Annual Review Information for Faculty

CETL Virtual Workshop for Faculty: Dates and times for 2024 will be posted as soon as possible.

Registration will open once dates and times are announced.

The general timeline for annual reviews and evaluation of faculty performance adheres to the following schedule (as outlined in the KSU Faculty Handbook, Section 3.12):

  • Last Friday of January: Completed ARDs/FPAs submitted by teaching and administrative faculty to next level supervisors.
  • 2nd Friday of March: All reviews between teaching and administrative faculty and next level supervisors completed; portfolios submitted to second level supervisors.
  • 2nd Friday of April: Second level supervisors return annual review submissions to teaching and administrative faculty; salary recommendations (if applicable; exact date TBD based on Budget Office and Board of Regents directions).

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMITTING AN ANNUAL REVIEW:

The annual review process utilizes Watermark Workflow for the entire campus.  This means that the reports are automatically generated.  Faculty members will enter their data, check that the reports are correct, and Submit.

(1) Enter data:  Faculty enter their accomplishment data into the appropriate Watermark Activities section. If your college/department requires you to provide supplemental documentation, you wil upload the documentation (i.e. full-text publications, graphs, charts, graphics, etc.) into the appropriate Activities section (e.g. Publications, Presentations, etc.). Once uploaded, check the "Include File in List of Links?" box.

Course evaluations should be automatically uploaded from the Course Evaluations and Surveys section into the Scheduled Teaching at KSU section. If the course evaluations have not been uploaded into the appropriate courses taught, then follow the instructions for uploading teaching evaluations found in the "Entering data and documentation/media files in the Activities section" document on the Portfolio Information for Candidates webpage.

Enter the information for the ARD and FPA in the Watermark Activities page in the "Narratives" section. To create a new FPA, us the "Narratives for Your Faculty Performance Agreement" link, and to create a new ARD, use the "Narratives for Your Annual Review" link.

Once the link is open, click Add New.

For an FPA, enter the upcoming year in the Calendar Year box. (For example, in the Calendar Year box you will enter 2025 because the FPA covers the upcoming year.

For an ARD, enter the previous year in the Calendar Year box. (For example, in the Calendar Year box, you will enter 2024 because the ARD is a review of what was completed in the previous year.)

IMPORTANT: You MUST enter your 2025 FPA Workload Percentages under Administrative Data -> Yearly Workload Summary.  You should also make sure that your 2024 Workload percentages are there and correct, as they will appear in your ARD. (Detailed Instructions)

(2) Check the reports:  Once the data has been entered into the Activities sections, it must be updated in the ARD/FPA workflow. In Watermark, click "Workflow" to see available workflows (they will be in the "Inbox" section).

Click the workflow link. There will be three automatically generated reports - ARD, Vita, and FPA. (Note: chairs and other administrators may not see all of these reports; see note below.) Before you begin, you should refresh these reports. Click the blue box with the circular arrow to refresh the document. You can click on each of these reports to see their contents. The Vita-Interactive contains links to any documents that you have uploaded into your Activities sections. If any corrections or additions need to be made, enter the data into the appropriate Activities section. Faculty members must click the "Refresh" button(s) in the ARD/FPA workflow to update the workflow. If the reports are not refreshed, the data will not be moved into the workflow.

Note: It is highly recommended that any time a change is made to a workflow, that the information is saved. In the upper right corner of the screen, click the drop-down arrow next to the "Actions" button and click "Save".

You can also check your reports (especially before the workflows are set up) by going to "Run Reports" or "Rapid Reports" and selecting the relevant ARD, FPA, or Vita-Interactive.

Note for chair and other administrative faculty: Since chair and administrator workflows contain users from several different colleges, we are not able to automatically populate college-specific ARDs for some administrators. You will need to run your college-specific ARD from Rapid Reports and upload it into the corresponding field in the workflow yourself.

(3) Submit:  When you are ready to submit, click "Actions" and then select "Submit to Department Chair".  NOTE: Your Annual Review is not complete until you click "Actions" and select "Submit."  Clicking "Save" is not enough.

Note that if you must Refresh your FPA to make the percentages appear, it must be all the way back at the beginning of the workflow.  The workflow generally goes:

Faculty -> Chair -> Faculty Response -> Dean -> Faculty Response -> Complete

If your review is at either Faculty Response stage, you will not be able to Refresh it.  Your chair or the Dean (if it's at the later Response step) will have to Recall it and Send it Back all the way to the first Faculty step.  Note that the review comments will not be visible at the earlier stages, but they are saved and will re-appear at the later stages.

 

Frequently Asked Questions:

  • Your college will set the deadline. If you have not already received this information, you can ask your chair.

  • Tenure-track and tenured faculty had the option for a one-year extension to the remaining probationary period leading up to their required tenure and promotion review, required tenure review, or required post-tenure review during the 2020 Covid period. This option was available to all current tenure-track and tenured faculty with a required tenure and promotion review, required tenure review, and required post-tenure review in 2020-2021 or later.  

    If you wish to rescind your decision in the future, you must do so on or before the second Friday of March of the year you are submitting. 

  • No. You will enter your data into Watermark, then check your ARD, FPA, and Vita-Interactive in Workflow. You will then Submit the forms to your chair from the Actions menu.

  • Watermark Faculty Success is a way of cataloging all of the faculty's accomplishments, to be used for purposes like T&P portfolios, accreditation reports, reports on global and community engagement, High-Impact Practices, student success measures, websites, etc. We ask faculty to do annual reviews in Watermark in order to get all of that information in there. Watermark may not make annual reviews go quicker, but doing annual reviews in Watermark will make those other tasks easier.

  • No. There is a feature of Watermark Faculty Success which allows you to run a Google Scholar report on yourself, export that into a bibtex format file, and upload that into Watermark.  You can also import an existing cv that might be in Word format.

  • Please email facultyactivitydata@kennesaw.edu to correct this.

  • This information comes from the FIS system, so the information needs to be fixed there. If you will email the details of the problem to facultyactivitydata@kennesaw.edu, we will make sure that your record is fixed, first in the FIS system and then in Watermark.  But it may take a few weeks before the corrected results appear in Watermark.

  • This is probably because your highest degree is not indicated as such. Go to the Degrees screen (under Professional Credentials), select your highest degree, and look for the drop-down menu that says "Highest Degree You Have Earned?" and select "Yes."

  • Enter your best description under "committee name." It won't matter that it's not a committee.

  • Scheduled Teaching entries originally came from Course Response student evaluations, so they only go back to when we started using the DM online student evaluation module.

  • You should be able to save the document that opens as a Word document. Alternatively, you can open Word, and from within Word open the rtf document that was downloaded. Then go to "Save As..." and you should be able to save it in Word format.

  • In order to request Watermark data from a former institution be transferred to KSU, you must first complete the Import Authorization Form and submit it to facultyactivitydata@kennesaw.edu. 

  • First, select the item from the list and select "duplicate."  Then go into your new entry (which YOU own) and unselect the other authors' names from the drop-down list, and, instead, type them into the "name" boxes.  Ask your co-authors to unselect YOUR name from THEIR version.  Then you will each have only one copy, and you will own the one listed in your account.

  • There is a field used in Watermark called "Preferred First Name," and if you have not entered anything there, it may appear blank.  To fix this, go to Administrative Data -> Personal and Contact Information, and enter your Preferred First Name in that field.

If you have any other questions, please email facultyactivitydata@kennesaw.edu.

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