My annual review feels like an exercise in nickel and diming

[foralurker]

Hi everyone. This is another one of my "is this normal??" questions.

The emails went out this week about preparing our annual evaluation forms with tips on demonstrating  your impact. I'm not tenure track, and from what I understand the TT folks get different forms and they're evaluated by a different group. Which makes sense. So, what I'm describing here is what I, as a non-TT faculty, am encouraged to do.

The tips and advice we receive on our listserv is EXHAUSTING and encourages us to go through our calendars, see what we did this year, and fill up our forms with any bullshit we can quantify. For example, there's a section under teaching where you can list activities that improved your teaching. I'm thinking something like "I attended a regional two-day teaching conference in my discipline." But instead I'm encouraged to look through my calendar for any Zoom 1 hour webinars I might have signed up for with our teaching and learning center and say "23 hours of professional development."

Under mentorship, I'm thinking something along the lines of co-presenting or helping a student go to a major conference. Instead I'm encouraged to count the number of appointments I had with students this year and write it as "mentored 28 students for a total of 126 hours." For research, we should figure out how many times someone retweeted us, or watched a YouTube video, or downloaded something from our website. For consulting, we should see if we met with another faculty member in our department to talk about their work and list number of faculty and number of hours spent. Everything needs to be counted and represented by a number.

The search for bullshit, meaningless metrics (dishonest, out of context metrics) is exhausting. It's almost as though they don't respect my work and research enough to want to hear about my outcomes. Or listen to me describe the context that makes my work meaningful. I mean, I get it. My h-index and incoming grant dollars aren't impressive. But I'm doing a little bit, which is in line with my non-TT appointment. Asking me to tally up bullshit on my calendar seems disrespectful.

Is this normal?

[Ruralguy]

Its not what my school does, but I can't really say what we do is normal (we don't have annual reviews, we have set review periods, and everyone gets reviewed by the Tenure and Promotion Committee). . However, for more teaching centric positions, we definitely evaluate teaching over scholarship, but we don't ignore scholarship.

My question for you is "who is 'they'?" and can they be queried about the process? Do you have a trusted senior colleague whom you can ask about this sort of thing?

[foralurker]

"They" would be the more senior instructional faculty in my department who have been through the promotion process (associate instructional professor). There are a couple who enjoy the mentoring aspect and have, at one time or another, sat on the committee that does promotion for non-TT faculty. (They receive both your dossier and prior copies of the annual evaluations.) They're the ones offering up the advice and shaping the presentation of our annual responses.

My understanding is that I could go up for a promotion in year five. The annual evaluations are not a dossier or anything. They have a home-grown, web based system that looks like a series of web forms from 1995 (teaching, research, service) with sub-categories in each.

The "other they" would be our department chair and the dean of our college. They send out the kick off emails and then the chatter begins on our list serv among my colleagues until they're due in December. It seems that our dean is the one who started the show-me-the-numbers nonsense, my colleagues started milking it for all it was worth, and it has probably gotten out of hand over the years from there.

Anyhow, my trusted senior colleagues are the ones who encourage this behavior and hype us up on the listserv on all the ways we can play their numbers game. When I asked around about the practice, the response is a mix of "this is what the dean responds to" and "we like it this way." The exchange of emails on the listserv is nuts to me. Someone might post a message that says "I had 4 meetings at Starbucks with Dr Z about -blank- and I'm listing that as 5 hours of grant consultation" and everyone is like "oh that's so clever!"

[lightning]

Yeah, it is bullshit, but you'll find that is the norm in many places, including mine. You can thank the many morons who decided many moons ago that easy-to-measure-and-aggregate-and-visualize metrics are easier for admincritters to administrate than to use more informative context-rich metrics. Also, you can create lots of higher-ed "data xxxxx" admin jobs if you have a swamp of data that needs data rakers/hoarders/slingers. Your senior faculty only went along with it because they got tired of fighting the fight that you want to fight right now.

[Hibush]

The need to "fill up our forms with any bullshit we can quantify" is one of the most depressing parts of my job. For all the reasons so well described here.

