This page offers orientation support for the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey portal. Support related to the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey data definitions, collection, validation, and results are addressed on other pages within the portal.

Where can I find information about the Faculty Compensation Survey instructions or directions?

Faculty Compensation Survey instructions may be viewed by selecting the Instructions menu item, which is located under the "Data Collection" and "Documentation" tabs.

I have a question beyond what is covered in the Faculty Compensation Survey instructions. Where can I find answers to commonly asked questions about the Faculty Compensation Survey?

Faculty Compensation Survey most frequently asked questions may be viewed by selecting the FAQ menu item, which is located under the "Documentation" tab. Most questions asked by survey respondents may be addressed by reading the Instructions or FAQ pages, so please refer to them first before contacting the AAUP FCS staff.

What other resources are available in the Faculty Compensation Survey portal?

Users should start by consulting the Instructions and FAQs located under the "Documentation" tab. For additional questions, please contact the AAUP FCS staff at aaupfcs@aaup.org.

Faculty Compensation Survey User Access

Whether the user receives an invitation from the AAUP FCS staff announcing the start of the Faculty Compensation Survey for the current year, or the user is newly added to the institution by the primary contact for the institution, the user will receive an e-mail resembling the below screen capture to initiate access to the Faculty Compensation Survey portal.

Clicking the text Faculty Compensation Survey will direct the user to the Faculty Compensation Survey portal main page, upon which the user will be asked to provide a username and password. The username will be the person’s individual institutional e-mail account (e.g. bullwinkle.moose@wossamotta.edu). The use of shared/departmental email addresses is strongly discouraged due to concerns about data confidentiality and our ability to troubleshoot errors. The link included in the e-mail will provide users the opportunity to create or reset their passwords. Users who receive this email do not need to visit the Faculty Compensation Survey portal main page first. Rather, users may simply click the user password reset link in the email message. The AAUP FCS staff will never have access to user passwords. Users who forget their passwords may obtain new passwords by clicking the "Get a new password" link on the login page.

Starting the Faculty Compensation Survey

Once the user has obtained access to the Faculty Compensation Survey with a valid username and password, the user will need to click the green "Start" tab on the menu immediately below the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey banner. The below screen capture provides a depiction of the location.

Once the user has clicked the "Start" tab, a Terms and Conditions form should appear for first-time users of the site as well as users beginning the Faculty Compensation Survey each year. The AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey Terms and Conditions have long been implicitly associated with the survey and explicitly stated since the 2014-2015 data collection cycle. The below screen capture provides a full version of the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey Terms and Conditions. Once the user has agreed to the Terms and Conditions by clicking the agreement and authorization boxes, and provided a typed (digital) signature and position title, the user will be directed to the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey main page for users. From that page, the user will be provided a menu of options for the Faculty Compensation Survey portal dependent upon their user account access level.

Adding and Editing User Information

Data Managers and System Administrators have the ability to add or delete users for the institution or system by clicking on their user name and selecting "Manage Your Institution's Users". In the below screen capture, the user's name tab appears under "Dr. Barnshaw." To add a user, simply click the "+ Add a User" button located under the institution name. Once the user clicks on the "+ Add a User" button, a user page will appear resembling the "Edit Your Account" page as seen further down this page. To delete a user from your institutional account, identify the user, and on the far right side of the row, select the "Edit" button. Selecting the "Edit" button will take the user to the page to delete the requested user. A user may not be deleted if there are no Data Managers at the institution. A user may also not be deleted unless a prefix is added first and a phone number is provided.

Any user may edit their account by selecting their username on the far right side of the menu and then selecting "Manage Your Account." The "Manage Your Account" will prompt the user to a page with several options. Selecting "Editing Your Account Details" will prompt the user to edit your account which is depicted in the screen capture below.

Editing Institutional Information

A Data Manager or System Administrator may edit the institutional information by selecting the username on the far right menu and selecting "Manager Your Institution" as depicted in the screen capture below.

