OMG half of them are below average!!!

[alexwinolj]

The ERA results are now out. Various university departments have been given a score between 1 and 5, where 3 is "world standard" and 4 and 5 are even better [1]. So is this an official acknowledgement that you need to be an alien to thrive in Australia's modern university system? And the media commentary so far suggests that scoring less than 3

Comments

[finella_c]

It was an open secret at my former employer that many academic staff were not research active, and I'm not especially surprised if that's replicated at many Australian institutions.

There are different spins you can put on the situation, of course.

One is that (many) staff are "under-performing".

Another is that staff at all but a handful of research-intensive institutions are struggling to produce research, faced with ever-increasing teaching/marking loads and creeping admin.

Yet another is that the application of ERA indicators simply "reveals" the diversity or differentiation in the HE sector - different institutions, with different missions, engaging with different audiences.

I guess the method of calculating rankings is a separate issue. In Education, at least, the allocation of FOR codes to publications often seemed random, and I suspect that contributed to the discipline's relatively poor performance at national level.

I've already heard of several cases (from different institutions) where areas were awarded ratings of A, A, B, and yet received an overall mark of "B".

[finella_c]

Research active is a nebulous term but I have seen it defined as 'having any paper published anywhere' or 'having a student (hons, masters or PhD)' - both forming a fairly low bar. And yet, some still fail to achieve it. (I should note that, in the majority of cases where I have first-hand knowledge, the 'no papers' generally arises from 'no submissions of any kind'.