Annual Review Information for Faculty

CETL Virtual Workshop for Faculty: "Preparing and Submitting Your Annual Review Documents" on Wednesday, January 10th from 1-2:30pm  

Register Here

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:

Beginning with 2018 ARDs, 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 main Activity screens as usual. You may be required to provide supplemental documentation (such as full-text versions of publications), so you should upload files into the Activity screens and click the box for "Include File for Portfolio Review."  This is also how you should handle any graphs, charts, or graphics that you would like to link to; upload them into a relevant screen and click the "Include..." box. You should upload your teaching evaluations as well (Detailed Instructions) Goals are entered into the screen called "Narratives for Your Faculty Performance Agreement."  (Use "Add a New Item" with the date 2024 for your new, 2024 FPA.)  If there is narrative text required for your ARD form, that text goes into the screen called "Narratives for Your Annual Review Document."  (Use "Add a New Item" with the date 2023 for your ARD that will cover last year, 2023.)

IMPORTANT: You MUST enter your 2024 FPA Workload Percentages under Administrative Data -> Yearly Workload Summary.  You should also make sure that your 2023 Workload percentages are there and correct, as they will appear in your ARD. (Detailed Instructions)

(2) Check the reports:  At the top of your Watermark Faculty Success screen, you will see an option called "Workflow."  If you click on that, you should see an option available for your 2023-24 Annual Review process.  Click to open that, and you will see three reports that are automatically generated.  They are your 2023 ARD, your 2024 FPA, and your Vita-Interactive. (Note: chairs and other administrators may not see all of these reports; see note below.)  Before you begin, you should "Refresh" these reports. 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 Activity screens.  If there are any corrections to be made, you should make them in your data (see Step 1, above) and click "Refresh Report" in the Workflow.  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 chairs 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 the reports are complete and correct to your satisfaction, and you have entered any comments or additional files required by your department or college, you should click "Save" at the top of the Workflow page.  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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