Downloading and Uploading the Faculty Compensation Survey

Once the user has accepted the survey Terms and Conditions, the user will be redirected to the research portal main page. The "Start" tab will be replaced by a "Data Collection" tab, which allows a user to view survey instructions, download or upload survey data, review survey data, or manually enter survey data on each appropriate form.

Selecting "Data Upload Template" under the "Data Collection" tab will allow users to download a clean, Excel survey template with the fields in Form 1: Institutional Information pre-populated for convenience. The screen capture below provides a description of the download and upload page. Downloading the Excel survey template may take several minutes because the file is being pre-populated by prior institutional information. If the user is unable to successfully download the pre-populated template, please try downloading the blank template.

The Faculty Compensation Survey template may also be uploaded on the "Data Upload Template" page. Uploading a template into the Faculty Compensation Survey will overwrite any data previously entered manually on any of the six forms for that data collection cycle year.

Before uploading the template into the portal, please make sure that all numeric fields have numeric values (e.g. "Conversion Factor" should read 0.818181 not 9/11). Please do not use formulas in place of numeric values (e.g. use 200,000 not 100,000 + E7). Please do not use text values in place of absent data (e.g. If the institution does not offer a supplement to the President/Chancellor leave the cell blank not "NA").

To upload the Excel survey template into the portal, select the "Choose File" button on the "Data Upload Template" page. The "Choose File" button will prompt the user to point the Faculty Compensation Survey to the present location of the Excel file to upload. Once the user selects the location of the file, the title of the file will appear in the Excel file location. Once the filename appears in the "Choose File" text box, please select the "Upload" button. Please click the upload button only once. The upload process may take up to three minutes to complete as the file is being uploaded into the research portal and checked against more than 50 validation rules to improve institutional survey quality.

Validating Faculty Compensation Survey Data

Once the data have been uploaded, an overview of data collection should appear. Users electing to manually enter data in the portal or participating in quality review may view the overview of data collection by clicking on "Overview" which may be found under the "Data Collection" tab.

The Overview tab allows users to view the estimated current progress on total survey completion as well as the total progress on each of the six Faculty Compensation Survey forms as depicted in the screen capture below. The percentage completion bars indicate the number of cells entered relative to the total number of cells, not the progress of uploaded data. An institution need not reach 100 percent completion overall, or on any single form as some institutions may not be able to provide all possible fields. For example, an institution that does not employ any Graduate Teaching Assistants would not be able to complete any of the Graduate Teaching Assistant fields on Form 6: Part-Time Faculty Salary. Please do not enter zero values for cells that do not pertain to your institution. Please leave them blank as leaving them blank will not contribute to norm values.

Using the Overview tab will also allow users to improve the quality of the Faculty Compensation Survey by reviewing any data issues identified by checking user institutional information against more than 50 validation rules within the Faculty Compensation Survey portal. A data issue does not necessarily indicate that an error in quality has occurred but rather, data reported are at variance with what is normally expected from findings produced by current and prior submissions from the Faculty Compensation Survey. If a potential data issue has been identified, a red bar will across the Overview page directly below the menu options as depicted in the screen capture below.

To review the potential data issue, simply click on the "Please review" hyperlink, which will direct the user to the potential issue or issues. If a data issue warning does not appear on the Overview page, it does not necessarily mean that there are no errors with the Faculty Compensation Survey, but rather, the validation rules failed to identify any of the most common data issues.

If you are able to view your data in the Faculty Compensation Survey portal, and you have clicked "Save" or "Save and Continue," you do not need to sign off on each form or click submit upon completion of your submission because your data is already written to the database storing all Faculty Compensation Survey data. In beta testing of the Faculty Compensation Survey, users did not want to have to click a "Confirm" or "Sign Off" button if the button did nothing more than what was already achieved with data in the Faculty Compensation Survey. In the interest of user's time, the AAUP FCS Staff agreed with the beta testers and decided not to require every Data Manager to sign off on every form as that would add needless work for the portal as well as the user.

