DUTIES SPECIFIED IN BYLAWS (Article II, Section 3):

1. Substitute for First President-Elect, if necessary.

2. Serve as a member of the Policy Committee. In ABS, ex officio members of committees are full voting members.

3. Serve as a member of the Education Committee.

4. Serve as Chairperson of the Allee Award Committee.

5. Every fourth Second President-elect (starting in 1996-1997) will be responsible for liability and director's and officers insurance for the ABS.

DUTIES SPECIFIED BY POLICY:

1. Conduct the Warder Clyde Allee Award session for best student paper according to Section 9.

2. Serve as Chairperson of ad hoc Appeals Committees in cases concerning Code of Ethics (Section 23).

3. Responsible for ABS insurance (every fourth Second President-elect, Section 19).

SUGGESTIONS:

1. The following suggestions are for the Allee Award activities:

a. Papers given in the Allee session must represent the work of the author in the same sense as independent research for a Ph.D. dissertation.

b. Submit call for participants to Secretary for February Newsletter and to Central Office for website.

c. Judges. The selection of judges should be done early, well before the deadline for submission of papers for the annual meeting. This is necessary for several reasons. First, the Program Officer will have to assure that there are no conflicts between the time when the judges must serve and when they must give their own papers. Second, if it is necessary to rank order the contestants' papers, which must be done immediately upon receiving them. Third, it is difficult to get people to be judges so it is often necessary to go back a second or third time to find enough well-qualified individuals. Experience has shown that it is wise to have a mix of junior and senior individuals involved in judging. While there is no fixed number, a good combination is two junior plus two senior individuals. Judges should not have a conflict of interest; thus if the Second President-Elect has a student entered in the session, he/she should not take part in the judging. It might then be necessary to appoint enough judges to have an odd number in case of a tie.

d. Judging. The Allee Award has many objectives, but the original and perhaps primary one is the promoting of excellent communication of scientific findings. The Award, understandably, has come to mean more than that. No one would give a high rating to a trivial paper just because it was elegantly presented and illustrated. Thus the evaluation of the Award has come to be based on equal mix of quality of presentation and quality of science. A number of forms have evolved whose objective has been to promote unbiased scoring. However, no matter how good the form, each judge tends to develop opinions based on unmeasurable factors. The chief functions of the score sheet, then are (1) to facilitate a balanced consideration of each of the papers in the final judging, and (2) to alert the contestants to the factors involved in presenting a competitive paper. Of course, the contestants should be sent a copy of the score card as soon as possible after the annual meeting concludes. There is generally reasonable agreement on what constitutes good presentation. The difficulties arise in assessing scientific merit. Ideally, the student will have presented an original question that has been resolved through imaginative experiments and penetrating analysis. However, some students come up with original hypotheses but produce pedestrian solutions, whereas others tackle long-standing and well-known questions but lay them to rest with a magnificent experimental attack. These trade-offs are not easy to evaluate. We are inclined to favor a paper that addresses the problem causing the most excitement at the moment. Perhaps that is as it should be.

e. Announcement. Under no conditions are the results of the contest to be given out before the night of the banquet when they are actually announced formally by the Second President-Elect.

2. Submit annual report, including expenses and proposed budget, to Executive Committee.

3. Submit annual report, correspondence files, and other appropriate archive materials to Historian, including Allee Award judges, winners and honorable mentions, materials used in the session (rating forms), and correspondence relevant to the session.

4. Provide suggestions to the Parliamentarian regarding revisions to this statement on the duties of this office.