OMG half of them are below average!!!

[alexwinolj]

The ERA results are now out. Various university departments have been given a score between 1 and 5, where 3 is "world standard" and 4 and 5 are even better [1]. So is this an official acknowledgement that you need to be an alien to thrive in Australia's modern university system? And the media commentary so far suggests that scoring less than 3

Comments

[reverancepavane]

So is this an official acknowledgement that you need to be an alien to thrive in Australia's modern university system?
Well, from the responses from the ARC and NM&HRC grants I've been involved in over the years this has always been the case. Australian acadaemia has an even worse case of Colonial Cringe than the Australian financial and industrial sectors.

[finella_c]

It was an open secret at my former employer that many academic staff were not research active, and I'm not especially surprised if that's replicated at many Australian institutions

[finella_c]

Research active is a nebulous term but I have seen it defined as 'having any paper published anywhere' or 'having a student (hons, masters or PhD)' - both forming a fairly low bar. And yet, some still fail to achieve it. (I should note that, in the majority of cases where I have first-hand knowledge, the 'no papers' generally arises from 'no submissions of any kind'.

[kriste]

Welcome to modern academia and the fantastic exports from the UK.

[bungo]

At first (tired) glance, the rankings for Applied Maths looked plausible. If I can read "not assessed" as "has no significant strength in this field at all". But then what happened to Adelaide's Math. Physics?

[alexwinolj]

"Not assessed" means that the number of publications in that area was below a certain threshold (I'm not sure of the exact details). Sadly, Adelaide closed its mathematical physics department some years ago.