As you may know, SIGCSE strives for high-quality reviews for papers to provide authors with feedback so they may improve their work for presentation or future submission. To that end, we strive to have each submission receive 5 reviews. Reviewers will each review 3-4 full papers (max 6 pages each), or 6 non-paper submissions (2 pages each). In addition to these reviews, each paper along its reviews will be carefully meta-reviewed by an Associate Program Chair (APC). The Associate Program Chairs, denoted as “Senior PC” members in EasyChair, is responsible for promoting discussion among the reviewers during the discussion phase until the reviewers and APC lead agree on a recommendation about whether the paper should be accepted. The APC member then submits that recommendation to the Program Chairs. The APC and Program Chairs work together to select the final papers. Please note that the numerical scores on each paper are NOT the only considerations for paper acceptance. Novelty, balance of perspectives, diversity, and space/time considerations are also important.
The responsibilities of an Associate Program Chair are to meta-review 8-9 SIGCSE papers and make recommendations for acceptance to the Program Chairs for these papers. Each APC is expected to read their assigned papers, but their primary responsibility is to ensure that (1) each paper receives 5 quality reviews, (2) the reviewers discuss their reviews using the Comments feature in EasyChair, (3) recommendations are made to the Program Chairs for each assigned paper, and (4) the APC writes a meta-review for papers whose reviewers did NOT come to a consensus on their recommendation, or for which they recommend something different than the reviewers. APCs are also responsible for communicating with the Program Chairs about their 8-9 papers. This will be facilitated through a Google Sheet listing each paper and asking APCs for their recommendation to accept/reject, or request discussion.
When making recommendations, APCs are asked to consider how each paper will contribute to an outstanding SIGCSE 2017 program and experience for attendees, as well as how it brings new ideas to the field and practitioners of computer science education. At the end of the reviewing phase, APCs read the reviews for their papers, and prompt the reviewers to engage in discussion using the Comments feature in EasyChair, until all of the reviewers have come to a consensus on whether to accept the paper or not.