COMMENTS ON THE REVIEW TEAM REPORT:

Below are comments from various people.  If you don't want your
comments posted, please indicate that when providing your comments
to me.

Jim Lewis points out the following:

``If you've read it carefully, you found a place where the word "be" is
missing and you've found a place on page 12 when the percents 40% and 60%
remain from an earlier draft. There is a reference to page 6 where the
values are 45% and 55%. John tells me that these two mistakes were caught
and corrected before a paper copy was mailed to Evelyn Jacobson.''


Glenn Ledder writes:

David,
  I think the APR really went well.  I have almost no quarrels with anything
in the report.  I think our response should be primarily to comment on the
recommendations the report makes for the future.  Here are a few items that
I think have some importance.

1) TA visitation

I agree with the report that we should have a program of visiting TA's in
calculus recitations.  I have done this in the past.  I don't do it anymore
because of the time commitment and the lack of impact such visits have.  In
the past, I found the weak TA's generally unwilling to make changes and the
department has no mechanism by which lecturers can "discipline" TA's who do
not make the grade.  In particular, I'd like to have faculty in lecture
classes provide the department with a 1-paragraph report on each of their
TA's at the end of the semester.  If the TA's know this will happen, they
will be much more responsive to their lecturers.  I don't want to give the
wrong impression here.  About 80% of my TA's are very good.

2) Faculty vs non-faculty instruction

The report says that we have too many of our courses taught by nonfaculty.
I am not sure that I agree with that, because those nonfaculty courses are
mostly precalculus and low-level service courses, but I certainly hope that
the percentage taught by nonfaculty doesn't increase any further.  The only
ways to keep it from increasing are to make the classes larger or to replace
faculty who retire.  Larger classes are exactly what we don't need if we
want to preserve our tradition of excellent undergraduate instruction.  I
believe we should use this point to underscore the need to at least maintain
our current faculty size.

Glenn


Roger Wiegand writes:

Hi,

We (or they) should reconcile the numbers of page 6 and in the summary
on page 12:  Is 45% or 40% of our instruction done by faculty?

Roger

Jim Lewis responds to Roger:

R,
John Ewing changed the report from saying 40% to 45%, etc. He caught the
mistake after sending the pdf file to me and to the Review Team but before
mailing a hard copy to Evelyn Jacobson. Thus the official report is
consistent.

Jim