Evaluation of departments
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The evaluation process of the University's Departments was developed over the course of about 4 years, for each of which a group of 12-20 Departments was evaluated:
- drafting of a self-assessment report by each Department, which describes for the last five years: research programs and human resources engaged in these programs, financial resources acquired, research products, collaborations at local, regional, national and international level, research on commission and consultancy provided to third parties, spaces and equipment available, involvement in Schools or PhD Courses. The report concludes with a SWOT analysis and a strategic plan for the future
- appointment by the University Evaluation Committee (NVA) of the Panels of experts (3-7), mostly foreigners, chosen from shortlists of candidates proposed by the University Scientific Committee
- Drafting of individual opinions by Panel members on the basis of the self-assessment report
- site visit to Padua with meeting of all members of the Department, including PhD students
- drafting of a common report by the Panel, which includes the evaluation of both the programs and the Department as a whole
- Department's comment on the common report
The numbers
- Planned duration of the project: April 2005 – November 2008
- 66 Departments (64 of which correspond to the current Departments) divided into four groups, to which 4,441 professors, researchers, research fellows, research collaborators, scholarship holders, PhD students belong (2008 data)
- about 800 research programmes to be evaluated (the "syllabus" is in fact a line of research, bringing together several projects)
- almost 300 experts involved in the evaluation and site visits (foreigners come from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Francia, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Ireland, Norway, Holland, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Israel, Argentina, Australia, Canada, USA, Japan)
Evaluation and Departments
As regards the programmes, the Panels were asked to express an opinion on:
Quality: originality of approach, consistency of syllabus, national and international reputation of researchers, quality of products, quality of other activities
Productivity: ratio between the number of products and the number of professors and researchers
Relevance: for the discipline and for society
Future prospects: assessed on the basis of the results obtained, plans for the future and recent and foreseeable developments in the discipline
The opinions expressed on the programs can be:
"excellent", "very good", "good", "satisfactory", "unsatisfactory"
The 4 groups of Departments evaluated
Conclusions
At the end of the entire evaluation process of the Departments, which lasted three and a half years, the NVA drafted a note, sent to the University's Governing Bodies, which contained the following observations:
Also taking into account the motivations that led to this project, the primary use of evaluations must be made first of all by the Departments themselves, in order to better direct their research programs, to establish a greater number of collaborations at international level - also aimed at attracting funding from the EU (a recurring recommendation in the Panels' reports) - to create synergies between Departments, appoint internal scientific committees with the task of: identifying the most interesting research topics, discouraging projects with no prospects for growth for the future, avoiding fragmentation and sometimes the repetition of research topics, proposing rebalancing policies in the distribution of financial resources, and increasing - in some cases - relations with the territory.
The precise description of the research programs of all the Departments can also be used to support both the design or redesign of master's degree courses, in which "curricula specifically dedicated to the training of particular skills can be created", and of PhD Schools.
The network of national and international relationships, derived from the evaluation process, which also involved site visits to Padua, can also be exploited to intensify the mobility of teachers and students, with the attraction of visiting professors and an increase in the inclusion of students in international mobility programs.
The excellent evaluation of research programs by third parties - mostly foreigners - is a result that must also be widely communicated at national level, also because there are very few universities that have taken similar initiatives. The NVA considers it more problematic to translate the results of the evaluation of the Departments into an exhaustive comparison between Departments. However, enlightening information and judgments have been obtained on many aspects that should be used: for this purpose, it could be appropriate to set up a special Commission which, with the collaboration of the NVA and the Council of Department Directors, examines the collegial reports in detail. Such an analysis would make it possible to identify research programmes and sectors in which the University's governing bodies deem it most appropriate to invest.
The NVA considers the experience conducted on the evaluation of the Departments to be largely positive and hopes that it can produce concrete results and in any case become a practice on which the University will continue to be committed.
The evaluation documents by department (128 Mb ZIP file)