Absurdity at the top

What’s the quality of the quality measuring process?

Nobody is against improving quality. And often to do that you need some way of measuring what you have, of giving it a score in terms of its existing quality. But that’s where things get tricky.

Take this government’s new attempt to measure the quality of research being done in the universities here in Australia. The idea is that they are going to set up a system that will give us a rough-and-ready notion or score for the existing quality of the research being produced. Sounds great, right? Alas, it’s not at all clear that it is. In fact, it looks to be an opaque and uninformative system with unintended incentives that no overseas person could take overly seriously.

At least that’s the case in my discipline of law. Consider how this new system is going to measure the quality of what we Australian legal academics are producing. First it sets out criteria that will count in this measuring process. So each academic will nominate…