The education sector has closed a list of tasks, which the ministry plans to implement later this year. The Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic set 38 tasks of the regional school system, 24 tasks in the field of higher education and 5 tasks in the support of national minorities. The task “Ensure a readjustment of evaluation system of higher education research using the experience of the British system RAE / REF and applied this system into practice" was defined, while the deadline for fulfillment of this task is set for December 31, 2016.
Currently, there is a dual system of supporting research and development at public universities in Slovakia. On one side, there is a competition for funding under the grant agencies. On the other hand, there is an institutional funding, which is specified in the document “Methodology of allocation of subsidies from the state budget to public universities”. Based on this document, several parameters are being currently evaluated. E. g., the results of the quality of the research activities of universities according to the latest comprehensive accreditation (weight 0.43) and a proportion of publications of the university (weight 0.225) have the biggest impact. The university´s share of the average number of PhD students is evaluated also (weight 0.1). The share of subsidy for university for research activities depends on the input data of these parameters and on the weight´s values and coefficients in formulas.
The basis of the British RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) is the institutional research funding for universities that depends on the quality of research, while the best quality research gets the most resources. The evaluation of the quality and quantity of research is carried out by peer review using individual panels of evaluation committees. The evaluation commission obtains documents from universities and the documents contain information on number of employees, number of PhD students and information on quality of research results. The commission categorizes the different materials into four classes - the highest rating of 4 *, through 3 *, 2 *, 1 *, respectively, works that are not rated at all. Subsequent calculation of institutional funds is simple: the total number of workers who are included in the documents shall be multiplied by the % results that obtained the 4 * and it is multiplied by funding allocable to each employee in the class 4 *. This process applies to each class. However, the dependence is not linear, because the 4 * obtain significantly higher funding. The revised methodology REF (Research Excellence Framework) is based on an assessment of the quality of individual research groups within the parameters as received grant funds, training of PhD students and citations. An essential part of the evaluation is to assess the quality of outputs, while a university defines its outputs that will be submitted to the evaluation commission.
The difference between the Slovak and the proposed UK (RAE) system lies in the fact that the Slovak system calculates the relevant part of the subsidy according to the formula, while the British system is based on peer review. The Slovak system is time and cost significantly less challenging, but it can be easily misused, compared with the British system. E.g., Slovak formula assigns the same funding for each publication, without distinction of its quality, or the same allocate resources for each graduate PhD student, regardless of the quality of the student´s research results. There are also concerns that that scientific publications over the past two years are involved in determining the actual quality of the research activities by using weight 0.225 only. On the contrary, high weight (0.45) is attributed to the complex accreditation that was done a few years before the current allocation of subsidies.
