UW NRC Assessment Home

Tip Sheet for Completing Faculty Questionnaire
for the National Research Council Assessment of U.S. Research Doctorate Programs

Revised February 1, 2007

Introduction

This tip sheet is designed to facilitate completion of the web-based Faculty Questionnaire you will soon be receiving from the National Research Council (NRC) as part of their assessment of U.S. doctoral programs.  Sixty-five doctoral programs at UW are participating in the assessment (http://www.grad.washington.edu/NRC/program_table.htm).  A list of faculty members that participate in these programs was sent to the NRC in mid-December, containing your name, work mailing address, work email, and doctoral program affiliations. 

The NRC has received IRB approval to conduct this study, as has the UW. The information you provide by means of the Faculty Questionnaire will remain confidential.  NRC will destroy all individual information once it has been aggregated.  No one at UW (or anywhere else) will have access to individual information not already available to the public.  Administrators at UW will not even know whether or not you have completed the Questionnaire (although we will know what percentage of faculty in any program has completed the questionnaire).

The deadline for completion of the Faculty Questionnaire has been extended to February 22, 2007  After February 22 and before April 1, your answers to the Questionnaire will be counted, but you will not be eligible to receive a “ratings questionnaire” in which you will be asked to rate programs in your field at other universities.

Responses to the faculty questionnaire are the main source of information on faculty research, scholarship, and mentoring in UW’s doctoral programs.  In addition to assuring a complete picture of your doctoral program(s), the information you and other faculty provide will allow the NRC to compile quantitative and descriptive data regarding doctoral programs in the United States, which will then be used to rate programs nationally.  Please answer the questionnaire completely so that doctoral programs on our campus will have the best chance to demonstrate their high quality.

The NRC intends to make aggregate information publicly available at the completion of data analysis (no earlier than summer 2008), and anticipates that this information will be useful to many constituents, including prospective graduate students.  For more information about the study, please see http://www7.nationalacademies.org/resdoc/index.html.

If you have misplaced your invitation email, you may request your logon credentials to complete the web questionnaire by providing your email address at the following web site:

https://www.nrc-assessment.com/NRC_Faculty/Lost/Lost.aspx

Please specify the email address you use primarily for University of Washington business.

Preparing to Answer the Questionnaire

 1.  The NRC, through Mathematica Policy Research (MPR), will be contacting you both by U.S. mail and e-mail.  You will first receive an email and be provided with a login and password to access your survey.  The faculty questionnaire is emailed out in waves, so only about 200 UW faculty at a time will get the email.  Set aside 30 to 45 minutes, realistically, to complete the survey.  You may start and stop the survey as often as you need to. 

 2.  You will need an up-to-date electronic copy of your CV available.  At the conclusion of the questionnaire, you will be asked to upload a copy of your CV.  (Preferred formats are Word, RTF, and PDF.)

Clarification of Specific Questions

Question A2:  The intent of this question is to determine the extent of your doctoral committee service at UW.  If you are involved in more than one PhD program, your scholarly productivity will be allocated to the programs in proportion to the number of PhD committees you have chaired and/or served on in each.  Service as a Graduate School Representative (GSR) on doctoral committees is not included.  This allocation of effort will be applied to the various productivity measures collected in this questionnaire, and by the NRC (e.g., publications, citations, honors and awards, and grants).  You will note that this field is pre-populated for you.  This information comes from Graduate School's doctoral committee records and is considered official data.  Your departmental graduate program assistant can access additional details on this committee service using MyGradProgram. The Graduate School has pre-populated these data with careful attention to both the NRC methods and time-line. Please do not change these numbers unless you have confirmed with your graduate program assistant that there is an error.

 Question A4/A5:  When asked to supply your specialization(s), you will be able to indicate up to 6.  Enter your specialization in the text field, and then select from the drop-down menu the one that comes closest to describing your specialization.  The purpose of this question is to identify the range of research interests within any given program and also to identify niche programs.  Be sure to enter your primary specialization in A4, and any additional specializations in A5.  Because “other” is not an option in the drop-down list, please try to find something in the drop-down list that comes close.

