National Research Council (NRC)
Assessment of Research Doctorate
Programs
Faculty Questionnaire Tip Sheet
January 2007
The NRC Assessment of Research Doctorate Programs is an effort to help universities improve the quality of their doctoral programs through benchmarking; providing potential students and the public with accessible, readily available information on doctoral programs nationwide; and enhance the nation's overall research capacity. The National Research Council conducted other assessments that were published in 1982 and 1995. Additional information about the NRC Assessment is available at www7.nationalacademies.org/resdoc/index.html.
Logistics & Timing
- The Faculty Questionnaire will be an electronic survey that faculty members can access via a Web browser using a username and password supplied by NRC.
- At this point, we anticipate that faculty will receive a first notification from NRC about the faculty questionnaires in mid-January. However, we strongly encourage faculty to preview the faculty questionnaire in advance, available at www7.nationalacademies.org/resdoc/Faculty__questionnaire.doc. Faculty may also wish to polish their CVs and spend some time gathering information for inclusion in the questionnaire.
- Faculty will receive both email and U.S. Mail communications to their campus addresses, which will provide them with a unique username and password.
- The faculty questionnaire is scheduled to close on February 15, 2007 for those who wish to be included in the pool of faculty that will be sampled and asked to rate other programs in their field. Questionnaires may still be completed until April 1, 2007 and be included in the final data.
- Faculty can start the online questionnaire and then return to it as many times as they wish prior to final submission of the data.
- If a username and/or password is lost, a faculty member should contact Mathematica Policy Research (MPR), coordinator of the NRC Assessment, at NRCAssessment@mathematica-mpr.com.
Data Collected
The faculty questionnaire attempts to collect data on several points. These include: doctoral students you have advised (or committees you have served on) in the past five years; scholarly activity, publications, and awards; career path information; and demographic data.
Here are some things that might make the survey process easier:
- Be sure to have your CV available electronically, as the NRC will request that you upload it as part of the survey. NRC prefers that you upload your CV in PDF, RTF, or Word formats.
- Have your list of publications up-to-date. Humanities faculty should be prepared to report ten years of publication data. Faculty in all other fields are asked for only five years.
- The Faculty Questionnaire asks participants to attach their CV or separate document to assist the NRC in verifying their publication and career path data. NRC has not shared its process for systematically extracting faculty publication data from CVs, and we believe that it may be in the best interests of our programs' ratings for faculty to provide complete publication information within the survey itself (questions D3, D4, D5). We strongly encourage all faculty to answer thoroughly questions D3 & D5. Additionally, we advise humanities faculty to complete question D4 thoroughly (journal articles). Most STEM and social sciences faculty do not need to complete D4. ISI (http://scientific.thomson.com/mjl/) provides good publication coverage for faculty outside of the humanities, and NRC should be able to identify your publications, especially with clear answers from D1 & D2.
- When listing publications, be sure to list all names under which you may have been published in the last five years, including first and middle names or initials. Undercounts may occur if faculty do not include every possible version that their names may have appeared in print.
- Be sure to list all books and monographs you have published, as well as book chapters. Use complete, unabbreviated titles, including subtitles.
- To mitigate the effects of multiple name versions and common names, the NRC uses ZIP codes, but faculty must be diligent in reporting all ZIP codes that were listed as a contact address for publishing purposes during the past five years. The NRC does not want the publication's ZIP code, but the ZIP code that you reported in your address for that article. Additional information is available online at www.grad.uiuc.edu/nrc/facquestfaq.htm.
- The Graduate College has pre-filled several questions for you, using institutional data sources, and information provided by your
program. Detailed information about how these numbers were derived is available at
www.grad.uiuc.edu/nrc/facquestfaq.htm. These questions are:
- A1: What year did you become a faculty member at this institution.
- A2: Program name & number of doctoral dissertation committees chaired in the past five years.
- A3: Are you currently serving on graduate admissions and/or curriculum committees?
- A4/A5: Primary and secondary fields of research specialization.
- F1: List of doctoral students for whom you served as the primary dissertation advisor during the past five years. Faculty need to complete the current position, employer and address information.
- Question J1 asks faculty if they would be willing to participate in an additional questionnaire to rate other doctoral programs in their field. This is part of NRC's rating process, in which a sample of faculty will be provided with data including faculty lists and other information about a sample of programs in their field and asked to rate or rank them based upon certain characteristics. If you do not submit your faculty questionnaire by February 15, 2007, you will not be eligible for consideration for participation in this process. This questionnaire is expected sometime after April 1, 2007. Additional information is available at www7.nationalacademies.org/resdoc/FAQ.html#P361_53469.
A comprehensive list of Frequently Asked Questions is available online at www.grad.uiuc.edu/nrc/facquestfaq.htm.
