What does assessment mean?
League tables and performance indicators are much beloved by funders and by newspapers, but less loved by those they grade who understand the distortions they can produce. This week it is the turn of...
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The bond that can work miracles
Last November, the THES noted that the Seventh Day Adventist Newbold College was awaiting the second coming of Christ and Sir Ron Dearing. Sir Ron may be cautious about the Messianic status he enjoys...
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Talking totals
David Law asks whether quality assessment results could ever be used to produce a league table of the best teaching universities League tables are a national preoccupation in education. The research...
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Division over a rabbi's memory
GEOFFREY Alderman's admir-ably succinct history of British Jewry's fissiparous tendency (THES, February 14) sadly neither sheds light on the issues nor justifies his own stand and the Paisleyite...
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Division over a rabbi's memory
PROFESSOR Alderman is right that the chief rabbi is not the leader of Anglo-Jewry. Rather he is simply the head of the United Synagogue, the largest branch of orthodox Jewry in Great Britain. As such...
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Pay review or a strike?
THE UNIVERSITIES and Colleges Employers' Forum has become irrelevant to academic salary determination. Steve Rouse, chief executive, says that the UCEA board "does not have a position on a pay review...
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Pay review or a strike?
TONY BINNS cites just one of the anomalies in the titles and pay of academics in different types of institution (THES, February 14). The top points of the main and promoted scales in the new...
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A sample mistake
MARGARET O'BRIEN (THES, February 14) says that "it might have been wiser" to present her findings about the sociology of Barking and Dagenham to an academic audience before contacting the Panorama...
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CNAA era lessons
TONY TYSOME reports the view of Geoffrey Alderman that a new standards agency "is bound to eventually become a kind of super Council for National Academic Awards" (THES, February 14). Having worked...
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Darwinian takeover
I ACCEPT Derek Freeman's claim (THES, February 7) that he believes in "a synthesis I of both the genetic and exogenetic" in the determination of human behaviour. Everyone, sociobiologists and...
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Partners in classroom
THE MEASURED professional tone adopted by the writers of Personal View (THES, February 7) was welcome, as was the overwhelming endorsement which their research provides for the partnership model of...
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Gender defenders of Africa
IN 1991 a historic meeting in Paris, convened by the Association of Donors to African Education, brought together all the ministers of education in Africa. Only five were women and they were...
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Don's Diary
Tuesday Kyushu, Southern Japan. The earthquake hits at 7.30am. Five point eight on the Richter scale with the epicentre in a nearby town. My hotel room jerks and sways violently like an Inter-City...
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Pension climbdown has a sting in its tail
YOU CAN tell how serious a government is about staying in office by the pace of its pre-election activities. If they are frenetic, ill conceived, subject to little or no consultation and, generally,...
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A cry for freedom
MAYBE if J. D. Jacobs and Douglas Trainer looked behind their own rhetoric when challenging my commitment to free speech they would find that it is not something that has been fought for by...