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Compacts take us into the metrics

By Richard James - posted Tuesday, 19 August 2008


In an international market hungry for information about tertiary education, fresh approaches to performance measurement are needed. Standards and performance measurements, in particular the quantification of performance, are critical issues, especially if the sector moves towards a mission-based compacts model. So it is timely to consider performance and standards in the midst of the Games of the XXIX Olympiad in Beijing.

With most, but not all, the sports in the summer Olympics, the measurement of performance and standards is objective, transparent and immediate. Excellence leaps out. The rules and goals are absolutely clear. The metrics are well understood and fine-grained differences in performance can be measured. Plus, in the main part, athletic performance is beyond manipulation.

So, Olympic performances can be measured fairly unambiguously. What constitutes world class is generally clear-cut.

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Let's compare this with higher education.

Obviously the outcomes are far less tangible and far less immediate.

Further, the goals and desired outcomes are contested. Excellence is less absolute, it is located within contexts and shifts over time. At least to some degree, quality in higher education is subjective and lies in the eye of the beholder.

It could be argued that in a mass or universal higher education system if excellence is to have meaning then it involves achieving a good fit between the needs of groups of students and the education that is provided.

The point here is a simple one: the measurement and comparison of institutional performance in higher education is imperfect and somewhat fraught. And thus the use of indicators for improving performance or for rewarding or providing an incentive for enhanced performance is an imperfect science.

Just how good are Australia's academic standards? It is difficult to know for sure, the elusiveness of standards has some interesting effects.

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First, it allows us to get away with exaggerated claims. Every university can be a leader, for this claim can seldom be decisively rebutted (or defended).

We have become extremely successful in talking up the quality of Australian higher education. Expressions such as "world class" and "internationally recognised" are repeated mantra-like on university websites and in promotional literature.

Second, almost conversely, it allows academic standards to become a source of cheap polemic. We're all familiar with the headlines: "Standards in decline", "Standards being eroded". These claims are equally difficult to defend or rebut.

In acknowledging this complexity it is not to argue we shouldn't measure performance in higher education or that we should not monitor standards. Of course we must be concerned with both.

The success of mission-based compacts - should we head in this direction - will rely heavily on government's and sector's confidence in the measurement of institutional performance against negotiated goals. In fact, performance measurement is a central element in a compacts approach, as Group of Eight executive director Michael Gallagher and others have stressed.

Compacts will help set the preconditions for a more diverse and responsive higher education sector. For this to be successful, our notions of standards and performance will need to be adjusted accordingly. We need to develop a performance indicator framework that supports and does not undermine differentiation, and which does not nurture the present stratification based on reputation and positional status.

In describing the idea of compacts in March, Innovation Minister Kim Carr said: "Universities will have a reciprocal responsibility to explain their purposes, and to report publicly on how well they have performed against their own goals and expected performance standards."

What might this look like in practice? Here there is much devil in the detail, for it is difficult to imagine the government handing over the entire measurement of performance to the institutions.

For compacts to be successful and for the sector to have confidence in a compacts-based funding model, there are four things we need to do.

First, develop agreed sector-wide metrics based on common definitions for measuring performance in the three main areas of performance: teaching and learning, research and research training, and community engagement or knowledge transfer.

Second, develop metrics that shift the emphasis to outcomes-impact measures of performance to complement input-process measures. Third, establish core performance measures for all institutions, regardless of negotiated mission. And fourth, develop a value-added conception of institutional performance in the area of student learning outcomes.

There is little reason why different metrics would be needed for individual institutions.

There is an inexorable trend towards more standardised, more independent testing of graduates' skills in higher education. Few would argue that such testing can tell us everything we wish to know, but it can tell us something.

Standardised testing in the school sector is criticised in the teaching profession, where the collection of data is seen variously to threaten professional judgment, to narrow what is valued in learning and to homogenise curriculums. Whatever approaches are taken in higher education, we must not de-professionalise academic work.

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First published in The Australian on August 13, 2008.



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About the Author

Richard James is director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne.

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