People know the price of everything and the value of nothing

My first job in Thailand was at a historical anomaly. I worked at a satellite campus of a major university which ran 2 undergraduate programmes for a total of around 200 students yet needed the full array of support staff and infrastructure. Even though it was located only 5 kilometres away from the main campus, there was no sharing of staff. As a first university job it was perfect. After a few months I knew everyone on campus, including all of the students; I only needed to think about my own teaching; and there were almost no meetings and very little form-filling. Overall, the campus was very laid back.

While I was enjoying the easy-going atmosphere, after a couple of months I noticed one of my colleagues was enjoying it even more. It appeared that her job consisted of arriving at 9 o’clock, reading the newspaper for a couple of hours, having lunch and then going home. Asking around, I found out that she was the philosophy teacher and her total work responsibilities were teaching 2 hours per week. Rather than having a teacher travel the 5 kilometres from the main campus once a week, apparently the satellite campus needed its own seriously underworked philosophy teacher. Thus I was introduced to the wonderful efficiencies of the Thai civil service.

A few years and a couple of jobs later, my current university became the first to change its status from fully within the Thai civil service system to semi-autonomy, meaning that the university should have more control over its own management. Given the wastefulness of the civil service system, some level of accountability seemed necessary. Occasional news stories also highlighted the need for accountability – the lecturer who was fired for paying to have his name added as an author on numerous articles, or the degree that was closed because the college only had 3 full-time staff to supervise nearly 100 doctoral students.

As universities moved out of the government system, a more insidious threat emerged – the rise of neoliberalism as the ideology underpinning educational administration (more on this in future blogs). From almost no oversight, now everything needed to be measured and quantified in ridiculous detail.

Evaluating curricula

As Chair of the PhD in Applied Linguistics, one of my responsibilities is ensuring that the programme passes all the necessary quality assessments. 3 different systems requiring reporting in 3 different formats over 3 different timeframes are used, with the main system going by the Thai 3-letter abbreviation Mor Kor Or. While preparing this blog, it occurred to me that I didn’t know what this stood for. It seemed I wasn’t alone as I couldn’t find anyone who could tell me without looking it up. Instead, my colleagues repeated the old joke that Mor Kor Or meant Mai mee Krai Ahn (or No-one Reads It). This isn’t surprising. Our most recent Mor Kor Or report was 125 pages with links to a Dropbox containing 160 files. Since quantity is valued over meaningful content, we’re doing a pretty good job at quality assurance. The only feedback we’ve received is about phrasing – apparently all objectives need to be written as Action verb + Object + Qualifying phrase. Rephrasing our objectives would ensure that our PhD is quality education.

It’s not that I think that QA is a complete waste of time. The process of collecting data, such as interviewing students, can be insightful and lead to beneficial changes. The issue is that it’s the lengthy fixed-format products that are evaluated, not the programme-specific reflections. The amount of work required to produce QA reports bears no relationship to the amount of impact. Extrapolating from current trends, I estimate that in 10 years’ time, we’ll be spending around 40% of our time reporting on the actual work that we do in the other 60%. It seems it’s a good time to be a grumpy old academic close to retirement.

Evaluating teachers

A second area where accountability is necessary is staff promotion. Under the civil service system, promotion was largely automatic based on length of service, meaning the philosophy teacher could happily continue reading her newspaper. Ideally, however, universities would be meritocracies where the best rise most quickly, but how do you identify who’s best? In a neoliberalist world, the obvious answer is measure everyone and promote those with the highest scores.

To this end, my university set up a system whereby every teacher reports their work every semester using 114 categories of work. After getting over the initial shock of the complexity of the system, it actually proved quite easy to complete and had the added benefit of providing detailed data for the university. With any such system, there are issues. Even with 114 categories, some work is ignored. I never found out how to input a research monograph into the system, presumably because the developers didn’t expect staff to write such a book. More worryingly, the intangibles of cooperativeness, responsibility, willingness to help out, care for colleagues and so on are not captured by the system in line with the Oscar Wilde quotation I’ve used as the title for this blog. Such omissions are petty quibbles compared to the negative impacts the system has on how some people work.

Getting points becomes more important than making meaningful contributions, and points gained start to be seen as a measure of self-worth. Some teachers cry out about unfairness and feel that their work is being under-scored – I don’t know how many hours I’ve wasted in meetings trying to decide whether a certain piece of work warrants an extra 0.25 points or not. Other teachers refuse to take on new tasks unless they are getting sufficient points. Overall, the system is a clear example of Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Emphasising point-scoring for career development has more worrying long-term implications illustrated by a quote from Alfie Kohn: “The more you rely on performance-based incentives, the less interest people have in the work itself”. The scoring system promotes extrinsic motivation over intrinsic motivation with unintended consequences. To see the problems with stressing extrinsic motivation, we can use the impact of rewards on children’s behaviour as an analogy. When kids are rewarded for their performance, they like it and obviously they want another reward. Given a choice between performing the same task again (for which they know they’ll be rewarded) or doing a slightly more difficult task (at the risk of failing and not getting the reward), most kids choose to do the same task again. Rewarding kids for performance, then, stifles development (if you’re a parent, the better choice is to reward effort, not performance). Applying this to university work, extrinsic motivation through point-scoring means that some people continue to do the same old work that guarantees points rather than pushing themselves to do something more challenging. For example, doing adequate straightforward research that’s guaranteed publication in a low-level journal is easier than doing innovative research that has a small chance of being published in a top journal. The system is promoting mediocrity.

Changing the system

While curriculum evaluation in Thailand is governed by national-level regulations, teacher evaluation systems are set up at the institutional level. My university is aware of the downsides of excessive point-scoring, and, in a move contrary to the dominant neoliberal ideologies, has decided to try to include qualitative and developmental aspects to teacher evaluation. Also running counter to neoliberalism, instead of a centrally imposed system, the university is allowing each faculty to set up its own system. My own faculty has done this emphasising innovative work and self-development projects. Since neoliberal ideologies have become the pervasive norm governing education, it’s going to be interesting to see if such counter-initiatives will survive in the face of the pressure to measure.