Faculty members encouraged to participate in NRC assessment Surveys on research-doctorate programs due Feb. 15
By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor 217-244-1072; slforres@illinois.edu
Faculty members in 65 doctoral programs as well as doctoral candidates in five fields at the Urbana campus are being asked to participate in the National Research Council’s Research-Doctorate Programs survey. The UI is one of 230 institutions participating in the assessment, which the Chronicle of Higher Education called the “gold standard for rating American graduate programs.” The assessment is used by grant agencies to determine funding and as a reference tool for faculty members and graduate students. The Graduate College is leading the effort with support from the Division of Management Information and the University Office of Planning and Budgeting. The NRC conducted assessments in 1982 and 1995, and has refined the methodology based upon concerns raised by the 1995 survey. For 2007, the number of fields to be assessed has been expanded from 41 to 60 and will include nearly all of the UI’s agricultural programs as well as programs in communication, American studies, theater and kinesiology, said Richard Wheeler, dean of the Graduate College and institutional coordinator for the survey. “The survey started out as basically an arts and sciences plus engineering survey,” Wheeler said. “It was expanded this time, in large part from pressure by universities such as the UI who have strong science and agriculture programs that weren’t included in the prior surveys.” The 2007 assessment will emphasize quantitative measures of doctoral education rather than reputational rankings based solely upon peer assessments of programs’ scholarly quality, and will present program rankings as ranges rather than absolute numbers. “For statisticians, the rankings (of the 1995 and 1982 surveys) were basically meaningless because in some cases the scores were so close that there was no reliable statistical difference between them,” Wheeler said. The assessment comprises multiple questionnaires: an institutional questionnaire, which requests data on health care, collective bargaining and new programs as well as completion matrices for five racial/ethnic groups; a questionnaire for faculty members; a program questionnaire; a questionnaire for graduate students; and a rating questionnaire. The deadline for completion of the faculty questionnaires is Feb. 15. The graduate student questionnaire is an experimental initiative, which marks the first time that students have been asked to participate in the assessment. Admitted to candidacy doctoral students (that is, students who have passed qualifying exams but have yet to write their dissertations) in five fields – neuroscience, chemical engineering, English, physics and economics – will be asked to complete the online questionnaire by April 1. Also for the first time, the assessment will collect information on quality of life factors for graduate students, such as compensation, health care and living conditions. The Graduate College, with assistance from contacts in the participating units, provided the NRC with a list of about 1,500-1,600 faculty members who have chaired or served on dissertation committees. Mathematica Policy Research Inc., which is administering the questionnaires, will contact those faculty members by mail and by e-mail requesting that they complete the questionnaires. Faculty members will be asked for information such as their program affiliation, committee service, employment and educational background and their scholarly activity during the past five to 10 years, depending upon their field. Faculty members who submit their questionnaires by the Feb. 15 deadline will be eligible to participate in the ratings questionnaire, which will be administered to a random sample of faculty members from each field. Those people will rate the quality of 15-20 graduate programs on a five-point scale based upon data such as the racial/ethnic/gender diversity of the faculty, the number of PhDs conferred annually over the last five years, students’ time to degree and the percentage of students placed in academic positions. Faculty members who respond to the faculty questionnaire after Feb. 15 will have their data included in the assessment but will not be eligible to participate in the ratings assessment. Programs such as library and information science, nuclear engineering and urban and regional planning are identified as “emerging fields” for the 2007 assessment, and are not eligible to participate in the faculty questionnaire and will not be rated. Staff members in the Graduate College, who completed the institutional questionnaire and are entering data into most of the fields on the program questionnaire prior to its being sent to the units, are hoping for a high level of participation by faculty members. “We really are making it as easy as we possibly can for everyone,” Wheeler said. “It’s very important that faculty members fill out their surveys and return them. It will affect the rating that the UI’s graduate programs receive and the quality of data available for the study.” The NRC, which expects to collect data from more than 90,000 faculty members nationwide, will report the results through a public, online, searchable database sometime during 2007. Additional information is available on the Graduate College’s Web site, at www.grad.uiuc.edu/nrc, or by e-mail, gradnrcsuvey@illinois.edu.
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