Faculty Senate covers range of topics at March meeting

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The University Faculty Senate covered a range of topics during its meeting Tuesday (March 21), including standardizing titles for non-tenure track fixed-term faculty, student progress reports, SRTE teacher evaluations and the incorporation of learning goals and objectives for all syllabi to aid in learning outcomes assessment.The Senate approved an advisory and consultative report that creates standardized titles for full-time, fixed-term, non-tenure track faculty. The policy aims to standardize faculty titles and create a titling system that is University-wide and consistent across academic colleges and units.
The recommended system of ranks and titles provides three tiers of titles for faculty that are involved in teaching, research or clinical business categories. For example, an assistant teaching professor, associate teaching professor and, lastly, teaching professor are the three ranks within the category of teaching faculty with terminal degrees. The ranks for teaching faculty without terminal degree are: lecturer, assistant teaching professor and associate teaching professor. The other categories are: researchers with terminal degrees, researchers without terminal degrees, clinical business faculty with terminal degrees and clinical business faculty without terminal degrees. These policies do not extend to fixed-term faculty in the College of Medicine, the Penn State School of Law or the Penn State Libraries.
The recommendation will be sent to President Eric Barron for consideration.
The Faculty Senate voted to approve a change to policy that recommends instructors submit early progress reports for all undergraduates in courses numbered 499 and below, particularly for students at risk of earning a grade of less than a C. These early reports will be filed with Starfish, the University’s new academic advising system, which allows those progress reports to be sent to students’ advisers as well as the students. 
Faculty Senate also approved legislation that will require all course syllabi to state learning goals and learning objectives in an effort to support learning outcomes ...

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