The guidelines for the Annual Merit Process and Performance Evaluations can be broken into two categories: Board of Regents and Office of Faculty Affairs and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Board of Regents and Office of Faculty Affairs

Salary adjustments for faculty are made annually. For instructors and tenure-track faculty, these adjustments generally take effect July 1 for that academic year. Recommendations for merit increases are to be determined by the department chair in consultation with department colleagues as defined by department rules and college/school guidelines.

Regental policy requires that each primary unit develop explicit statements for criteria for assessing annual merit. These statements must be in writing and must be available to faculty. New faculty members should be provided a copy of the unit's evaluation criteria as early in their first year of employment as is practical. The criteria for assessing annual merit adjustments are to include measures of each faculty member's contribution to the teaching, research/creative work, and service missions of the primary unit and the University. Effort in each of these areas is to be weighted according to the workload assignment for the individual faculty member.

Regent policies also require that primary units consider a faculty member's Professional Plan as part of its annual merit evaluation exercise. Professional Plans are considered more commonly as a part of the Post Tenure Review process.

Two forms are used at the unit level as part of the merit assessment and salary adjustment process. The first of these forms is titled Annual Merit Evaluation: Advice and Comments. This form is a confidential working document and is used by the chair or assessment committee to provide advice to each faculty member regarding their professional performance. The second form is titled Faculty Performance Rating Form, which is a pubic document. Regental policy also requires that each faculty member receive an annual performance rating as outstanding, exceeding expectations, meeting expectations, or below expectations. The rated faculty member has the right to append a response to the rating if he/she so desires. A copy of the performance rating is placed in the faculty member's personnel file and is subject to disclose under the Colorado Open Records Act.

College of Arts and Sciences

The annual merit evaluation process adopted by each unit must adhere to a number of college, campus, and University system policies and guidelines. These policies and guidelines define a common set of characteristics shared by all unit processes in the College of Arts and Sciences. These common characteristics are as follows:

  1. Annual Merit Evaluation processes must be described in writing and available to members of the unit. Evaluation processes must be approved by the faculty members of the primary unit, and by the dean. Substantive changes to the evaluation process or criteria for evaluation must occur by April 1, prior to the academic year in which the modified processes will apply.
  2. The Annual Merit Evaluation process must evaluate the performance of faculty members over multiple years. That is, accomplishments over at least two years must be combined and considered (college policy). Some units average accomplishments over three or more years.
  3. The process of Annual Merit Evaluation must include the deliberations of a faculty committee from the primary unit, a.k.a. salary committee, which may be a standing or ad hoc committee (college policy). Many units use their executive committee for this function.
  4. In the annual evaluation of teaching accomplishment, multiple measures of assessment, not just FCQ results, must be considered.
  5. Components considered in the evaluation of teaching accomplishment must be assigned relative weights that imply relative importance in the evaluation process. The term "components" refers to both the types of teaching activities evaluated (i.e., classroom teaching, graduate student mentoring) as well as to the methods of assessing those activities (i.e., FCQs, peer classroom visitations). Relative weighting may be assigned explicitly or implicitly to components by rank ordering components in importance, grouping components into more important and less important categories, assigning merit points to components, by describing typical profiles of faculty earning evaluations of "meeting expectations," "exceeding expectations,” or by other acceptable methodologies (college policy).