Research council begins new review of doctoral programs

The National Research Council (NRC) has begun a national review of research doctoral programs, and UW–Madison faculty, staff and students who receive questionnaires for the review are urged to complete them in a timely fashion.

The council previously assessed programs in 1983 and 1995; the goal is to help universities improve their programs through benchmarking against other schools. The information also is made available to prospective students and employees as they make decisions about where to apply for further education and work. This year, about 200 institutions will be evaluated. Although the previous rankings have been provided only in printed book form, the council is working to produce an online, searchable database with this year’s survey, says Donna Paulnock, associate dean of the Graduate School.

“People will be able to have more personalized access to the data,” says Paulnock, who is on UW–Madison’s NRC project team.

There are several different questionnaires. The institutional questionnaire is designed to collect data about institution-wide practices and policies, while program questionnaires will gather information on the fields with which each program is associated and the research specialties of the faculty. These two questionnaires have been finalized and will be disbursed to appropriate participants in the next month.

Faculty and student questionnaires are still in development and will gather both quantitative and subjective data, says Paulnock. For example, faculty will be asked how long they’ve been with their current institution, what their educational background is and what their responsibilities are. But they’ll also be asked to evaluate their programs, to give the council a more specific view of each discipline. UW–Madison will pre-populate these forms with basic information to make them easier to fill out, but Paulnock emphasizes that all questionnaires are completely confidential.

Programs in more than 50 academic fields will be evaluated with this year’s survey. Faculty questionnaires will be distributed in September, and student questionnaires will be distributed to students in five NRC-designated fields in October. The data will be analyzed and put into a usable database format and should be available in late 2007.

To learn more, visit http://info.gradsch.wisc.edu/admin/NRC_Assessment.html.