 Question D1:  When providing your name, make sure you include any names under which you may have published during the past 5 years (10 years for Humanities fields).  Please also include a middle name or middle initial if you have used it on your publications.  For example, if your name is Mary Jane Doe-Smith, you may be cited as M Doe, MJ Doe, MJ Smith, MJ Doe-Smith, etc.  This information will help identify your journal articles and publications in the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) database.

 Question D2:  When using the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) compilation of citations to journals, the NRC will attempt to mitigate the effects of common names by using the zip code that appears on an article.  In answering this question, provide the zip code(s) associated with your professional address(es) when you published articles, chapters, books, or other forms of scholarship (not the zip code of the publisher).  This might include a previous institution, a professional organization, or even a current or previous home address. 

NOTE: Book chapters should be listed under D5, and not with books under D3. You’ll find this clarification when you get to D5.

 Questions D3-D5:  Note for Faculty in the Humanities (including Drama, Art, and Music) fields:  The NRC will gather publication information from the last 10 years, whereas for all other fields, 5 years will be used.

These three questions ask for lists of books, papers, and other scholarly products that, in particular, cannot be found via the ISI database.  It is difficult to know which of your publications will appear in ISI and which will not, so we suggest using this survey to enter all of your scholarly work.  Manual entry of information into the questionnaire can take a lot of time for many faculty.  So, if your CV lists all of these things, you do not need to list them in D3-D5.  At the end of the questionnaire, you can upload your CV (preferred formats are Word, RTF, and PDF), and the NRC will extract your books, papers, and scholarly products from it.  Unfortunately, we do not know how the NRC plans to convert tens of thousands of faculty CVs in different formats into a database, which is cause for some concern.  So, to be 100% sure all of your scholarly activity is included, you may wish to cut and paste from your CV into the survey, particularly for books, chapters, non-journal products, and articles published in languages other than English (i.e., things not catalogued well by ISI). 

 Question E2:  The question asks how many extramural grants or contracts fund your work.  This does not include post-docs that work on your research projects but have their own funding.  This question also does not include training grants that fund your students to do work in your lab.  This is because in both of those cases, the grants are intended to support the student’s work, not the faculty member’s.  Also, the sum of the two lines in E2a do not have to add up to what you reported in E2.  You may, for example, be partially funded to work in a center where you are neither the PI nor Co-PI.

 Question F1:  The NRC would like information about students who got their doctorate in the last five years (2001-02 through 2005-06) for whom you served as the primary dissertation advisor (chair).  This list has been pre-populated for you, with name and degree year, from the Graduate School's doctoral committee records. This list was carefully pre-populated using the NRC methods and timeline.  You may change this information, but please consult with your departmental graduate program advisor (who has access to detailed records in MyGradProgram) before you do.  It may be difficult to know the employment and location of all of your past students; please do the best you can.  The NRC is asking for this employment information to “identify career outcomes of doctoral students” and to help prospective students “select a degree program that meets their own career objectives.”

 Question J1:  Although the NRC study will not have an explicit reputational component in the 2006 version, the NRC does plan to invite a random sample of faculty to rate the overall quality of other doctoral programs in their field.  In Question J1 you will be asked to indicate your willingness to complete a follow-up ratings questionnaire.  You will only be considered for the ratings questionnaire if you complete the Faculty Questionnaire by February 15.  The Graduate School encourages you to do so and to complete the ratings questionnaire should you receive one.

Additional Questions?

Please direct any questions about completing the Faculty Questionnaire first to your departmental graduate program assistant, then to the institutional coordinator's office in the Graduate School at nrc@grad.washington.edu. We will do our best to respond in a timely manner.

 The Graduate School   G-1 Communications Building    Box 353770  
University of Washington  Seattle  WA   98195   Phone: 206-543-5900