Are evaluations truly necessary?

By Prudence Chou 周祝瑛

Friday, Jan 23, 2009, Page 8

    The Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan recently released the results of an evaluation of nine public universities conducted in the first half of last year. Although more than 89 percent did not pass the evaluation, 42 faculties and graduate institutes were placed on a list for future monitoring.

    Surprisingly, many of these were from universities with good reputations such as National Chengchi University and National Tsing Hua University. The Ministry of Education (MOE) has said that faculties and graduate institutes that did not pass the evaluation failed mostly because they suffered from a severe shortage of full-time teachers or failed to clearly define their teaching goals, adding that they would be closed if they failed to pass the next round of evaluations to be conducted next year.

    Taiwan’s university evaluations had always been performed by external organizations. It was only in July 2006 that the council started conducting such evaluations, which were primarily aimed at faculties and graduate institutes.

    In the most recent evaluations, faculties and graduate institutes first carried out self-evaluations and then mapped out development goals on their own. The evaluation center then visited and conducted interviews based on these development goals.

    The evaluations were based on five criteria: goals, specialties and self-improvement; curriculum; teaching; student performance; teacher research and graduate student performance. University evaluations can be positive if they can help faculties, graduate institutes, teachers and students redefine their goals for study and teaching.

    However, in the past two years, these evaluations have also given many schools a great deal of pressure.

    This pressure includes having tens of thousands of university staff working around the clock to complete these evaluations, printing information onto tens of thousands of tonnes of paper, compiling statistical data and creating computer records, as well as demanding that faculty answer questions that are not suited to data-based research and requiring that teachers answer questions on classified research and other personal questions.

    Especially worthy of attention are those schools that may lose their social prestige because they fared poorly in their evaluations. These schools may even have their government subsidies decreased or canceled, and their admission quotas frozen.

    However, what we really must ask ourselves is whether the evaluated universities can really improve after all that energy, manpower and money was put into these assessments.

    Who benefits from this evaluation mechanism?

    Just as one evaluation leader who had just finished a university evaluation said: “When universities work day and night preparing information for never-ending evaluations and when teachers focus a great deal of energy on getting good results in National Science Council projects to help them obtain better evaluation results for their faculties, submitting articles to Social Science Citation Index journals, spending money to invite businesses to engage in industry-academic cooperation and even going overseas, including to China, to obtain doctoral degrees, teachers do not have a lot of time left to devote to their students.”

    They also do not have a lot of energy or concentration to devote to critical thinking and research. Indeed, there are now very few faculty directors and university presidents who can stop their schools from becoming more stratified and market-oriented, with an increasing emphasis on quantitative research.

    While the sharp increase in the number of university evaluations in recent years is closely linked to increasingly lower numbers of students being accepted into courses and a lack of places in courses, Taiwan’s academic circle is very small, with more emphasis placed on interpersonal relationships over academic achievement.

    This is why there has been a move toward quantitative evaluations. In order to gain more prestige for Taiwan’s universities on an international scale, many faculties in various universities have recently been focusing on working according to quantitative standards like those used in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Engineering Index (EI) to make distinctions between their teachers in terms of seniority and skill.

    It seems that the previous emphasis on self-determination of academic goals and a respect for the decisions of academics will cease to exist very soon. No wonder foreign academics have said that young academics here in Taiwan lock themselves up in research rooms and laboratories to write papers for SSCI and SCI journals and therefore have no time or interest in anything that goes on in society.

    Do universities really need evaluations? Almost everybody would agree that some sort of university evaluation is necessary. However, Taiwan’s academic circle often ignores the differences between specialized academic fields, using physics and engineering standards to assess the humanities and social sciences, which has led to an over-emphasis on quantitative assessment.

    Even government agencies and the evaluation center ignore the serious negative consequences of these quantitative evaluations — Taiwan’s entire academic field has become a center for academic contract manufacturing and reproduction. Universities are becoming more and more utilitarian and academic ideals and the passion teachers have for teaching are rapidly decreasing.

    Can we really hope that this current system of university evaluation will improve universities? In addition to their research, can we encourage teachers to place more emphasis on student progress? Perhaps we could get those faculties and graduate institutes that have already been assessed to provide us with their thoughts and even conduct a meta-analysis of the current evaluation system. This could turn the evaluations into a catalyst for a more open mindset and help universities find their ideals once again.



Prudence Chou is a professor of education at National Chengchi University.

TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
　

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