; individual poems; encyclopedia entries; review articles; book reviews; columns; essays; indices; abstracts; other publications 1-9 pp.; reprinted book chapters; reprinted articles; refereed conference talks; invited talks; invited poetry or fiction readings; conference organization

5^th TIER: invited panel participations; public interviews; conference service; reviewer for journals or publishers; external/internal reviews for grants and scholarly prizes; editorial boards; offices held in national or regional professional organizations; professional consulting; reprinted poems; published external reviews or media publicity of scholarship

Point values for accomplishments in research listed above will be assigned following the table below.  Only documented accomplishments shall be considered.  Each publication or authored grant proposal listed on the bulleted sheet should be accompanied by the actual product.  Documentation of other accomplishments need be only one page for each (a conference program, citation of an honor, etc.).

Graduate Faculty Status Research Points

Coauthored publications and grants will be valued according to the following scale, except in those cases when the value or contribution to scholarship are argued to be higher: 2 authors at  100% of point value each; 3 authors at 75% each; 4 authors at 66% each; 5 or more at 50% each. Currently enrolled Kent State University graduate student participation in collaborative research will not be counted in the above breakdowns.