If an institution has a data issue, clicking on the "Please review" link in the warning band on the Overview page will direct the user to a list of data issues as depicted in the screen capture below. In the below example, the data issue reads "Expenditure for Retirement is less than 5% of salary for Professor 9-Month." This data issue means that for the user's institution when comparing the average salary for the rank of Professor on nine-month contracts, the amount reported by the institution for retirement for Professors on nine-month contracts is less than five percent of the average total.

From the Data Issues page, the user has two options. The user may click "Go to Form 3" which will take the user to the appropriate form to review and if necessary, edit data within the portal. When editing data in the portal, please be sure to click "Save" at the bottom of the page when making changes. If the user uploaded data using a template and wishes to make a change in the template to have a duplicate record stored outside of the Faculty Compensation Survey portal, the user will need to again upload the template to register a template change. The user may also click the "Confirm Data As Is" if the user believes data are correct and that the possible issue does not apply to the user's institution.

If, after reviewing the data issue, the user believes data are accurate for their institution, the user should click on the "Confirm Data As Is" on the "Data Issues" page as identified in the screen capture above. Once the user clicks on the "Confirm Data As Is" button, a text box will appear next to the data issue requesting the user explain their confirmation of data over the data validation system as depicted in the screen capture below. A simple sentence explanation such as "numerous Professors opt out of retirement at institution" will suffice. In this instance, the user simply elected to write "Verified as Accurate. BM." This text lets the AAUP FCS Staff know that the primary contact was the user, (e.g. BM are initials for user "Bullwinkle Moose") that reviewed the data issue and was able to validate the accuracy of the initial value. Once the user has entered text, the user must click the "Save" button to permit the research portal to test the change and update the data issues list for the institution.

Once the user clicks the "Save" button, the Faculty Compensation Survey updates the portal with the text response and tests any new values or the responses against the validation rules within the portal. After completing the validation checks, the system will update the Data Issues page. If there are no data issues, a message will appear stating "We have not found any issues with your data. Great work!" as depicted in the screen capture below.

A message with no data issue does not necessarily indicate that there were no data errors, but rather, no data reported are at variance from normally expected findings produced by current and prior submissions from the Faculty Compensation Survey. It does mean that if there are any other issues to be identified, the primary contact user (Data Manager) will be contacted by the AAUP FCS Staff. If there are no data issues, and the user is not contacted by the AAUP FCS Staff, no further action is required by the user for submission to the Faculty Compensation Survey on behalf of the institution for that year.

Occasionally, a user may encounter a Data Issues screen where there may be one or more issues identified with a submission, but upon review, and signing off on these issues, the system requests to user to "Please Review" even though there is simultaneously a message stating that "We have not found any issues with your data. Great work!" These seemingly incompatible messages generally occur because the Faculty Compensation Survey validation system has found one or more issues, a user has verified data as accurate, and the issue or issues are awaiting further review from AAUP FCS Staff. Once the issue or issues are reviewed, the "Please Review" should disappear, or the AAUP FCS Staff will contact the user. Either way, no further effort is required by the user at that time. Should there be additional need for review, the AAUP FCS Staff will contact the user.

Once all data issues have been reviewed and addressed, users should click the "Submit Your Data" button on the "Data Overview" page. The data are then submitted and locked. If the data need to be unlocked for editing at any time during the data collection, users should click the "Request Unlock" button on the "Data Overview" page to alert AAUP FCS Staff that the request has been made. Users will receive a notification when their data submission has been unlocked for editing and they may make any necessary updates, review their data submission, address any data issues, and re-submit their data.

Exploring Faculty Compensation Survey Results

AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey results (both the Annual Report and the associated published appendices) are available each spring on the AAUP website. Any additions or corrections received after the survey closes may be eligible for inclusion in the corrected appendices, released in late summer. A variety of data products are available for purchase on the order form page. If you have any questions about the data products, please contact aaupfcs@aaup.org.