OATdb Archive

2014 - 2015

Sciences, College Of

Goal
To Further Excellence In Teaching
The College of Sciences will provide the resources,support, and mechanisms to assist departments and faculty in their efforts to improve teaching throughout the college curriculum.

Objective
Recruit Highly Credentialed Faculty
The college will strive to hire faculty who posses the terminal degree from R1 universities.

KPI
Highly Credentialed Faculty
Eighty percent of new faculty hires will possess the terminal degree from R1 institutions

Result
Highly Credentialed Faculty
The faculty hired during this period all possess the terminal degree in their field, exceeding the desired goal.

Action
Recruiting Quality Faculty
The dean's office works with the departments to place ads in prominent disciplinary journals and magazines, meets with all candidates to interview them, and makes recommendations, in concert with the departmental search committee, regarding recommendations for hiring.

Goal
To Promote Excellence In Creative Activities And Research
The College of Sciences will provide the resources and support to facilitate scientific inquiry among faculty and students in the college.

Objective
Provide Appropriate Faculty Travel Funds
The college will solicit travel requests from faculty members, then request, acquire and allocate appropriate funding for proposed travel.


KPI
Faculty Travel Funds
The college will solicit travel requests from faculty members, prioritize these requests, and acquire the necessary funds to facilitate the research and developmental goals of the faculty. Our goal will be to fund 75% of the requests.

Result
Faculty Travel Funds
All travel requests directed to the College of Sciences Dean's Office from departmental faculty were approved, exceeding the goal of 70%.

Action
Provide Travel Funds
The College of Sciences Dean's office sets support levels, reflecting different costs for state, national, and international travel to support faculty travel for conference presentations. To maximize impact, the office limited faculty to one request in FY16.

Goal
To Bring Visibility To Programs In The College
The College of Sciences will actively publish faculty and student accomplishments through local and national media and increase public exposure to scholarly and artistic events on campus.

Objective
Visibility
The College of Sciences will publicize research and creative accomplishments of faculty and departments in the Heritage magazine, on the website, and in other publications.

KPI
Visibility
We will seek to have at least 10 publications of research and creative accomplishments in journals, newsletters, and on websites.

Result
Visibility Of College Of Sciences
Greater than 10 articles highlighting faculty, students, and activities from the College of Sciences were featured on the main SHSU website, exceeding our goal of 10 articles.

Action
Promotion Of COS Activities
The College of Sciences and the Departments work closely with the COS webmaster, John Holder, and other university officials in PR to promote and highlight activities within the college. This results in placements on the college and university website and within official university publications.

Goal
To Provide A Rigorous, Current Curriculum
The College of Sciences will encourage the development of new programs that reflect discpline specific and societal changes. The College will adhere to a formal, rigorous curriculum review process.

Objective
Accreditation Of Programs
The college will identify all programs that are eligible for accreditation through professional organizations and initiate the accreditation or reaccreditation in each case.

KPI
Program Accreditation
Programs that are eligible for accreditation from outside agencies will seek or renew accreditation. For 2013-2014, the goal is to continue revisions to the computer science curriculum to meet ABET standards.

Result
Program Accreditation
The computer science program continues to be accreditated by ABET, meeting our goal.

Action
Accreditation Of Programs
The College works closely with the departments that are accreditated to remain accrediated and to determine if accrediation is warranted for those departments that have accreditation as a disciplinary option. The Computer Science department was recently reaccrediated until 2019.

Objective
Restructure College Curriculum Process
The college will establish fixed deadlines for submission of materials to the college curriculum committee and review items thoroughly in a timely manner.

KPI
College Curriculum Calendar
The calendar for the college curriculum process will be modified and strictly enforced. Our goal is that all proposals will be submitted by the deadline.

KPI
Approval Of Submitted Curriculum Proposals
At least 90% of curriculum proposals approved by the COS committee will be approved by the University curriculum committee.

