Guidelines for Faculty Performance Reviews

This Addendum is specific to the SYDE Annual Performance Review for faculty members and supplements the Faculty of Engineering Guidelines for Annual Performance Reviews. In the event of a conflict between the terms of the Faculty Guidelines and this Addendum, the Faculty Guidelines shall take precedence.

Performance evaluations shall occur on an annual basis for faculty members holding probationary or definite-team appointments, and on a biennial basis, in Winter of odd numbered years for the prior two-years, for faculty members holding tenured or permanent appointments (Article 13.5.2(a) of Memorandum of Agreement).

This Addendum is a living document that will be presented and reviewed by the department in the Fall of even years. Note that these current guidelines will apply for work starting in 2025 and will not be applied retroactively to work in 2024 and earlier when SYDE was without an addendum and followed only the Faculty guidelines.

The merit committee recognizes overlap between the three components of faculty roles: teaching, scholarship and service. Some items may fit and even be reported in more than one category but may not be double counted.

Awards (internal or external) may be listed in any appropriate section and are considered by the committee. If the award needs description is should be provided.

1. Assessment of Teaching Component

The committee does a holistic evaluation of the diverse portfolio of teaching contributions unique to every faculty member.

Classroom Courses:

• The assessment of teaching performance may include teaching quality metrics such as, but not limited to, student or peer assessments or other measures provided by the faculty member (including faculty-initiated formal or informal surveys or observations).
• Assessment can also include course development activities (maybe new course, or course components, or material new to you). Implementation of innovative teaching methodologies may be documented.
• Attending workshops on teaching techniques at UW and beyond, professional development for classroom teaching or advising may be included in the assessment.
• Unsatisfactory metrics across the majority of courses taught in the 3-year window could result in an unsatisfactory merit score.

HQP and Graduate Student Supervision:

• The committee recognizes that the number of HQP varies based on type of research and type of funding.
• For tenured and tenure-track faculty, assessment will include the number of graduate students supervised, with the expectation that satisfactory performance is normally supervision or co-supervision of 3 or more graduate students or postdoctoral fellows for each tenured faculty member in the evaluation period. Evidence of quality graduate advising can be included as well as strategy used to manage particularly large groups.
• Professional development for advising skills can be documented

Special Circumstances

• For faculty members who choose to teach in excess of the normal Department teaching load, the expectations for graduate and undergraduate student supervision will be reduced. Such workload arrangements are determined in advance of the calendar year in writing with the Department Chair.
• Some teaching related activities are documented in Assessment of Service Component:
• Active mentoring of colleagues’ teaching,
• Service as class professor (not a teaching task but still teaching),
• Undergraduate Advising
• Final-year design project supervision (indicate level of involvement)
• Supervision of undergraduate research assistants or co-op students
• Assessment may also include pedagogical research for faculty with 0% merit weighting for scholarship/research. Pedagogical research may also be reported under scholarship but should not be duplicated.
• In general, a minimum of 1 capstone team advised (in any department) every 2 years is expected. Since this is student-invited, faculty without capstone advising can indicate other undergrad advising such as USRAs and coops.

2. Assessment of Scholarship/Research Component

The department is guided by the definition of Scholarship in Policy 77 where scholarship may take several forms and where the accessibility of the scholarship outcomes and peer review and professional adjudication are essential elements of dissemination.

• Documentation of knowledge mobilization in the form of peer-reviewed/adjudicated publications, conference presentations, technical reports, keynote talks and other means is assessed in terms of both quality and quantity. Many measures of quality may be relied upon. A lack of research/scholarship dissemination for 3 years would be considered unsatisfactory.
• Open access contributions to the field such as datasets, standards, software and infrastructure can be listed. Metrics of use or downloads will be helpful. Provide DOIs when available.
• Measures of impact for scholarship contributions such as industry, standards, policy or exhibitions can be provided.
• The department does not rank journals or conferences due to the diverse interdisciplinary elements of scholarship. Faculty may provide measures of journal quality and/or the conventions used within their field for the evaluation of scholarship.
• Indication of one’s contribution to multiple-authored work is highly recommended.
• While patents are recognized as measuring research contributions, consulting, commercialization, and business development are not.
• Co-authorship of grant applications (successful or not) are considered by the merit committee when evaluating scholarship. One’s contribution to proposal writing can be noted.

3. Assessment of Service Component

Both external and internal service are very important parts of the faculty contributions. Service roles vary significantly across individuals and the committee is looking for balance. A faculty member’s service should be both internal service to the university and external service the professional community. External service does not excuse internal service.

Service roles vary significantly in level of effort required. Therefore, documentation of service activities should indicate approximate number of hours and nature of contributions (hours are not tallied but rather used to indicate significance of the activity). Evidence of committee outcomes and one’s role, impact or contribution can be briefly described.
All faculty are expected to engage actively as good citizens of the department and its students by equitably sharing the service functions of the department. Satisfactory performance participation in department meetings and retreats, and annual attendance of at least one Open House, undergraduate or graduate recruiting fairs, or a convocation event

• Examples of Internal Service may include:

• Senior administrative positions such as Chair, Associate Chair, Program Director, Option coordinator, first-year adviser and similar
• Membership or leadership in department-level, faculty-level, and university-level committees should be documented as internal service. This includes Member of Department Advisory Committee on Appointments (DACA), DTPC, Merit and program committees which are core to operations.
• Serving as a thesis reader or committee member (for students other than your own) is recorded as internal service.
• Mentoring non-supervisees and junior colleagues.
• Delivering professional development workshops and departmental research seminars, chairing sessions in department grad symposia, involvement in departmental grad outreach activities.
• Chairing PhD comprehensive exams or defenses.
• Leading class-prof hours are considered internal service.
• Grant writing and advising one’s own students (including thesis examination) is recorded in scholarship not service.

• Examples of External Service may include:

• conference and workshop organization.
• serving as a director or officer of a professional or scientific society.
• journal paper and grant proposal reviews.
• external faculty promotion and thesis reviews.
• editorial activities.
• participation in professional technical committees.
• measures of impact, even if qualitative, on professional services, policy and communities may be provided.

Created 2024