Minutes January 26, 2010

The Senate met to continue our discussion of the program formally known as the deans' list.  We began by confirming the growing consensus that new nomenclature and a structured nomination process would alleviate most of the Deans' major concerns.  At our next meeting we hope to finalize and vote on those ammendments to the original resolution. 

Name: "Commended Students" seemed to sit better with most than "Honors" or other alternatives.  Senator Murray pointed out the importance of a name that doesn't create laughable acronyms, so we will not, for instance adopt the name Commended Really Interesting Student Program, or worse, Commended for Radical Academics Program.  More seriously, Senator Weiskopf advised that our name not set up false expectations by appearing to similar to academic honor rolls at other schools.

Process: The Maurer method was favored by most Senators present.  While some details still need attention we were in broad agreement about the following: 1) The process needs to be easy for faculty to understand and complete 2) the process needs to be easy for deans to administer 3) the process needs a quantitative basis to alleviate concerns of subjectivity (though distributed subjectivity is still subjective, even with numbers attached) 4) Deans need to retain some latitude in crafting the final list. 

We also agreed that faculty may only nominate students they teach, and while Dean Botella pointed out that one's teaching load may increase or lessen one's ability to affect an individual class list, we saw no way around that effect. I did follow up with Mr. Gillespie, who assured me that Survey Monkey will allow us to pull together scores and comments, but also allow us to look at individual responses, so a Dean could look and see how a students score was generated. 

Roughly, the process might look as follows.  1) At the close of a grading period, the Dean of students sends out the survey by email.  The survey would include text reminding faculty of the criteria for commendation, and the most recent list of commended students to help faculty look beyond those names.  2) Faculty nominate 1-5 students, assigning each points, not to exceed 10 total points.  (i.e. the faculty member has ten points to distribute among the nominated students).  Faculty also write 1-3 sentences of commendation for each nominated student, and identify each student's graduating class. 3) Deans receive a survey report sorted by grade and score, and use that report to generate their lists and personalized comments for letters of commendations.  Deans also screen the list to reduce repeated commendations, and ensure some diversity of commendations (some for improvement, some for acheivement, etc.) 4) Letter would go home and into the file. 5) Deans announce the list of commended students in school meeting. 

Senators, please examine this closely and recommend changes through the blog comments so that we are well placed to make and pass a resolution at our next meeting.