2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work describes the lessons learned from a study on faculty search committees about how and why rubrics were or were not used in their faculty search processes. Many institutions are recommending search committees use rubrics to provide fairer evaluation of candidates, and it has been shown that the use of rubrics in the faculty search process can help reduce some gender bias. Yet, many search committees have been slow to incorporate rubrics in the faculty candidate evaluation process. As part of a broader study on how faculty search committees evaluate candidates, we conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with the search committee chair and/or a member of 11 faculty search committees in science and engineering. Part of the interview protocol included questions about rubrics and the steps committees used to evaluate and advance candidates through each stage of the search process. The results of the study show that many search committees did not use a rubric at any stage in their search process, despite participating in a workshop that recommended using a rubric as a tool for equitable and inclusive hiring. Rubrics were most commonly used at the first stage of candidate evaluation (narrowing down the pool from all applicants to the first round of interviews), though some committees used a rubric to evaluate candidates in the first round of interviews. Additionally, a wide range of attitudes emerged. The most stubborn resistance came from searches where committee members felt rubrics were “not applicable” to a given search because their search spanned multiple research areas or their field was too interdisciplinary. Conversely, other search committees felt their process would not have been possible without rubrics because they help reduce bias and create a way value non-traditional metrics (i.e., those other than numbers of publications or citations). In learning about faculty’s attitudes towards and against rubrics, proponents can make more persuasive arguments for how and why they should be used to achieve a more equitable faculty search.
We prefer to present this work as a lightning talk.