Using the Committee Consensus Summary

This article explains how to use the Committee Consensus Summary in Reviews, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT). It covers where to find the summary, what it shows, and how consensus percentages are calculated. This article is intended for Committee Chairs and Committee Members participating in a review that includes a Committee Step.

Prerequisites

• You are participating in a submission on an active Committee Step.
• The review form used on that step includes at least one rating scale or dropdown field. The Committee Consensus Summary is not available on forms without these field types.
• At least one committee member has published a response to a qualifying field. Until this happens, the summary will display an empty state.

Note: Reviews, Promotion, and Tenure is a paid module for Faculty Success, designed to guide candidates, reviewers, and administrators through on-campus review processes such as Annual Reviews and Promotion & Tenure.

Accessing the Committee Consensus Summary

The Committee Consensus Summary is available in two places, depending on your role: the Inbox Summary View for Committee Chairs reviewing multiple submissions at once, and the Committee Consensus Summary tab on an individual submission.

Inbox Summary View

If you are a Committee Chair, you can also view consensus across all of your active submissions at once. From Reviews, open the View Tasks by Committee Consensus view to see every qualifying submission in one place.

Each row in this view displays:

• Process Name
• Step
• Candidate
• Department (if applicable)
• Due Date
• Date Received
• Consensus Status (for example, "4 of 5 reviewed") with a High, Medium, or Low indicator

Consensus indicators use the following ranges:

• High: 80–100%
• Medium: 51–79%
• Low: 0–50%

Note: This view does not refresh automatically when task filters are applied elsewhere in your Inbox. Reopen the view to see the latest data.

Committee Consensus Summary Tab

This tab appears on the submission itself, alongside the other tabs available on an active Committee Step. Access depends on your role:

• Committee Members can view the tab once all of the following are true: 
  - The Committee Step is the active step, 
  - Member Visibility is enabled for the step, 
  - The member form includes qualifying fields, and 
  - You have published (not just drafted) your own response.
   
• Committee Chairs can view the tab once the Committee Step is the active step and the member form includes qualifying fields. Chair access does not depend on the Member Visibility setting; you'll see the tab once you've published or submitted your own response.

Note: Member Visibility controls whether committee members can see each other's published responses and the Consensus Summary. As Committee Chair, your access to the tab is tied to your own response, not this setting.

Once the submission moves off the Committee Step, the Committee Consensus Summary tab and its data are no longer available to anyone. As is the case with Committee Member responses, the Committee Consensus Summary is not saved as a part of the official submission.

How Consensus Is Calculated

Consensus is calculated at two levels: individual fields and the form as a whole.

Field-Level Consensus

For each rating scale or dropdown field, Faculty Success calculates the percentage of committee members who selected the Top Response (the most frequently selected option) out of everyone who provided a response to that field.

• Calculation: (Number of members who selected the Top Response ÷ Total number of collected responses for that field) × 100
• Fields with no collected responses are excluded from this calculation and not displayed.
• Selectable values such as "Abstained" or "Not Applicable" count as collected responses. A field left blank, with no option selected, does not.

Example: Recommendation for Promotion

• Committee size: 5 members
• Collected responses: 4 members selected "Yes - Recommended" (the Top Response), 1 selected "NO - Not Recommended."
• Calculation: (4 ÷ 5) × 100 = 80%
• Display: Top Response: Yes - Recommended | Consensus: 80%

Form-Level Consensus

The form-level consensus percentage gives you a single number representing overall agreement across the entire form, shown in the high-level summary. It's calculated across all fields that have at least one collected response; fields with no responses are excluded.

Example: Form with four fields

In this example, Administrative Efficiency has no collected responses, so it's left out of the overall average, which reflects only Teaching Effectiveness, Research Productivity, and Service Contributions.

For each qualifying field within the tab, you can expand or collapse the results individually to review details as needed.

Qualifying Fields and Scope

If the member form has no qualifying fields (no rating scales or dropdowns), the Committee Consensus Summary tab does not display at all. If the form has qualifying fields but no one has published a response yet, the tab shows the following message: "Consensus Summary not available. The summary will be displayed once reviews containing rating scale or dropdown responses are submitted."

If a submission includes more than one Committee Step, only the currently active step's data is shown. Data from prior or upcoming committee steps is not included in the summary.

For more on setting up committee steps and Member Visibility, visit How to Configure Steps in a Workflow Template.