The editors of the AASWomen Newsletter are receiving many ads for tenure-track faculty positions and fellowship opportunities. Thank you for sending them!
As we enter the "hiring season", please think about using rubrics in decisions related to hiring and, in the case of graduate school, admission*. Please also consider making them transparent by publishing them so that applicants are aware of the evaluation criteria. All of us are born with biases and they play out in our lives every day, especially when considering who to add to our department, field, and/or community. Rubrics allow us to compartmentalize those factors that are most important to us and allow a standardization of the factors to be considered, among all members of the decision committee.
I've listed some resources here that may be useful to you and/or your department. Feel free to share widely!
Faculty Search Toolkit (Michigan State University)
Faculty Hiring Evaluation Rubrics (University of Michigan, via the University of Washington)
Checklist for Hiring (Michigan Tech)
Multiple resources, incl. a variety of rubrics and a list of best practices (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
More resources (University of Michigan)
While the above resources are focused on practices to hire a diverse faculty, the guidelines can certainly be applied to accepting graduate students and the rubrics can be revised accordingly.
As far as I can tell, no one has developed any rubrics for graduate school admission, but the need is real! So, if you design one, it will be a great resource and the CSWA can help you disseminate it widely!
A quick Google search on "rubric evaluating grad student applications" provided some promising links:
Holistic Review in Graduate Admissions (Council of Graduate Schools)
Connecting Graduate Admissions Practices with Goals: Questions to Consider (ETS and the GRE Program)
Finally, rubrics to evaluate PhD Qualifying Exams also exist. You can find one here (pdf) and here (doc).
Do you know of other resources? Let us know! and check out the CSWA's page for additional information.
* I thank my salon group at the Maria Mitchell Women in Science Symposium for the stimulating discussions that lead to this post.
