Assessment, selectivity and excellence: getting the balance right

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Assessment, selectivity and excellence getting
the balance right

• Sir Howard Newby

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1986 and all that

• A reminder of the RAEs origins
• expanding student numbers without commensurate
  increase in research funding
• ensuring that resources followed performance
• selectivity Vs concentration
• the importance of dual support

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Driving excellence

• The key issue is that funding should incentivise
  research excellence
• Everything else is a second order issue as to how
  this is best achieved
• HEFCEs policy has been robust on the former,
  whilst having an open mind on the latter

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Advantages of the RAE

• Benchmarking of performance
• Driven research excellence and banished much
  mediocrity
• Led to the active management of the research base
  in HEIs
• Raised research standards and efficiency
• Sustained the UKs position in the global
  research economy

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Disadvantages of the RAE

• Encouraged an over-emphasis on research at the
  expense of other HEI functions
• Encouraged a restricted range of research outputs
• Created a ceiling effect for the top rated units
• Encouraged the perpetuation of disciplinarity

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The RAE and wider HE policies

• Selectivity Vs concentration
• Research, knowledge transfer and learning and
  teaching inter-related
• Huge incentives for research Vs virtually none
  elsewhere
• What are the incentives for excellence in non
  research-led HEIs?

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Metrics alone are not enough

• Metrics will not remove distortions and
  game-playing, merely provide different ones
• The danger is that spurious focus on metrics will
  perpetuate the absence of clear thinking on wider
  policy issues
• A wider range of incentives is needed to ensure
  an appropriate functional differentiation of the
  sector in the future

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Winners and Losers

• Running a beauty competition on metrics based
  models is no substitute for policy
• Babies and bathwater