• UTO provides training

• ASU Online Resources about Online Teaching

• ASU Online Training Sessions

Desk Copies

If you require desk copies of books for the course(s) you are teaching, please contact Brittany Cook ([email protected]).

Disability Accommodations

In compliance with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 504, and the Americans with Disabilities Act as amended (ADAAA) of 2008, professional disability specialists and support staff at the Disability Resource Center (DRC) facilitate a comprehensive range of academic support services and accommodations for qualified students with disabilities. DRC staff coordinate transition from high schools and community colleges, in-service training for faculty and staff, resolution of accessibility issues, community outreach, and collaboration between all ASU campuses regarding disability policies, procedures, and accommodations.

Establishing Eligibility for Disability Accommodations

Qualified students with disabilities may be eligible to receive academic support services and accommodations. Eligibility is based on qualifying disability documentation and assessment of individual need.

Your Responsibility to Provide Reasonable Accommodations

Faculty must make every effort to provide reasonable accommodations for qualified students with disabilities. Prior to giving any student disability accommodations, however, faculty must receive verification of eligibility from the DRC . Once a student is registered with the DRC, the student with disabilities must meet with the instructor to discuss what reasonable accommodations they will need to be successful in this course (e.g., extra time on exams or papers, an in-class note-taker, etc.).  Students with disabilities that are known at the time this course begins should meet with you to make requests for accommodations at the beginning of the semester, either during office hours or by appointment. For disabilities that arise after the course has begun, students should meet with your at the earliest possible time to arrange for accommodations of their learning needs.  Disability information is confidential. 

Email

Once new instructors are officially hired, they will receive an official ASU email account.  It is  imperative that all faculty use their official ASU email account—and not those from other educational institutions or from commercial email services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, and the like—to communicate with students.  Conversely, instructors should require their students to communicate with them either from within Canvas or by using their official ASU email accounts.

FERPA

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act is a federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. For detailed information about how FERPA affects you as an instructor, visit this link: https://students.asu.edu/policies/ferpa. It is best practice to obtain a FERPA waiver before providing a reference or a letter of recommendation for any student.

In the unlikely event that you are contacted by family members of your students, we have developed a template for you to use to communicate with such people.  Specifically, we need faculty to explain that they are constrained in such communications by FERPA.  Please be sure to use this template in your very first communication with any family member or friend of a student and do not have any further communications with such people until you have a signed FERPA waiver.

Final Exams or Experiences

ASU policy specifically prohibits faculty members from administering final exams (or similar summative assessments) during the final week of classes for all in-person courses.  Thus, all instructional faculty members are required to teach for the 15 weeks of the semester and then administer a final assessment during finals week, which is the 16th and final week of the semester. By contrast, faculty teaching online are required to administer their final exams (or similar summative assessments) on the last day of an online session. For more information, consult ASU's official policy on final exams at this link: https://www.asu.edu/aad/manuals/acd/acd304-01.html).

Grading

Combating Grade Inflation

Over the past several years, we have made real strides as a School to combat grade inflation in our undergraduate courses.  We expect our faculty to create challenging courses, but then help students meet those challenges.  Put differently, courses that assess student learning with objective questions that test mere recall of information do not live up to our expectations.  We want our faculty to develop students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving skills.  We also expect our faculty to help our students become effective communicators—both orally and in writing.  And we expect faculty to grade fairly, but with rigor.  None of our courses or faculty members should be “easy As.”  In fact, our expectation is that “average” work receives the grade of “C.” For more information about the problem of grade inflation, read this article that appeared in U.S. News and World Report.

Grading Standards

Grades should be associated with corresponding levels of student achievement:

• “A”  -   Excellent.  Performance of the student has been at the highest level, showing sustained excellence in meeting all course requirements and exhibiting an unusual degree of intellectual initiative.
  
  
• “B”  -   Good. Performance of the student has been at a high level, showing consistent and effective achievement in meeting course requirements.
  
