Faculty Evaluation System

Evaluation of faculty’s performance is a very important part of any educational institution. Faculty is a type of resource and the educational institution should annually strive to determine whether the faculty resource is producing the results consistent with its vision, mission and objectives. The goals of conducting faculty evaluation are many but the common ones are to determine which faculty member has to be promoted, retained or detained and his tenure. Comparison of Static and Dynamic Faculty Role Model The major problem of this evaluation system is that it is very biased.

Therefore the main concern while developing the faculty evaluation system is to strive for objectivity. However, in developing this system, the first step is to determine the faculty role model. The standard includes three major roles of faculty which are teaching, scholarship/creativity/research and services. The next step is to weight these roles in accordance with the relative importance each has in context of the educational institution. These weightings can be static (fixed values) or dynamic (range of values).

Most of the institutions prefer dynamic weights rather than static because dynamic values are best suitable to eliminate the element of subjectivity in the evaluation. Thus dynamic weights bring more objectivity in the evaluation results. (Diamantes, 2002) Actually the evaluation is done at various levels in the institutions. These levels are peer level, administration, board of directors, students and other departments. Each level evaluates a given faculty according to their perception of the major roles the faculty should perform.

These differences in perception create inconsistency in results. Therefore, dynamic faculty role models are used so that each level in an institution assigns the weightings to each faculty’s role according to their perceived importance of these roles. The dynamic weightings are important for it provides controlled subjectivity in the evaluation. (Diamantes, 2002) Example of Faculty Evaluation System Glenville State College’s main mission is to provide students with effective teaching.

Therefore the teaching role in the evaluation system at GSC has 60% weighting while professional development has 20% and services also has 20%. Each of the three roles has further subdivisions or components representing the specific activities undertaken by the faculty. For example teaching includes the activities of instructional delivery and course design; faculty’s professional development includes pursuance of further education and publication of research work; and services includes services to students, communities etc. (Seldin, 1981)