New Zealand ‘tinkering’ with research assessment exercise

What a circus. PBRF has encouraged game playing on a massive scale, only benefiting a proliferation of rent-seekers in managerial and senior academic positions. It accomplishes the very opposite of what it sets out to accomplish. Really. Just make it stop already. The benefits of the system wore off long ago.

I'm reading over the PBRF 2025 guidelines right now. Unbelievable. New Zealand academia is reeling, and the TEC seriously intends to rerun this exercise with no real changes. There's a good argument that PBRF is part of why things are currently such a mess. Did the TEC even bother to examine other countries conducting similar exercises, notably reports from the REF 2021? Who is going to benefit from PBRF 2025? Not the average research-active academic under 50 years of age. Certainly not students. Perhaps a few elitist professors who'll retire immediately after, and those who wangled their way onto panels (and their cadres). And how is a flawed system going to work any better for indigenous funding than it did for anybody else?