Faculty Success

In 2025, we added a screen called Guest Lectures in the Teaching/Mentoring section. This is where you can enter teaching contributions in courses for which you were not an instructor of record. All courses for which you were an instructor of record are added by CALS Administration to Scheduled Teaching.

Include this activity in Teaching Innovation and Curriculum Development (in 2025 we added a new dropdown menu option for that).

This is considered a course for which you are an instructor of record, so it will be populated for you in Scheduled Teaching. If you want to include a description of the activity and/or a student name, add it to the “Description of the course and your role” free text box in that particular entry.

You can also add an entry for independent study in the Mentoring screen. This screen allows you to enter the name of the student, involvement type, comments, and dates.

The Yearly Advising Summary is for you to enter the total number of undergraduate and graduate students you advised in an academic year. You also have the option to include a description of your advising activities. In 2025 we included extra data fields to distinguish between career advising and academic advising. Career advising includes activities such as meeting with students and writing recommendation letters.

Mentoring allows you to include a name and dates with the description of the mentoring activity. You can also indicate the mentee level (e.g. faculty member, fellow, masters student, undergraduate, etc.).

Mentoring now also includes theses, dissertations, supervised research, and independent study. This screen includes fields for name, title of student’s work, stage of completion, comments, and dates.

You are only able to add one file per course. If you need multiple files, combine them into one PDF before uploading.

These examples should be listed in Contracts, Grants, and Other Research Activities. Select “Internal UW – Campus Grants” from the Sponsoring Organization dropdown.

Roles such as department chair, faculty director, and center director should be entered in the Administrative Assignments screen in the Career Information section. This screen allows you to add a description of your role as well (the description is not included in your FAR, but deans and department chairs can log in and view your comment).

University service examples include service on the APC, curriculum committee, RAC, and award selection committees.

Administrative assignments include roles such as department chair and center director.

Not all fields will be pulled into the FAR, but they can be accessed by Deans and Department Chairs. In addition, you can use the information you enter into Faculty Success for other purposes, so if something is important to you, you should enter it.

In some cases, comments or additional information are critical to understanding an item, but are not included in the FAR by default. In these cases, a faculty member can paste the note into the final FAR before submitting the final PDF to their department.

It’s okay to leave data fields blank if you don’t have a relevant activity–blank data fields just won’t populate when you run your FAR. For example, you may not have any “Notable Deviations from Annual Duties” to include, or you may not have international activities.

Data for the 2025 calendar year needs to be entered by Monday, January 12, 2026.

CALS asks that you enter data for the 2025 calendar year. If you were a member of the CALS faculty in 2024, you already entered your data for that year. You may choose to enter activities prior to January 1, 2024, but it is not required.

The asterisk in front of a screen name indicates that the screen has data fields that will be pulled into the Faculty Activity Report. You may not have activities to enter in each screen, and that is fine. If that is the case, leave it blank. If you want to know exactly which data fields will be in the FAR, click the Reports tab, select CALS Faculty Activity Report, and then click “Download this report’s template” in the upper left corner.

Screens that have data fields that will be pulled into the Faculty Activity Report have an asterisk. You may not have activities to enter in each screen, and that is fine. If that is the case, leave it blank. If you want to know exactly which data fields will be in the FAR, click the Reports tab, select CALS Faculty Activity Report, and then click “Download this report’s template” in the upper left corner.

The only required fields are date fields (at least a year for each activity). If you want information included in your Faculty Activity Report, you need to enter it, but nothing else is required in the sense that the system won’t let you advance if something is blank.

When you pull a report, the date range selected will determine which activities appear in your report. For the CALS FARs, you will be reporting on calendar year 2025 activities. Watermark uses the term “significant dates.” Significant dates establish the timeline of a record and determine if it will be included in a report based on whether the date entered in the significant date field falls within the reporting date range.

A Significant Dates and Reporting help article from Watermark can be found here.

When 2 significant dates are on a screen (e.g., Start/End dates), then ongoing behavior or single day activities can be represented.

• If the activity is “ongoing”, leave End Date blank. As an example, if an activity started on February 12, 2022, and is ongoing, dates would appear as: February 12, 2022 – Present.
• If the activity occurred on one day, only that date should be entered in the End Date field. As an example, if an activity occurred only on October 6, 2024, leave the start date blank and the date would appear as: October 6, 2024.

If more than two significant dates exist, the range will always be the earliest significant date to the latest significant date. For example, in Contracts, Grants and Other Research Activities, you can enter up to three dates: Date Submitted for Funding, Start Date of Funding, End Date of Funding. If you enter all three, the date range would be from Date Submitted – End Date of Funding.

Significant dates must be entered in chronological order on the screen.

Other examples:

• If you just enter a year, the system will consider the date range to be January 1-December 31 of that year.
• If you enter a year and a month, but no day, the system will consider the date range to be the full month (e.g. July 1-31, 2024).

Staff members will not be given access to edit data and faculty members are expected to enter and manage their own data.

Faculty Activity Report (FAR): Annual reports that are used for performance evaluation, merit raises, and post-tenure reviews.

Sections: A way to categorize or group screens (e.g. Teaching/Mentoring).

Screens: The hyperlinked titles in sections. Each screen is an activity type and contains data fields.

Data fields: Get pulled into reports such as the FAR.

Roles:

• All faculty will have access to manage and view their own data
• All chairs will have access to manage and view their own data, as well as that of the faculty members in their department

go.wisc.edu/calsfs or https://www.digitalmeasures.com/login/wisc/faculty/authentication/authenticateShibboleth.do

You will be prompted to use your NetID and login credentials and will authenticate with Duo.