  
• “C”  -   Average. Performance of the student has been at an adequate level, meeting the basic requirements of the course.
  
  
• “D”  -   Passing.  Performance of the student has been less than adequate, meeting only the bare minimum course requirements.
  
  
• “E”  -   Failure. Performance of the student has been such that minimal course requirements have not been met.

Honors

Faculty may receive requests from students enrolled in Barrett, The Honors College, to complete an "honors contract" in order for the student to receive honors credit for a particular course. 

Mentoring Hours

When a faculty member agrees to supervise an honors contract, he or she is making a commitment to mentor the student with whom the faculty member is entering the honors contract for a minimum of eight hours.  This may mean weekly or bi-weekly meetings for 30 to 60 minutes.  This may mean spending a full day working on a project together. There are no prescribed requirements for how the eight-hour minimum of mentoring might unfold, so long as the faculty member is actually working with the student for at least eight hours over the course of a 15-week semester or 7.5-week online session.

CCJ Standardized Honors Contracts

The School established a series of four standardized honors contract options for CCJ students and faculty in order to harmonize the expectations for honors credit within the major.  This helps to reducing inter-faculty disparities concerning the expectations for honors contract credit. In addition, a customized option may be approved by the Undergraduate Committee. 

• Option A: Observational Learning Assignment – Faculty may opt to require their Barrett students to engage in observational learning in the community.  This might involve the student doing a “ride along” with police, observing court proceedings, touring correctional facilities, or otherwise observing some aspect of the criminal justice system “in action.”  Students are expected to spend four to six hours conducting such observations.  They must then write a report on their observations.  But the report must not merely summarize the student’s observations.  Honors students are expected to compare and contrast their observations with the material being taught in the course for which the honors contract is approved.  This should involve, at minimum, critically analyzing how the student’s observations compare with the textbook and primary sources of academic scholarship.  Papers submitted in satisfaction of observational learning assignments must be between 8 and 10 pages in length, excluding references.

• Option B: Leading a Class Session – Faculty may opt to prepare their Barrett students to prepare and teach a class session of at least 60 minutes in length.  The purpose of this type of honors contract assignment is to allow the student to demonstrate sufficient mastery of relevant course material (i.e., book chapters, primary-source articles, etc.) such that the student is able to teach his or her peers effectively. Faculty members opting for this type of extended oral presentation are encouraged to require their honors students to integrate various pedagogical methods into their classroom-based teaching, such as multimedia presentations, lecture, discussion, and an in-class cooperative learning activity.

• Option C: Media Assignment – Every day, mass media in the United States present news stories relevant to crime and justice.  Faculty might option to have their Barrett students conduct a detailed analysis of such media depictions.  This might take the form of a detailed case study in which the student investigates the news story from a variety of media sources and then writes a critical examination of how different media sources presented the case.  Alternatively, this might take the form of a content analysis of multiple news stories on a particular topic (e.g., how different Arizona newspapers cover gang-related crime in the Valley; how the Phoenix-based Arizona Republic differs in its coverage of a particular criminal justice issue from the way the Tucson-based Arizona Daily Star covers that same issue).  This type of assignment should require students to adhere to a valid social science method (case study, quantitative content analysis, qualitative content analysis, etc.) for gathering and analyzing media stories as a form of data.  Moreover, students must write-up their research in a formal paper that is at least 10 pages in length.

• Option D: Perceptions Research Critique – Various agencies, companies, and researchers routinely conduct polls or surveys to assess how the members of the public feel about a wide variety of issues, many of which concern criminology and criminal justice.  Faculty might opt to have their Barrett students critique the methodology of one or more polls or research studies by examining the sampling frames and methods, as well as the phrasing of the substantive questions posed to respondents.  Special attention should be paid to issues of reliability, validity, and generalizability.  Students must be required to write-up their critiques in a formal paper that is at least 10 pages in length.

