Academics yesterday criticized the preliminary draft of a new system for evaluating colleges proposed by the Ministry of Education at a public hearing about the indicators to be used for evaluating colleges.
The hearing was held in response to the controversial league table of colleges which was released last month.
More than 150 deans and professors of institutions in northern Taiwan attended the public hearing, offering suggestions about the proposed college and university evaluation system compiled by a special ministry panel.
The ministry divided the indicators used for evaluation into two categories: qualitative and quantitative, said Huang Hong-pin (黃宏斌), director of the ministry's Department of Higher Education, who hosted yesterday's hearing at the National Taiwan Normal University.
The indicators include an evaluation of schools' administration, courses, teaching, financial situation and student counseling, as well as the institution's academic reputation, research achievements, academic scale, student quality and educational resources.
"The ministry will not use the results of the evaluation or the classification of the type of college to determine government subsidies," Huang said, promising that the ministry will not announce the results of the evaluation until consensus has been reached about the indicators.
Huang said the ministry hopes to finish the evaluation before February next year.
However, many academics and deans criticized the preliminary draft of the evaluation system for being ambiguous and incomplete.
"I do not see the purpose of carrying out such an evaluation, since the ministry has not addressed it clearly," said Tang Li-ying (唐麗英), a professor of industrial engineering at National Chiao Tung University (交通大學).
"The ministry seems to be trying to obscure the purpose of the evaluation so as not to offend the colleges that might get a low ranking. The results of the evaluation will not make sense and will be a waste of time if their purpose is not identified," Tang said.
A hasty evaluation might only label colleges as "good" or "bad," Tang said.
Chien Mao-ting (簡茂丁), dean of Soochow University (東吳大學), said the indicators listed in the draft were oversimplified and consequently they could not be used to measure academic excellence.
The percentage of international students, which is included as one of the indicators in the category of student quality, for example, hardly reflects a college's so-called internationalization, Chien said.
"In fact, some colleges try to attract international students, while some do not," Chien said, suggesting that the number of exchange students might also be taken into consideration.
Yang Tsung-rong (楊聰榮), a professor in the Graduate Institute of Social and Cultural Studies at the National Central University (中央大學), said the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), which the ministry used as an indicator of research achievements, presents a problem.
"The SSCI is just an indicator selected from thousands of criteria identifying research excellence in the United States, and is carried out by a private company that makes a high annual profit," Yang said.
"The ministry should consider whether we should totally accept the criteria that the US uses. If so, I am afraid that it only mirrors our uncertainty about research," Yang said.
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