The Council on Higher Education’s review of PhD degrees reveals worrying trends | Daily Maverick

The Council on Higher Education’s ‘National Review of Doctoral Qualifications in South Africa’ begs the age-old question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – who will guard the guards themselves? Quality research can take time and it would be unfortunate if universities were, in future, to feel the need to safeguard their interests by encouraging doctoral students to tackle what is easily ‘doable’ rather than what is intriguing, continues Daily Maverick.

 The doctoral review is on course for an outcome that is likely to subvert its own noble intentions of assuring – and developing – quality, says the writer.
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The website of the statutory quality assurance body for higher education, the Council on Higher Education (CHE), records that: “On the 2nd of February 2017, the Council on Higher Education launched the National Reviews [sic] of Doctoral Studies, it held its first ‘Stakeholder Consultative Forum’ at the National Research Foundation (NRF) in Pretoria.”

This announcement was followed by two years of planning for the review of all doctoral qualifications across all universities. As the review was originally scheduled for completion in April 2020, universities can expect lots of review activity this year.

The story that follows tracks developments to the present. It’s a troubling story, as we shall see. At the outset though, to the credit of the CHE, the doctoral review process in fact got off to a good start. In line with the principle of peer review, the “Qualification Standard for Doctoral Degrees, November 2018” (the qualification standard), was compiled with the input of a reference group of 19 eminent professors from a representative range of universities. An earlier draft had also gone out for public comment. We thus have credible benchmarks for the review, established through a legitimate process.

In providing benchmarks for assessing quality, the qualification standard follows a clear logic comprising:

• Purpose of the doctoral qualification;
• Graduate attributes that manifest that purpose; and
• The contexts and conditions for the assessment of those attributes.

The qualification standard was followed by the CHE’s “Institutional Self-Evaluation Report Template, April” (the SER template)...

In conclusion, at this stage we don’t yet know what sense universities will make of all this; and whether the CHE will then have sufficient common understanding across institutions to enable it to draw valid conclusions across the sector. A lot depends on the peer reviewers who will do the site visit rounds later this year. Let’s hope that scholarship and good professional judgement can mitigate the CHE’s shortcomings.
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Source: Daily Maverick