FAQ on College of Engineering Faculty RSCA Metric Points

For External Grants

• How to calculate the grant point if the F&A rate is not at full rate?

  • You earn 1.0 for an external awarded $50K grant with full F&A rate, e.g., 46.5% in AY 2022-23. If the F&A rate is less than that, the earned point will be prorated as follows: (awarded amount / 50000) x (awarded F&A) / (full F&A)

• Is the full awarded amount eligible for grant metric point?

  • Not necessarily. The awarded budget may have costs that do not charge F&A, for example, equipment and participant costs do not usually carry F&A. In calculating the point, we add the modified direct cost and its F&A to come up with the amount that is eligible. See below for an example, in which the eligible grant amount of the first year would be ($68260+$31740).

    

• If the grant spans multiple years, shall I claim all the points in one year or spread it across multiple years?

  • You can do it either way. Claiming all the points in one year will give you a bigger boost in your metric point this year, but the point will fall out of the 3-year calculation window sooner than spreading it over multiple years.

• If I plan to claim points for a multi-year grant across years, do I need to create a new RTrack entry each year?

  • Yes. You need to create a new RTrack entry each year to specify the award amount that you would like to invoke (i.e., converting to point) in that reporting cycle.

• If I have included course release time in my funded grant and I want to request 1:1 course release matching from the college, how will that impact my metric point?

  • For grants submitted after Fall 2023 (8/21/2023):
    The college will no longer provide 1:1 course release matching. 

    For grants submitted prior to Fall 2023:
    If your funded grant carries full F&A rate, you can request 1:1 course release matching from the college. You can simply indicate that in the Comments section of your grant entry. In this case, we will deduct the funded amount that corresponds to your release time, i.e., (release time cost + fringe benefits + F&A) from the invoked amount in determining your grant point for the cycle. 

• Is approved budget file required in my RTrack grant entry?

  • Yes. We need to see the budget details for the metric point calculation, including the modified direct cost, F&A, and whether there is release time budgeted or not.

For Papers

• Do I need to upload the final published papers in RTrack?

  • Yes. Only published or archived papers earn metric points and they should be uploaded in RTrack.

• For a conference paper to be considered for 0.4 point, do I need to upload its peer-review summary?

  • Yes. The paper should have gone through and extensive review of the full paper or a paper digest of 5 pages or longer. The peer-review summary uploaded to RTrack needs to include comments from two or more reviewers.

• If my conference paper abstract has been peer reviewed and its full text has been published in a proceedings, how many metric point can I earn?

  • 0.2 point if you are the first author or the corresponding author of the paper.

• Will you consider the impact factors on the journal website?

  • No. We will only refer to either the Journal Impact Factor by the Journal Citation Reports (accessible from SJSU’s library website) or the Quartile information by Scimago Journal and Country Rank. 

Additional College Release Time Calculation

• What value should I use for NC when running the algorithm in “Additional CoE Tab” on RTrack?

  • NC is normally set to 3, except for faculty who have been at SJSU for less than three years. For example, in the Spring 2023 reporting cycle, NC is set to 2.33 for faculty who started in Fall 2020, covering the period from Fall 2020 to Dec. 2022, and is set to 1.33 for faculty who started in Fall 2021, covering the period from Fall 2021 to Dec. 2022.