New_FAQ

Do older versions of Internet Explorer or Netscape work with the questionnaires?

Schools will be able to review the responses for your programs when the validation sheets are sent to the ICs. The validation sheet will be sent to each school after all of their programs have responded. A 'Review All' link is located at the bottom of the Program web survey. This button allows an individual Program to view all of its answers. This is based on your skip patterns so the number of pages will vary by Program. We estimate the average number of pages will be about 40-45 pages. The Review All pages can be printed. Most browsers can also convert the pages to HTML. Some user settings may also allow them to print to a PDF. If you have completed your survey and want to be able to review and print it, you should e-mail NRC-Assessment@mathematica-mpr.com and ask to have access to your case again.

Can a school put their faculty mailing sample on “hold”, with a request that they do not go out until released?

If there is any reason that we should not release your faculty sample, just let your MPR liaison know and they will set it to be held. We will make a note of when you want it to be released, however, we are not set up to automatically release it on a specified date. When the time comes for it to be released, if you have not heard from us that it has being released, please remind your liaison that your faculty are available for the web survey and they will be included in the next release.

Meanwhile, please send us your faculty list so we can process it and be ready when the time comes.

What should be done if the faculty provides NRC with different counts for committee membership than what the IC has provided?

We plan to compare faculty reports and reports from the institution, and will get back to you if there are big discrepancies. Generally, the IC data should prevail. We expect that large discrepancies will arise in very few cases. We are more worried about what would happen if discrepancies indicated systematic misrepresentation (which of course none of you would engage in--but your programs might). If it does seem that that is occurring, we will just ask you to check with the program respondent. We will not name names.

We would prefer for faculty to upload CVs in one of the following formats: RTF, Word, or PDF.

MPR selected a faculty sample to be included in the first mailing. The sample that was released included all the faculty names from institutions that gave us permission to contact their staff at this point. Being included in the first mailing means that a faculty member's program information was received by November 30 and the Institutional Coordinator did not signal us to hold the sample for any reason.

· First, the university pre-populates the faculty questionnaire.

· MPR incorporates the pre-populate entry into the questionnaire for the faculty member and puts it up on the web for the faculty member to answer

· The faculty member fills out the questionnaire (including non-pre-pop questions and has an opportunity to correct the populated ones if he/she feels they are inaccurate)

· The faculty member submits the questionnaire. This signifies his/her agreement with the entries.

When we submitted our faculty lists, we provided number of committees and program involvement. We then assumed that this information was going to be preloaded by MPR. Why do the specs have us submitting this information again?

MPR is not preloading any information from the spreadsheets into the faculty surveys.

Will you use the submitted pre-population data for a faculty member even if that individual does not respond to the faculty questionnaire?

No, in most cases. For the rating study, to do this would imply a different sampling methodology for the institutions that pre-populate than for those that do not. We will sample raters from among those who volunteer on the faculty questionnaire. We will, however, do matching of all faculty names with ISI data, regardless of whether they answer the faculty questionnaire or not.

Will information from the faculty spreadsheets pre-populate the faculty questionnaires (I am specifically referring to the values for committee supervision and service, and program name)?

The committee counts on the faculty spreadsheet will be used to calculate the initial allocation factor for publications and, outside the humanities, citations. These counts will not be used to pre-populate the faculty questionnaires unless you want them to and you submit them with the batch pre-population data for the faculty questionnaire. Once MPR has calculated allocation factors for each faculty member, it will send these to the institutions for review--most likely in late February or early March.

How does NRC deal with non-response on the matter of publications of faculty?

We use data from ISI. This works for the sciences and social sciences; their coverage is incomplete for the arts and humanities. If we have low response rates from the arts and humanities, we may omit this measure (as we did in 1993) and use honors and awards instead. This makes it very important that we encourage good faculty responses in the arts and humanities, either through answers to the publication questions or through attaching a C.V.

If a faculty member is no longer affiliated with the university, should they still fill out a questionnaire?

Yes. Faculty no longer affiliated with the university should still fill out a questionnaire. However, they will only be required to fill out the first three questions (A1-A3). If they have changed universities, they should receive a questionnaire at their new institution.

Faculty that are core or new in an emerging program will participate in the faculty survey only if they are also core or new in another (non-emerging) NRC program.

We have a program that is completely interdisciplinary and thus has no core faculty; all are associated with other programs. Will none of these faculty receive questionnaires?

They will receive questionnaires through their "core" programs and appear on the faculty lists of both. Do not omit them.

Can faculty enter a subfield that isn't on the NRC taxonomy list in order to answer questions A4 and A5?

Questions A4 and A5 do not have “other” as a response. However, the faculty member is asked to write out their primary area of specialization verbatim. Then, in A5, the faculty member should select a field or subfield that comes closest to describing or including their primary area of specialization.

If faculty leave items D3, D4, and D5 blank on the faculty questionnaire, can they be assured that MPR or NRC will count all the publications listed on their CVs?

We intend to use the CV as the source for the data on publications, including items requested in D3. If only some items in D3 are filled in, we will check because, in general, we are expecting the data in these questions to be publications not found on the CVs. The CVs are very important for faculty in the humanities, where ISI provides incomplete coverage--and we will extract publication data from those CVs first. Then we will look at a sample of faculty in other fields to determine how incomplete ISI coverage is and on the basis of this information decide on next steps.

Question B2 on the faculty questionnaire asks faculty to provide the name and location of their previous employer. If they were previously a student and not employed, do you want the institution where they studied or should they leave it blank?