• Option E:  Customized Honors Contract – The goal of standardizing honors contract is to bring uniformity to a process that has suffered from unfair disparities.  But one of the negative consequences of standardization might be the stifling of creative learning experiences. To prevent such an outcome, if any members of the CCJ faculty have other approaches to honors contracts that they would like to utilize, they may submit a short written request for an exception to the policy outlined in this memorandum.  The request for an exception should summarize the proposed honors contract work in a single paragraph, much like the options summarized in this policy. Such requests should be sent via email to Dr. Hank Fradella ([email protected]) who serves as the Director of the School’s undergraduate programs and Faculty Honors Advisor.  He will, in turn, forward the request to the other members of the Undergraduate Committee for approval. 

Consequences of a Student Failing to Complete an Honor Contract

When faculty members receive an electronic request from Barrett asking about the supervision of an honors contract, there is a field in which faculty members are supposed to indicate the consequences of the student failing to meet the specified outcomes of the honors contract.  Most CCJ faculty either leave this section blank or, alternatively, state “none” (or some similar wording).  In other words, if the student does not do what he or she promised to do, there are often no consequences in CCJ courses other than not earning honors credit for the course.  Barrett administrators asked us to change this practice for the following reason: The leading predictor of Barrett students successfully completing honors contracts in a timely manner is whether supervising faculty members established any consequences for the students failing to meet the specified objectives of the honors contract.  Barrett administrators, therefore, encourage all faculty to specify that if a Barrett student fails to deliver a satisfactory honors contract project by the agreed upon date, there will be some specific consequence, such as a student’s final course grade being docked a full letter grade.  Because Barrett students tend to be highly motivated to attain high grades, this potential consequence is often an effective motivator for students to take their honors contracts seriously.  We therefore urge you to consider this approach or something similar to it.

Instructor Evaluations

Each spring, all lecturers, instructors, and Faculty Associates will receive a performance evaluation.  This evaluation will be based on a number of factors, including, at minimum, (1) student feedback on evaluations from each course taught; (2) grade distributions from each course taught; and (3) the course syllabus for each course taught.  Because full-time faculty, including lecturers and instructors, are required to submit an updated CV and Faculty Activities Report (FAR) each year, data from those submissions will also be included in annual performance evaluations. (Faculty Associates do not submit an annual FAR.) Finally, individual factors may also affect a faculty member's annual performance evaluation. Such factors include, but are not limited to, whether a faculty member responds quickly to emails from students and School or College administrators and staff, or whether meritorious grade appeals and student grievances have been upheld through the applicable processes.

Internships

For information about our School's internship program, visit this webpage: https://ccj.asu.edu/internships.

Overrides

Please do not tell students that you will allow them to be added to your course.  As a function of a variety of factors (fire codes, prerequisite completion, academic probation restrictions, etc.), only authorized School personnel may issue an override to allow a student into a course. Students can email our Academic Advising Manager, Irma Canseco ([email protected]), with requests for overrides, but there are no guarantees such requests will be approved.

Please direct students seeking overrides from Irma to inlude the following information when they submit override requests:

• First Name, Last Name
  
  
• ASU ID Number (Requests will not be considered or reviewed without an ASU ID number)
  
  
• Course & Class Number (ex. CRJ 305, class number 12345)
  
  
• Semester, Session (ex. Fall 2019, Session B)
  
  
• Request type (Pre-requisite, Section Full, Course Permission)
  
  
• Short Reason or Justification for the request (what do we need to know to consider your request)

Parking for Guest Speakers

Contact Nancy Johnson ([email protected]) for questions regarding parking passes for guests.  She can also be reached by phone at (602)496-2332.

Payroll and Human Resources Questions

If you have questions about your pay or other human resources issues, please contact the Business Operations Specialist, Sr., for our School, Ayo Ajulo. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or by phone at (602) 496-1849.

School Administration and Staff

• The leadership team of the School is comprised of the School Director, the Associate Director of the School, the Director of the PhD program, and the Director of master's degree programs. Their names and contact information are listed on this webpage.

Syllabus Templates