Adding on to Felix's e-mail about graduate faculty status, here are my thoughts:

Much of the debate about quality arises because there is insufficient output from faculty. If we all produced voluminously, this issue of categorizing journals would be a non-issue. No one would care. But, given the reality, here are my suggestions for the process of evaluating full-full/full-limited status.

1. The department will maintain an active and update list of journals relevant to our field.

2. Journals will be grouped into clusters. Each cluster will contain journals of similar quality. This quality will be expressed as a range, rather than as a point estimate. For example, Cluster A might contain journals which lie in the quality range of [10,15]. Providing a range, rather than a point estimate, allows some flexibility to rate papers within that cluster.
3. Create a quality/quantity trade-off curve for the department. Some sample curves are shown below.
4. If a faculty's output falls above the curve, that would indicate satisfaction of grad faculty status, for example.

This solves several issues:

1. The endless debate on whether a particular journal is A, A+, A-, A+-. We can use the work done by the Ph.D. students and other faculty to classify the journals into ranges easily.

2. Provides some flexibility in rating papers for quality within a group.