The Ministry of Education’s university evaluation system should be reformed to focus more on educational quality rather than research volume, representatives of the Educational Reform Forum said yesterday.
In reaction to an academic fraud scandal which led last week to the retraction of an article in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, panelists said that the system of evaluating professors and academic institutions creates perverse incentives which undermine the quality of education and encourage and enable fraud.
Currently, indices of academic citations are an important tool used to determine school funding, as well as faculty advancement and pay.
Panelists said that the emphasis on research in evaluations for all colleges and universities is unrealistic, given that in other nations, research is concentrated in a relatively small number of research universities.
“You cannot require all schools to be Einstein, which is what we are doing now,” National Taiwan University psychology professor Hwang Kwang-kuo (黃光國) said. “If you pay attention, there is a substantial amount of research published that is essentially the meaningless collection of data.”
He added that the emphasis on publishing is coupled with a weak peer-review system caused by the small size of Taiwan’s academic circles. Personal relationships turn peer review into a process of mutual back-scratching in which everyone passes, he said.
The same incentives that lead to meaningless research also encourage fraud, National Chengchi University professor of education Prudence Chou (周祝瑛) said.
The series of international scandals that have pounded Taiwan’s academic reputation stem from a culture of fabrication that permeates higher education, she said.
She called for peer review to be opened up to admit international experts and for educational evaluations to be revised to take into account teaching quality, rather than defining productivity in terms of research paper counts.
“Use of indices based on citations has caused a continual narrowing of higher education” she said. “Because schools care only about publication volume, the original functions of higher education get strangled.”
Other panelists concurred that instruction has suffered as result of the focus on paper output.
“There has been a devaluation of the value of college degrees because of the poor quality of education” National Taiwan University professor emeritus of chemistry Liu Kwang-ting (劉廣定) said.
Most newly minted chemistry masters students do work that would be done by graduates of community colleges abroad, he added.
He called the number of masters students admitted by universities “absurd,” saying that professors take on far more students than they can individually mentor because they rely on student research to boost their own paper count.
Newly enrolled student numbers at public research universities should be reduced sharply to remedy the extremely high student-teacher ratio, he said, calling for student numbers to be cut by 25 percent over three years.
In response to questions regarding panelists’ suggestions, Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) said internal academic discipline and the prevention of fraud should be important criteria used in university evaluations.
He also renewed calls for universities to not use paper counts to determine faculty pay, adding that while indices of academic citations can be a reference, they should not be focused on to the extent that longer-term measures of productivity are ignored.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
UPDATED TEST: The new rules aim to assess drivers’ awareness of risky behaviors and how they respond under certain circumstances, the Highway Bureau said Driver’s license applicants who fail to yield to pedestrians at intersections or to check blind spots, or omit pointing-and-calling procedures would fail the driving test, the Highway Bureau said yesterday. The change is set to be implemented at the end of the month, and is part of the bureau’s reform of the driving portion of the test, which has been criticized for failing to assess whether drivers can operate vehicles safely. Sedan drivers would be tested regarding yielding to pedestrians and turning their heads to check blind spots, while drivers of large vehicles would be tested on their familiarity with pointing-and-calling
A Taiwanese man apologized on Friday after saying in a social media post that he worked with Australia to provide scouting reports on Taiwan’s team, enabling Australia’s victory in this year’s World Baseball Classic (WBC), saying it was a joke and that he did not hold any position with foreign teams or Taiwan’s sports training center. Chen Po-hao (陳柏豪) drew the rage of many Taiwan baseball fans when he posted online on Thursday night, claiming credit for Australia’s 3-0 win over Taiwan in the opening game for Pool C, saying he worked as a physical therapist with the national team and
RSS