Higher education's absolute earnings benefit. Which British universities do most to boost graduate salaries? - Higher education and wages. BishopBlog: A lamentable performance by Jo Johnson. Meta-analysis of faculty's teaching effectiveness: Student evaluation of teaching ratings and student learning are not related - ScienceDirect. <div class="alert-message-container" role="alert"><div class="alert-message-body" aria-hidden="true"><span class="Icon IconAlert" style="display:inline-block"><svg fill="currentColor" style="width:100%;height:100%" tabindex="-1" focusable="false" height="24" width="24"><path d="M11.84 4.63c-.77.05-1.42.6-1.74 1.27-1.95 3.38-3.9 6.75-5.85 10.13-.48.83-.24 1.99.53 2.56.7.6 1.66.36 2.5.41 3.63 0 7.27.01 10.9-.01 1.13-.07 2.04-1.28 1.76-2.39-.1-.58-.56-1.02-.81-1.55-1.85-3.21-3.69-6.43-5.55-9.64-.42-.52-1.06-.83-1.74-.79z" fill="#f80"></path><path d="M11 8h2v5h-2zM11 14h2v2h-2z"></path></svg></span>JavaScript is disabled on your browser.
Please enable JavaScript to use all the features on this page. </div></div> Highlights Students do not learn more from professors with higher student evaluation of teaching (SET) ratings. Gendered Language in Teaching Evaluations. Gender bias in student evaluations: Professors of online courses who present as male get better marks. Many in academia have long known about how the practice of student evaluations of professors is inherently biased against female professors.
Students, after all, are just as likely as the public in general to have the same ugly, if unconscious, biases about women in authority. Just as polling data continues to show that a majority of Americans think being a man automatically makes you better in the boss department, many professors worry that students just automatically rate male professors as smarter, more authoritative, and more awesome overall just because they are men. Now, a new study out North Carolina State University shows that there is good reason for that concern. One of the problems with simply assuming that sexism drives the tendency of students to giving higher ratings to men than women is that students are evaluating professors as a whole, making it hard to separate the impact of gender from other factors, like teaching style and coursework. The results were astonishing.
REF cycles ‘force academics to rush out poorer quality research’ An extensive study provides new backing for a claim long advanced by those working in UK universities: that the research excellence framework forces academics to produce scholarship in greater quantity but of poorer quality.
The paper by academics at the London School of Economics, UCL, the University of Oxford and the Free University of Berlin examines 190,963 publications that were submitted to the last REF and were published between 2008 and 2013, as well as 211,694 submissions to the REF’s predecessor, the research assessment exercise, dating from between 2001 and 2007. The authors find evidence that academics rushed outputs to print in order to meet the deadline for submission: the number of submissions published in 2007, ahead of the RAE deadline, was 35 per cent higher than the total for 2008, the first year covered by the last REF. Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse. I’ve been on Twitter since April 2011 — nearly six years.
A few weeks ago, for the first time, something I tweeted broke the thousand-retweets barrier. And I am really unhappy about it. For two reasons. University rankings are fake news. How do we fix them? This post is based on a short presentation I gave as part of a panel at a meeting today on Understanding Global University Rankings: Their Data and Influence, organised by HESPA (Higher Education Strategic Planners Association).
Yes, it’s a ‘manel’ (from the left: me, Johnny Rich, Rob Carthy). In our defence, Sally Turnbull, who was chairing, sat off to one side and two participants (one male and one female) had to withdraw at short notice. Photo by @UKHESPA (with permission). The big news on the release of the Times Higher Education World University rankings for 2017 was that Oxford, not Caltech is now the No. 1 university in the world. According to the BBC news website, “Oxford University has come top of the Times Higher Education world university rankings – a first for a UK university. Publication of teaching excellence framework results postponed. The publication of the results of England’s teaching excellence framework (TEF) has been postponed following the UK general election.
The new league table for educational standards was scheduled to be released on 14 June. But a circular issued by the Higher Education Funding Council for England to participating institutions said that a delay had been ordered by the Department for Education. ERC rejects 'impact agenda' The adoption of an impact agenda by the European Research Council would destroy the organisation and will never be countenanced, its president has pledged.
Helga Nowotny made the remarks at a high-profile conference in Brussels last week marking the fifth anniversary of the ERC's creation. It funds "frontier" - or blue-skies - research solely on the basis of scientific excellence. Just over 20 per cent of its grants between 2007 and 2011 went to researchers at UK universities. NSS results unrelated to teaching quality, study claims. Student satisfaction scores should not be used to measure teaching quality because they have no discernible link with exam performance, a leading University of Oxford academic has claimed.
While results from the National Student Survey are likely to be used as a key indicator in the government’s proposed teaching excellence framework, a study by Tim Lancaster, director of clinical studies at Oxford, concludes that they have “little or no value as a quality metric” . Dr Lancaster compared the NSS results of 28 UK medical schools with the average pass rates achieved by their students in exams sat by all trainee doctors two years after graduation.
There was no correlation between good results in the NSS and performance in the exams set by the General Medical Council, according to the study “Assessing the quality of UK medical schools: what is the validity of student satisfaction ratings as an outcome measure?” , which is due to be published shortly by Dr Lancaster. Research Professional Sign-in. Is employability data being manipulated? The Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey is being abused, according to one former university employee When I started the post, it was said that the DLHE would make me hard of hearing.
