An optimal evaluation system should have five features if it is to both stimulate academic work and lead to fair decisions: clear expectations, feedback on performance, formative evaluation, summative evaluation, and differential rewards. Women and minorities were asked about their experiences in relation to these features. None had received anything they regarded as a job description; they suspected that the skill with which they figured out what they were supposed to do was one criterion on which they would be evaluated. These faculty drew conclusions about how well they were doing from internalized personal standards, from institutional information, and from feedback in the wider scholarly community. All informants described themselves as relatively distant from the social circles of their white male colleagues, but they disagreed strongly about the consequences of that distance on their careers. None of the respondents felt they were being rewarded disproportionately because of their race or sex. They felt the equal of, or better than, their white male colleagues, but several said they received fewer rewards and incentives than their colleagues received or deserved. Based on this study, university performance evaluation procedures are not optimal. (BW)