Anonymous #47

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Anonymous #47

Responses

Q7. What improvements could be made:

(a) to ARC processes to promote excellence, improve agility, and better facilitate globally collaborative research and partnerships while maintaining rigour, excellence and peer review at an international standard?

(b) to the ARC Act to give effect to these process improvements, or do you suggest other means?

Please include examples of success or best practice from other countries or communities if you have direct experience of these.

As the members of the college of experts cannot reasonably be expected to have the required disciplinary knowledge to provide informed judgements on all the proposals they see, their involvement in the peer-review process is detrimental to rigour. Furthermore, as they do not give feedback on their funding decisions, the process can seem arbitrary, opaque and unnavigable to unsuccessful applicants, especially when the latter have received positive reports from peer assessors.
Given that applicants spend months writing applications and months waiting for outcomes, it is surely only equitable for the college to take a little more time over negative decisions by supplying applicants with a supporting rationale.

Q8. With respect to ERA and EI:

(a) Do you believe there is a need for a highly rigorous, retrospective excellence and impact assessment exercise, particularly in the absence of a link to funding?

(b) What other evaluation measures or approaches (e.g. data driven approaches) could be deployed to inform research standards and future academic capability that are relevant to all disciplines, without increasing the administrative burden?

(c) Should the ARC Act be amended to reference a research quality, engagement and impact assessment function, however conducted?

(d) If so, should that reference include the function of developing new methods in research assessment and keeping up with best practice and global insights?

The ERA is a waste of everybody's time.
There are several independent bodies that draw up international rankings of universities and departments. The ERA replicates this work to no good end.
The design of the ERA is also at odds with encouraging the intradisciplinary diversity that universities should prize for the educational breadth that it offers students, since assessors are asked to identify collective strengths within a department or unit.

Submission received

14 December 2022

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