In no time at all, they laughed, I’d be hearing ‘barrister’ not ‘barista’ A management position at a university on a meteoric rise through the league tables, reporting impressive levels of graduate employability. A job that sounds too good to be true? Agents paid an average of £1,767 per non-EU recruit. THE investigation shows spike in spending on fees as UK ‘reliant’ on middlemen Source: REX Guiding hand: one pro vice-chancellor suggested changes to the visa system had pushed more students to seek agents’ advice UK universities’ commission payments to overseas recruitment agents have topped £86 million after rising sharply in recent years, a Times Higher Education investigation has found.
Data obtained from 158 higher education institutions under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that all but 19 elite or specialist institutions now use agents to enrol non-European Union students. Why UK universities should adopt US-style degrees. I am finishing my 20th year of teaching in the UK. I came to Lancaster University from my native US in 1994, and in 2006 I left Lancaster for the University of Aberdeen. I was born, raised, and educated in the US. But by now I think I fathom the very different UK conventions. David Willetts, the universities minister, is encouraging UK universities to introduce the US custom of having both a major subject, which can be anything, and a minor one, which can be anything else. UC Berkeley professor critiques Saudi university's recruitment process of world's top researchers.
The U.S. News and World Report rankings have long been regarded as the Bible of university reputation metrics. But when the outlet released its first global rankings in October, many were surprised. UC Berkeley, which typically hovers in the twenties in the national pecking order, shot to third in the international arena. The university also placed highly in several subjects, including first place in math.
University of Alberta professors apply for vice-chancellor’s job in clever, educational stunt. John Ulan/Canadian Press The current president and vice-chancellor of the University of Alberta, Indira Samarasekera, is leaving at the end of this month. This means that her job, which pays at least 400,000 Canadian dollars (about $368,500), is up for grabs. Economics is becoming an elite subject for elite UK universities. UK universities have had to become much more responsive to changes in the pattern of demand and compete with one another for different revenue streams.
James Johnston and Alan Reeves ask how this has played out in relation to the undergraduate economics degree, finding that new universities have retreated from offering economics programmes even as student numbers rose substantially. The authors argue that the role of research evaluation exercises cannot be ignored in this development and that there is a widening gulf between new and old universities.
Moreover, the study of economics is being restricted along class lines, with students from disadvantaged backgrounds more likely to attend new universities and thus less likely to have access to economics programmes. Research from other parts of the world points to worrying trends for economics degrees. 11 new #HEwords for academics that should be in the dictionary. We asked our Twitter followers to suggest words from the world of higher education that should exist, but don’t.
MMU’s GradMatch offers funding for graduate interns. Finishing your PhD thesis: 15 top tips from those in the know. Thomas Docherty to face insubordination charge in tribunal. English language tests inquiry declares thousands of results invalid. Immigration minister James Brokenshire told MPs some test centres' results are yet to be analysed. Students expect better jobs than they'll get, survey shows.
Many students find themselves doing non-graduate jobs. Hundreds of poorer children missing out on ‘elite’ universities, says commission. Why are male students at Oxford getting more firsts? Should academics lose out financially for taking maternity leave? For a good few years I have known that having a child as an early career academic might be risky. It goes without saying that the pressure to produce written work, develop funding applications and conduct research means maintaining a work-life balance is challenging. Hard Evidence: why aren’t there more black British students at elite universities?
Young people from black British backgrounds are more likely to go to university than their white British peers, but they are much less likely to attend the UK’s most selective universities. As the Independent Commission on Social Mobility pointed out: “There are more young men from black backgrounds in prison in the UK than there are UK-domiciled undergraduate black male students attending Russell Group institutions.” Bursaries fail to help poor students stay the course. When May I Shoot a Student? Opinion: Academic assessment gone mad. Universities should do more to keep women in science, say MPs. White definitions of merit and admissions change when they think about Asian Americans, study finds.
Study finds that Ph.D.s who write interdisciplinary dissertations earn less. How to Write a Research Statement. How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang. The seven deadly sins of health and science reporting. New book on gender, family and academe shows how kids affect careers in higher education. Incentives are a powerful tool, but do universities know how to use them? Journal Impact Factors. Pregnant in the lab: how does child-bearing affect a science career? Phillip Blond needs to do his research on the impact of British academics. Show me the money: grant writing is taking over science. Academics ‘talk posh’ to protect their careers. Vis ma vie d’enseignant chercheur en France.
NHS patient records to revolutionise medical research in Britain. From Graduate School to Welfare - Graduate Students. Science and Truth - We’re All in It Together. Bref, je suis étudiante en psychologie. Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic. Higher education is burning out its employees. Great ape debate : Nature : Nature Publishing Group. France's stem-cell rules get even stricter. 'Duh science': Why scientists spend so much time proving the obvious - latimes.com. How not to get a lab job. What your approach says about you. Scientist Registration – I'm a Scientist, Get me out of here! Science funding cuts 'could lead to brain drain' Singapore Statement on Research Integrity. Communication: A better class of heckle : Nature : Nature Publishing Group.
Northwestern University sex toy show 'disturbing' On scientists, cheerleaders, and rockstars. Trends Comparison. Bat fellatio causes a scandal in academia - science-in-society - 17 May 2010. Three Books For Surviving Graduate School. Vince Cable's wrong connection. The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. The 9 Circles of Scientific Hell. Les Français jugent les chercheurs "pas valorisés" Cambridge university refuses to censor student's thesis on chip-and-PIN vulnerabilities. In one day, Vince Cable has become an object of ridicule and loathing - Exquisite Life. Threatening Students Interested in Science.