Finding out how the data are used helps ease the pain because it reduces the effort and the psychological burden. In some cases, there is no penalty for overestimation. Indeed there is little incentive for those who get the reports to question data supporting the high productivity of their department or college. The Federal system is different in that it prioritizes fairness by making very precise requirements. Meet those and you are good.

Be as helpful as you feel is appropriate. Make sure you hit all the metrics expected of you, and find out what they are. Don't overthink this.

[Volhiker78]

Yes, the metrics are a waste of time. My philosophy is to come up with crude estimates and just stick with that number unless you receive pushback. I've never gotten questions back. The last thing I want to do is keep track of my time in order to accurately quantify something that is meaningless.

[arty_]

Actually I quantify my time this way because bull$hit like this is asked all the time.  I do this probably a relic from paralegal days in quantifying my time in 6 minute increments.

I have a two column word document on my desktop, date on the left column, and an entry  on the right when there is something quantifiable. Like, met with (list three students). attended dept lecture. Participate in scholarship committee mtg, disburse 20k in scholarships. Complete external review for tenure at ___university. It takes 30 seconds a day, maybe, and then at the end of the year, at most a half hour to divide into categories. More time to put together the sentence bull$hit.

[Ruralguy]

Yes, if you know you are going to get asked Stupid Question X a lot, the choices are:

(a) protest because the question is stupid
(b) come up with easy stock answers to the question at hand
(c) spend lots of time answering the question precisely because...

The correct answer is mostly (b). Leave it to tenured professors to do (a) as they please, but even they won't bother if (a)
is easier.

[foralurker]

Thanks for the responses, everyone. It sounds like the practice is normal enough. :-)

[ciao_yall]

I'm working on a job application where they want me to document the number of actual hours I have spent during my career doing certain things.

• Job X, 2 years, 40 hours a week, 10% of time on task Y, so a total of 4 hours *52 weeks * 2 years = 416 hours
• Job Y, , 4.5 years, 40 hours a week, 30% of time on task Y, so a total of 12 hours *52 weeks * 4.5 years = 2,808 hours
• ...
• Total experience doing Task Y = 3,224 hours

[Hibush]

I'm working on a job application where they want me to document the number of actual hours I have spent during my career doing certain things.

• Job X, 2 years, 40 hours a week, 10% of time on task Y, so a total of 4 hours *52 weeks * 2 years = 416 hours
• Job Y, , 4.5 years, 40 hours a week, 30% of time on task Y, so a total of 12 hours *52 weeks * 4.5 years = 2,808 hours
• ...
• Total experience doing Task Y = 3,224 hours

Are you using categories like

• Making groundbreaking discoveries
• Training today's disciplinary leaders
• Improving societal well being

or more targeted

• Sitting at computer
• Talking to people
• On the phone

?

[ciao_yall]

I'm working on a job application where they want me to document the number of actual hours I have spent during my career doing certain things.

• Job X, 2 years, 40 hours a week, 10% of time on task Y, so a total of 4 hours *52 weeks * 2 years = 416 hours
• Job Y, , 4.5 years, 40 hours a week, 30% of time on task Y, so a total of 12 hours *52 weeks * 4.5 years = 2,808 hours
• ...
• Total experience doing Task Y = 3,224 hours

Are you using categories like

• Making groundbreaking discoveries
• Training today's disciplinary leaders
• Improving societal well being

or more targeted

• Sitting at computer
• Talking to people
• On the phone

?

More targeted to general job responsibilities. I wrote a generic one and just copy/paste it.

[artalot]

My university is about to implement something like this. On the one hand, quantifying the amount of service I do might make admins realize how overburdened faculty are. On the other, I think I'd rather not know.

[bio-nonymous]

Sadly, we have to document a workload worksheet with all of this type of information and calculations, BUT, it is NEVER looked at-- at any level above our department chair! Thus, a whole lot of work for no reason other than maybe someday someone in admin will want this information...

[onthefringe]

My university is about to implement something like this. On the one hand, quantifying the amount of service I do might make admins realize how overburdened faculty are. On the other, I think I'd rather not know.

Our department, in an effort to promote more equitable distribution of service, pulled together a spreadsheet of everyone's service commitments. The main outcome is that now when you ask many people to do something they say "I know I'm not doing as much as X or Y — I don't know how they do it" before they decline.