Check “student” and answer the name of your doctoral institution in Question C2.

Faculty should list book chapters in D5 (D4 is customized to journal articles only). They should list the title of the chapter and the title of the book.

We notice that it is possible for respondents to the faculty list now being prepared to list specializations that may not necessarily be the same as they may list on the upcoming faculty questionnaire. Does this matter? How is the NRC going to resolve these differences?

In general, we will rely on the faculty specializations entered on the program questionnaire/faculty spreadsheet. We wish, however, to validate the entry through the faculty questionnaire. The specialization information will be used in the database to help describe the program. If there is a large discrepancy between what the program respondents say and what the faculty say, we will call and inquire further.

Will the data from items A4-A5 of the faculty questionnaire be used in establishing program or rater sampling eligibility or probabilities?

No. Data on research specialization of faculty will be used to describe the program in the public database. The exception is Language, Societies, and Cultures, where we will match raters by sub-fields.

We have some students whose permanent addresses are not U.S. addresses. How should we handle these?

We do not want foreign addresses. We are looking for an "on-campus" address. This is where a student receives mail within their program or department plus a valid "home address" or where the student currently resides - either on campus or off-campus. If they have another U.S. address that they can use other than their student address, then they can put that in the permanent address field. Otherwise leave the permanent address field blank.

Can a new program that has not yet graduated 5 PhD students still be listed on the NRC website, even if it is not included in the study?

No. Programs must have graduated at least 5 PhD students to be listed in the NRC database.

Is it possible for us to send a batch file for various questions in the program questionnaires for our campus?

We are not pre-populating the program questionnaires in the same way that we are the faculty surveys. We will accept all the program data in a batch file, but that means that the batch file should include all the data that are being collected in the program web survey for all programs. If you have only some data collected centrally, your options are to have someone enter that data into the web surveys before turning them over to the program directors to finish or you can provide this information to the program directors, so they have that data in front of them when they respond to the survey.

In relation to question F3 of the Program Questionnaire, why is the “United States” not on the drop-down menu as an option for country of origin of post-docs?

In question F3, please report non-US post-docs only. We ask for US citizens and permanent residents in F2b.

Is there a way for us to check the lists of faculty that made it onto each Program Questionnaire?

We are not loading the faculty information that you have provided by spreadsheet into the program web survey, which is why the data are not available for you to review within your program survey.

In regard to question E8 of the program questionnaire, which asks that full-time doctoral students be classified according to the type of their full support, which of the following methods should be used to distinguish the "only" categories from the “combination” categories?

Students reported in the "only" categories must not have any support in other categories. For example, those with full support as an NSF fellow would be reported in the "combination of externally funded fellowship or traineeship with internal support" if their fellowship was topped-off with institutional funding.

Question D13 on the program questionnaire asks about interdisciplinary centers. Are we to limit our response to centers, programs and clinics on our own campus or should we include external centers, clinics, etc?

We are asking this question in order to convey to students and others the interdisciplinary research opportunities open to students in the program. Given that objective, you do not need to limit yourself to "campus" opportunities alone. However, they should be settings for interdisciplinary research that actually involve students from the program in question.

Question # E7 in the program questionnaire asks for a typical 5-year pattern of financial support by funding mechanism. However, some students may not receive support for the entire 5 years. How should we deal with this?

What we're trying to get at in this question is what kinds of support a student might expect to receive over his/her first 5 years in the program. It does not have to add up to 5 years because the categories may not be exclusive (that is, a student may be both a TA and an RA at the same time). If, however, the program supports the student for less than 5 years (for example, if they are expected to find employment or support from outside the program for 2 years), that should be reported. An answer might reflect a statement like "The typical student in our program receives a fellowship for one year, then will spend two years as a graduate teaching assistant and is expected to apply for an external grant or fellowship or support himself through savings for the last (dissertation) year."

A student who has been admitted to candidacy and left the program should be counted in part a, columns 2 or 3 (left program with or without the masters). Part a, column 4 should be labeled and treated as "admitted to candidacy and still enrolled (or graduated)". A student who has graduated will be counted in both part a, column 4 and in part b. In part b, we count those who graduate (complete) in the given time frame. For those who don't complete, but have been admitted to candidacy, we assume they are still enrolled. Those in a given cohort who have left, show up in columns 2 and 3 of 4a.

In part a, students should only be counted once and the total of columns 2-4 will then equal the number of students who entered in column 1.

What are the guidelines for placing students who identified themselves as “multiracial” in the matrices labeled for ethnic origin in the institutional questionnaire?

Unless they choose to identify with a single racial/ethnic group, they should not be included in the matrices.

How should “academic year” be defined in Question E1 of the institutional questionnaire, if it is different from the university’s “fiscal year”?

Why are non-residents excluded on the institutional questionnaire and included on the program questionnaires-- will that not produce incongruent data between the questionnaires?

On the program questionnaire, Question C16 and following is for all students (by gender) regardless of residency status. We are not asking you to report completion rates for non-residents separately. The institutional questionnaire aggregates programs into broad fields and disaggregates completion data by race/ethnicity. Race/ethnicity is a concept that only applies to US citizens and permanent residents. So, the two datasets will not be consistent in any case. The program questionnaire disaggregates broad fields and disaggregates completion data by gender. In short, we're not asking for the completion matrices on the institutional questionnaire to be consistent with the ones on the program questionnaires.