MINUTES OF THE MEETING PAGE

5

OF THE FACULTY SENATE FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Vice Provost Teresa LaGrange commented that it is not the number of respondents that determines whether the report will be generated or not; it is the number of students enrolled. Professor Fodor remarked that it does happen that the report does not report what the department chair would see; the faculty department chair that teaches that class would have access to that data.

Dr. Sridhar stated that again, these kinds of issues are technical issues and we have just gone through a pretty massive roll-out across campus and it is a good idea for us to document these things and send them on to Vice Provost LaGrange’s office and make sure that those are actually acted upon before next semester’s data collection.

There being no further questions, Dr. Sridhar stated that the University Faculty Affairs Committee has proposed changes to the SEI Policy concerning campus access to SEI data and called for the vote. The proposed SEI Policy changes concerning access to SEI data were approved unanimously by voice vote.

Dr. Robichaud stated that with respect to data sharing, the sheet that everyone received is an example of the data that can be collected. It is not in the format that the data will appear. We are committed to sharing data and the policy says that we are going to do this. She would like people to keep in mind that this is a process and we will be making improvements. This is a first step toward sharing the data with the university community and the University Faculty Affairs Committee is recommending that we start by sharing the data that is associated with the two overall questions that have a possibility of five different responses and just to remind everyone that since it is not as clear as it could be on the sheet that everyone received, the overall questions are, “What is your overall evaluation of this instructor?” and secondly, “What is your overall evaluation of the course?” There are actually points that the students can work with. When UFAC looked at the possibility of sharing these data points, the first thought was perhaps only the means but then UFAC recognized that they wanted to be very clear for people to be able to understand how many students were enrolled in the class and people can see that in the far left, “Invited Count”, how many actually responded and submitted an evaluation, “Respondent Count”, and then if you like the “Response Ratio”, what percentage of your class actually completed the evaluations. Furthermore, UFAC also wanted what everyone should see over on the right hand side which is, how many students actually rated an individual instructor as excellent and their overall evaluation is excellent or below average or whatever so that the numbers would be broken out with respect to how many folks did that.

While this is not the way that it will look, UFAC will be going forward and present a couple of ways in which the data could look, and this will be the data that will be shared. She added that this is the recommendation of UFAC – that this will be the data that will be shared. Dr. Robichaud stated that UFAC’s rationale for going with this to start out with, at least is that first, it is not going to overwhelm anybody with reams and reams of data. It should be fairly straight forward for students particularly who are interested in using it. When Student Government was spoken with, they seemed pleased with getting these data for now. Dr. Robichaud pointed out that the Law College has