MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES

1. MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES Department Meeting January 28, 2011 9:15 AM – 10:45 AM CBC C146 (9 slides)

3. Tenured Faculty Spring 2011 Enrollment Comparison 1202 (1/20/2011) vs. 1135 (1/13/2010) Misleading: 2011 numbers include Drs. Tehrani and Yang

4. Several courses have predictable last minute enrollment increases.

5. Department’s Facebook account • Student workers took at least two pictures of (hopefully) every classroom. • Uploaded the pictures with my outdated comments. Cap: 42;Boards: three 8' white;Notes: South;Tec: YES

6. Department’s Facebook account (continued) • Currently locked for only Unlv Mathematical Sciences to view. • May change this when time permits • Prefer to have a “Friend” folder of instructors and lock the pictures for those in the folder. • A classroom picture can be sent to instructor’s wall by the usual method of tagging their name in the picture.

7. Building 7 Upgrades • Pictures…north and south sides and Pi Mu Epsilon

8. 1/28/11 Meeting Agenda Call to Order Announcements Approval of 12/3, 2010 Meeting Minutes Committee Reports (Merit, Graduate, Undergraduate, Personnel, Advisory) Hiring New Business Adjournment

9. Update on Student Evaluations • With the past disasters, we tried to be proactive concerning these. • I presented at the last EC Meeting our student evaluation spreadsheets that were handed back. • I don’t know of any other COS department having done anything on this. • The reaction is that our spreadsheets are impossible to do because of the hours involved. • I believe our spreadsheets to be better the long proposed idea of using Scantrons. • My understanding is that Life Sciences stayed with the online evaluations since there was insufficient time to prepare the paper evaluations. • The departments received the paper evaluation form with only 8 working days remaining so that it was impossible for Life Sciences and DMS to use the paper evaluations. • I tried to emphasize that: • the College needs something in place at least f0ur weeks before the end of the semester. • otherwise, our department needs to be able to start preparing these on its own. • I believe using online evaluations is a huge mistake.

10. The people involved with the online evaluations (Center for Evaluation) have requested from the Dean to meet at an EC to again push their product. • They will want to present “evidence” that a small number of responses still provides accurate feedback. • We will be ready to argue that these numbers are too important to count on a small number of responses. • There have been a number of issues beyond the low response rate. • Much work for the staff in putting together the lists of 6000 fall email addresses. • Regular errors from these people include: • not sending out the evaluations (involved even extra work in tracking the evaluations) • listing the wrong instructor for a class, • I have asked the staff to start compiling some of these past problems. • Most of the Chairs are concerned about the high costs. • I have argued that it makes more sense to hire people to carry out the work involved in using our proposed spreadsheets.

11. Update on Student Evaluations • At the EC, I asked to check whether there is any problem numbering the students as above • The reaction is that there is no problem as it does not compromise confidentially, but the Dean will check. • Emphasized that the comments have additional value with the corresponding student ratings. • Please check your spreadsheets with the actual evaluations. • With 6000 evaluations, I believe there must be at least one error. • We numbered the evaluations and kept copies so that we can check any errors on the spreadsheets. • There are a number of issues to be continually brought up at the EC’s during the semester, including the large number of questions (are these really needed for assessment), why one question appears twice, etc.