Date published: 2006/06/13
The BBC says:
University departments will be allocated research funding based on how much they get in grants from business, under government plans.
The Research Assessment Exercise, where an academic's work is judged by their peers, would be replaced with a more figures-based system from 2009/10.
It would also look at the number of researchers in a department and the number of publications.
The government said the planned system would reduce "red tape".
The RAE assesses the quality of research in UK universities and gives the biggest grants to the highest-rated departments.
The next RAE, in 2008, will be the last. Until then, it will run in tandem with an experimental "metrics" system, based on statistics.
It is intended that the metrics system will take over in 2009/10, especially for mathematical and scientific subjects.
Humanities and languages departments are expected to retain a greater element of peer review.
No matter what system they come up with it will be arbitrary and lead to stupidities and unfairness. The current system means that universities are desperate to hire new lecturers just before every RAE review so that they can claim those people's papers as their own (papers are counted for the department where you are located when the RAE is done, not for the department where the work was done). Indeed right now you will find departments all over Cambridge, and no doubt all over the UK, are hiring like mad.
And there has never been a government initiative which reduced red tape, so you can guarantee this one will not either. And with any new assessment methodology the universities will take a bit of time to figure out how to play the system, and then they will sensibly do that.
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