UGC RAE 1999

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UGC RAE 1999
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Guidance Notes

• 22 Jan 1999
• on UGC Web

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History

• RAE1 1993
• RAE2 1996
• RAE3 1999

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Immediate purpose

• Funding T R
• But R is not everything !
• Public accountability
• Induce improvements

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Principles

• Assess CC
• Aggregate individuals
• Based on output
• Threshold measurement

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New features

• 1. Broaden research
• 2. Emphasize not assessing individuals
• 3. Look for coherence
• institution
• CC
• individual

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1. Broaden definition

• Discovery
• Integration
• Application
• Teaching
• Carnegie Foundation Scholarship Reconsidered
  (1990)

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Discovery

• The scholarship of discovery, at its best,
  contributes not only to the stock of human
  knowledge but also to the intellectual climate of
  an institution. It is a scholarly investigation,
  closest to what is meant when academics speak of
  "research", that confronts the unknown and
  creates new knowledge.

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Discovery (contd)

• Not just the outcomes, but the process, and
  especially the passion, give meaning to the
  effort.

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Integration

• It is a serious, disciplined work that seeks to
  interpret, draw together and bring new insight to
  bear on original research. The scholarship is
  closely related to discovery. Such work is
  increasingly important as traditional
  disciplinary categories prove confining, forcing
  new topologies of knowledge.

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Integration (contd)

• This scholarship also means interpretation,
  fitting one's own research -- or the research of
  others -- into larger intellectual patterns. A
  variety of scholarly trends -- interdisciplinary,
  interpretive, integrative, are examples of
  scholarship of integration.

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Application

• It is a dynamic process of creating new
  intellectual understandings arising out of theory
  and practice. The term itself may be misleading
  if it suggests that knowledge is first
  "discovered" and then "applied". The process is
  in fact more dynamic new intellectual
  understanding can arise out of vital interaction
  between theory and practice, and one renews the
  other.

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Teaching

• It is a process that transforms and extends
  knowledge while transmitting an intelligible
  account of knowledge to the learners.

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Distribution

• Expect distribution of submissions to be
  reasonable given
• nature of subject
• role and mission ( strategy statement)
• Scoring will be without regard to distribution

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Research index

• p 100 x A / T
• T number of academic staff in a cost centre
  (who meet certain criteria) in fte
• A the number among these judged to have
  reached or surpassed the quality threshold,
  including fractional counts

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2. De-emphasize individual

• Will not use active researcher (AR)
• of AR ? research index
• Individual results will not be
• kept
• released
• used
• More a matter of adopting less misleading
  nomneclature

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3. Look for coherence

• Institution --- strategy statement
• CC --- Table 1
• Individual submissions --- Table 3

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Number who reach quality threshold

• 1. Submit
• 2. Assess

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1. Submit

• Period of assessment
• What to submit
• Definition of output
• Number of items
• Co-authors

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Period of assessment

• 4 years
• 1 Jan 95 --- 31 Dec 98

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What to submit

• up to 5 best research output items within the
  period of assessment,
• if considered appropriate, one exceptional
  research output item outside assessment period.

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Output

• innovation AND
• contribute to scholarship AND
• publicly accessible AND
• of interest to peers and generalizable.
• does not matter whether funded by the UGC

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Specifically

• any publication, patent, artifact, etc.,
• published or made publicly available within the
  assessment period or
• not yet published, but officially accepted in
  that period
• other output e.g. drama, concert performance,
  video tape, computer software, buildings,
  creative work that can be evaluated

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Number of items

• Quality, not quantity
• May submit fewer than 5
• Can meet threshold on the basis of even one
• In the majority of cases, a clear decision should
  be able to be made on the basis of 3

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Co-authors

• Individuals are proxies for the CC
• Need to form a view on the CC's involvement
• Not a multiplier if judged to have made
  significant intellectual contribution, not
  pro-rated or discounted

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2. Assess

• Panels
• Quality threshold

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Quality threshold

• Quality of output equates to an attainable level
  of excellence appropriate to the discipline in
  Hong Kong, and showing some evidence of
  international excellence.
• Then to give special recognition for societal
  relevance, symbiosis with industry, commerce and
  government, and/or with local culture and society.

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Comparability

• Each panel to translate general definition into
  more precise benchmarks
• Strive for broad comparability across disciplines

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• Attainable
• international excellence
• international vs local

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Holistic view

• View submission as a whole,
• Not score each item individually, not n/5.
• Evaluate based on best 3

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Quality

• Judged on own merits
• Not on venue / category / language

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Results

• No individually identifiable scores
• Total score of CC to Head of the institution
  concerned
• sector-wide average and median (if not fewer
  than three institutions)

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Rectifying misconceptions

• "UGC requires every individual academic to
  produce 5 international journal papers"