Talk:Research Assessment Exercise

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[edit] Rankings

These rankings are meaningless without an indication of how they were arrived at. Are the average ratings 6.69, 6.68 etc. out of 7? The document from which these numbers come has no such indication.

Given that the RAE assesses universities at department level, surely such rankings should be given at that level? I would suggest that this section should be removed. --Albinoduck 15:02, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Moved this section here from the article

==Controversy==

The RAE remains controversial in some Universities; it is believed by some academics to be a sham exercise. The most commonly cited issue is that the total pool of money available for research funding typically does not increase even if more universities achieve higher RAE scores. Thus, no matter how research improves, the total number of universities receiving funding remains the same. The RAE is then weighted to ensure that the universities who do receive funding are those politically accepted as being established research centres, such as the Russell Group members.

Many changes made to the RAE are interpreted in the light of this view. For example, cynics argue that, after the established research centres were awarded 5's in the 1992 RAE, a number of other universities improved their research standards to attempt to earn extra money. Had the RAE proceeded as before, these universities would have received 5's in the 1996 and thus qualified for extra funding, but this could not be permitted to happen since no extra money was actually made available: thus, the 5* grade was created for the research centres, moving the goalposts out of the reach of those universities who attempted to improve. Equally, cynics argue that the 2008 variation of assessing individual researchers is designed to reward universities who employ many members of staff in pure research posts - which, "coincidentally", corresponds to the same round of research centres who employed pure research staff using the funding gotten from high ratings in the previous RAE.

The RAE is also criticised for how it assesses research quality. Given the scale of the exercise and a desire to quantify research quality, much of the RAE relies on simple measures, like the impact factor of the journal in which a paper is published. This is argued to be a poor measure of research quality and distorting of academic activity.

End of section moved from article

It strikes me that this section is little more than a POV screed full of weasel words and is utterly without references. I imagine some of this can in fact be referenced by using media sources and appropriately rewriting the section. I imagine that much of it cannot be, other than in mutterings during coffee breaks. As it stands, it falls well short of WP:NPOV and WP:NOR, and makes no effort in reaching WP:V. I'm not being biased here, just firm. When/if time permits, I will try to recraft this more appropriately. -Splash^talk 22:07, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Soap Box

Well I think that there are a lot of academics out there who want to get on their soap box about the "failings" of the RAE, I think as long as any Wikipedian contributions to the subject are properly referenced, then this is in keeping with the spirit of the thing. Which hopefully this article will evolve into.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by RapidAssistant (talk • contribs) 08:49, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

I am not sure how to interpret this. But in any case, it doesn't matter how thoroughly cited something is, it cannot be allowed to become a "soap box" (see WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not a soapbox, point 1). The contents of the article should be balanced, neutral and factual. Any soapboxing should be promptly edited out. -Splash - tk 15:48, 28 June 2006 (UTC)