Result
College Curriculum Proposals
All proposals except the proposal for the PhD in Digital Forensics were approved. The PhD proposal required additional development to meet THECB approval.

Action
College Curriculum
The College of Sciences Dean's Office manages the curriculum process to expedite course and program development in a timely fashion, allowing courses and programs to proceed without procedural delay. The college has not had any problems with its curriculum development.

Goal
To Enhance The Quality Of Graduate Programs In The College
The College of Sciences will provide resources, planning and direction that will assist departments in growing quality graduate programs.

Objective
Provide Adequate Assistantships For Graduate Students
The college will allocate competitive assistantships in a manner that allows each program to recruit the quality and quantity of graduate students necessary to offer a viable graduate program.

KPI
Percentage Of Graduate Students On Assistantship
The college will produce a TA report that includes at least 85% full time graduate students who are receiving assistantships in COAS

Result
Graduate Assistantships
We did not meet the goal of 85% of all full time graduate students receiving assistantships. However, 5 additional TA lines were received for 2016 FY.

Action
Supporting Graduate Education
5 additional TA lines in Chemistry were obtained for FY16 in order to allow this program to grow to a more optimal size. At the College of Sciences retreat, the program capacity and desire to add additional TA lines were determined for each graduate program. Additional resources will be requested in the FY17 budget request.

Objective
Provide Adequate Graduate Scholarships
The college will provide an adequate number of $1500 scholarships to assist in the recruitment and retention of high caliber graduate students. Due to low overall stipends and an inability to waive tuition, merit scholarships are needed to attract out-of-state and international students to graduate programs.

KPI
Percentage Of Graduate Students On Scholarship
The college will produce a report of at least 30 scholarship recipients that includes the percentage of full time graduate students who receive scholarships through the COS office

Result
College Scholarships
We met the goal of providing 30 college scholarships for graduate students.

Action
Supporting Graduate Education
Additional funding for graduate students to obtain in-state tuition will be requested for FY17 to allow 10 additional students to receive a scholarship. Due to growth of graduate students in the program, this will keep the percentage of students receiving a scholarship from declining.


Update to previous cycle's plan for continuous improvement We will continue to use a variety of media to advertise open faculty positions with the goal of having a large and diverse faculty applicant pool.

We were successful in hiring a Hispanic faculty member in Biology and an African-American female faculty member in Mathematics.

We will supplement travel funding with discretionary funds if needed. We have a proposed budget of $10,000 to allow for this if requested.

We did not have to supplment the travel funds as they were sufficient.

We will resubmit to ABET for continued accreditation for the CS undergraduate degree program and continue to explore options for ABET accreditation for the Engineering Technology program once we have sufficient numbers of faculty to qualify.

We continued accreditation from ABET for CS and recieved funding to hire a faculty member in Engineering Technology with ABET experience to begin the accreditation process.

We will continue to publicize departmental seminars, special guest speakers, departmental conferences on campus, and special achievements of students and faculty.


We reached this goal through the COS website and the SHSU website.

We will request additional funding for graduate positions and stipend amounts/scholarships in our budget request and from the Graduate Studies office.

We received an additional 5 TA lines (approximately $65,000) for use in the FY16 year to support chemistry graduate students.

We will solicit funding from donors for graduate scholarships trhough the advancement office.


We did not receive any additonal funding for graduate scholarships from the office of advancement

We will present a detaiiled fundraising plan to the Office of Advancment that they can use to present to potential donors to allow us to reach 85% of all graduate students funded.

We continue to work with advancement to support college activities, including graduate scholarships.

Plan for continuous improvement Attracting diverse applicants requires active methods to seek out candidates. We will work with AA to develop such methods in this upcoming year.
Additional funding for graduate student stipends will be sought through new initiative funding and budget reallocation within the college.

We will use the COS facebook site to publicize departmental and college activities.

We will hire an experienced facutly member who has developed ABET assessment plans for Engineering Technology and will begin the process for ABET accreditation in ET during the FY17.