Salary rate computed on a twelve-month, annual basis.

Academic Staff: a professional and administrative employee other than faculty with duties and types of appointments that are primarily associated with higher education institutions or their administration.  Each academic staff has a principal role related to research, teaching, outreach, student services, information technology, libraries, communications, clinical/health services, or other responsibilities. 

Americans with Disabilities Act.  See also: http://www.ada.gov/

This term refers to the L&S Administrative Gateway, this specific KnowledgeBase website. 

The L&S Academic Planning Council, or APC, advises the Dean on planning, program, and fiscal matters, and thus plays an important role in College governance activities.  The Dean chairs the Council's weekly meetings, where topics that affect the whole college (and often, the rest of the university) are discussed by elected and appointed members. Academic and Administrative Deans serve as ex Officio observers to advise the council. Agendas are prepared by the Assistant Dean for Academic Planning, in consultation with the Dean and Associate Deans.  For more information, see the Administrative Gateway document, Who Serves on the L&S Academic Planning Council .

Academic Personnel Office. Main campus office for providing human resource services for faculty, academic staff, limited appointees, graduate assistants, and student hourly employees: https://www.ohr.wisc.edu/apo/

Archives and Records Management.  See http://archives.library.wisc.edu/ for more information, including policy on maintaining public records.

Academic Staff Policies and Procedures.  For more information, visit the Secretary of Academic Staff website: http://acstaff.wisc.edu/resources/policies-and-procedures

UW-Madison's accrediting agency, the Higher Learning Commission, defines assessment of student learning as a "participatory, iterative process" that:

• Provides data/information needed regarding student learning;
  
• Engages the institution (faculty, staff, students) in analyzing and using this data/information to confirm and improve teaching and learning;
• Produces evidence that students are learning the outcomes identified by the faculty;
  
• Guides educational and institutional improvement; and
  
• Helps the institution understand, evaluate and document whether changes made affect student learning

1. How are your stated learning outcomes appropriate to your mission, programs, students and degrees?
2. How do you ensure shared responsibility for student learning & assessment of student learning?
3. What evidence do you have that students achieve your stated learning outcomes?
4. In what ways do you analyze and use evidence of student learning?
5. How do you evaluate and improve the effectiveness of your efforts to assess and improve student learning?

In the course of an accreditation review, external consultant/evaluators will gauge the extent to which the university has engaged in assessment for purposes of improving student learning, and used what we find to improve student learning.

Board of Regents; the governing board for the UW System.  See: https://www.wisconsin.edu/regents/

Salary rate computed on a nine-month, academic year, basis.

Committee on Academic Staff Issues; these committees have been established in each school and college to advise Deans on policies and procedures, promotional opportunities, participation in department governance, and performance recognition for academic staff.

Wisconsin Statutes, Chapter 36, established the University of Wisconsin System, of which UW-Madison is the flagship institution.

Conflict of Interest  

The College of Letters & Science abides by faculty legislation and university policy governing consensual relationships, which is founded on Faculty Legislation. 

DARS is an automated degree audit system licensed to and used by UW–Madison to analyze and report student progress toward the requirements of a UW–Madison degree. In L&S, DARS is the Document of Record of any individual student’s graduation; a DARS is saved as a record that justifies why L&S awarded that student’s L&S degree, major, and/or certificate award at the time of graduation. DARS also stores every alteration to undergraduate program requirements and is the record of all approved curriculum exceptions.

Because DARS is used to audit and award degrees, aggregated DARS data is warehoused and visualized in Tableau workbooks and reported in Tableau IDE for academic planning, assessment, and operations.

DARS audits are essential advising reports to plan enrollment in future terms and to identify educational opportunities and pathways through curriculum. DARS is integrated with the Degree Planner module of the Course Search and Enroll application that students use to register for courses and plan their four-year degrees.

When requesting a DARS audit, a student’s status and academic record are processed and applied to the requirements of that program, resulting in an audit that is specific to that student’s unique circumstances. DARS can also be run speculatively by students and advisors. Known as a “What-If” audit, this function of DARS makes it a valuable program selection tool. Using the Degree Planner, DARS will also apply a student’s planned courses in order to facilitate four-year degree planning.

Academic Information Management (AIM) in L&S Student Academic Affairs oversees the creation and encoding of DARS audits for L&S academic programs. AIM uses DARS to audit L&S students for their degree and major awards. AIM consults with academic departments and programs, University and College governance, and other campus partners (e.g. Office of the Registrar) to ensure that program requirements published in Guide are properly encoded in DARS. AIM should be the first point of contact for any questions about how L&S programs are encoded in DARS.

Contact Mike Pflieger for more information.

The UW-Madison Data Digest is prepared by the Office of Academic Planning and Institutional Research (http://apa.wisc.edu/). The Data Digest contains useful, official information about the whole university - and the College of Letters and Science within that realm - in a succinct graphical format. The current and previous editions of the Data Digest are available here https://www.apir.wisc.edu/datadigest.htm.