News & Views item - August 2006

 

 

The Research Quality Framework -- the Saga Continues. (August 30, 2006)

    Whenever Nick Park and Aardman Animations decide that they've done enough with Creature Comforts, they might consider doing a new series of interviews with the political, bureaucratic  and academic animals in Australia -- and the UK -- to discuss the Research Quality Framework (RQF, Oz) and the Research Assessment Exercise ( RAE, UK)

 from which it is in the process of being stillborn.

 

On march 22, 2006 The Guardian (UK) announced

A unique British institution was sentenced to the axe this afternoon - though few in the Commons or outside realised it from Gordon Brown's [Chancellor of the Exchequer] rapid-fire delivery.

The research assessment exercise (RAE) - a gargantuan exercise in which every active researcher in every university in the UK is painstakingly assessed by panels of other academics - is to go.

And within UK academic circles there was an almost universal sigh of relief.

 

But it wasn't long before soul searching and considerable consternation ensued when the matter of what its replacement should be was mooted. A statement from the UK Treasury showed Mr Brown's inclinations:

The government is strongly committed to the dual support system and to rewarding research excellence, but recognises some of the burdens imposed by the existing Research Assessment Exercise. The government's firm presumption is that after the 2008 RAE the system for assessing research quality and allocating 'quality-related' (QR) funding from the DfES [Department for Education and Skills] will be mainly metrics based.

Now pro vice-principal of the University of Glasgow, Peter Holmes, attending an international research conference in Brisbane last week, when interviewed by The Australian said, "I don't think Britain is prepared to go straight to a metrics system without a lot more development, a lot more sophisticated analysis of what it would cost to do it and what would be included in the metrics program to deal with this range of disciplines.  There's a whole range of questions and it will start to change behaviour. Universities will start to recruit big earners; that could operate against younger staff who have not yet established funding streams."

 

Professor Holmes said Britain's research-intensive universities supported a hybrid system, with a core of peer review that was more informed by metrics than in the past.

 

And in his view while the RAE had improved greatly the quality of research in Britain, it had possibly downgraded the value of teaching.

 

One interpretation of that assessment might be that if the UK had focused on the existing peer review system and worked on improvements to it, it would have been far better and certainly less profligate with funds and academics and bureaucrats times than the "gargantuan" Research Assessment Exercise.

 

Also attending the Brisbane conference was University of Exeter visiting  professor Chris Caswill  who while agreeing that peer review outperformed metrics in many ways, he considered it was inherently conservative and exhibited bias in areas such as gender.

 

Surely that suggests that what is required are improving modifications rather than throwing out the bath water and replacing it with toxic dry-cleaning agents.

 

In the meantime the RQF development advisory group [RQFDAG], appointed by the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop and chaired by Chief Scientist, Jim Peacock, has been considering the skeleton preferred model provided to the Minister by the Expert Advisory Group convened by her predecessor.

 

According to Griffith University's higher education policy analyst, Gavin Moodie, "[The] development of the research quality framework is drifting without a clear direction and with a diminishing prospect of being implemented in a reasonable way within a reasonable time.... While the [RQFDAG] is spending time revisiting and in some cases reversing fundamental design principles decided by the previous expert group, no apparent progress has been made in appointing the expert assessment panels that are central to the whole process. They need time to develop discipline-specific guidelines, which need to be published well in advance to give universities and their researchers enough time to develop their submissions."

 

Of course the Federal government has still to even indicate what additional resources would be provided to the universities, if any, to implement an RQF. But as Dorothy Illing points out, "There is still no decision on who should be assessed. The development advisory group flags three options: that institutions nominate their own research groupings for assessment; that all research-active staff are assessed; or that all research-active staff are included in a university's submission, but that it can still organise its own groupings."

 

As matters "progress" it's a right  Shemozzle with the universities being collectively Shlimazels.

 

By way of explanation, "If a shlemiel is one who always spills his soup, the schlimazel is the one on whom it always lands."

 

 

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