The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE2008) was conducted jointly by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) and the Department for Employment and Learning, Northern Ireland (DEL).
The primary purpose of the RAE2008 was to produce quality profiles for each submission of research activity made by institutions. The four higher education funding bodies intend to use the quality profiles to determine their grant for research to the institutions which they fund with effect from 2009-10. Any Higher Education Institution (HEI) in the UK that is eligible to receive research funding from one of these bodies was eligible to participate.
The quality profiles are the results of the RAE2008, the sixth assessment in this current format of the quality of research conducted in UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). They follow an expert review process conducted by assessment panels throughout 2008. Research in all subjects was assessed against agreed quality standards within a common framework that recognised appropriate variations between subjects in terms of both the research submitted and the assessment criteria.
The RAE quality profiles present in blocks of 5% the proportion of each submission judged by the panels to have met each of the quality levels defined below. Work that fell below national quality or was not recognised as research was unclassified.
FTE Category A staff submitted
The FTE Category A staff submitted is the full time equivalent number of Category A staff selected by the submitting institution for inclusion in their submission to the unit of assessment (UOA). Category A staff are those who were employed by and on the payroll of the submitting institution on the 31 October 2007 census date. HEIs had the discretion to decide in which subject areas (units of assessment - UOAs) to submit and which of their eligible staff to include in each UOA submission. Since decisions on which staff to include in submissions lay with HEIs, the FTE Category A staff submitted does not necessarily constitute the total FTE of staff who were active in research in that subject and HEI on the census date.
| 4* | Quality that is world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour. |
|---|---|
| 3* | Quality that is internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour but which nonetheless falls short of the highest standards of excellence. |
| 2* | Quality that is recognised internationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour. |
| 1* | Quality that is recognised nationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour. |
| Unclassified | Quality that falls below the standard of nationally recognised work. Or work which does not meet the published definition of research for the purposes of this assessment. |
The 'international' criterion equates to a level of excellence that it was reasonable to expect for the UOA, even though there may be no current examples of such a level in the UK or elsewhere. It should be noted that 'national' and 'international' refer to standards, not to the nature or geographical scope of particular subjects.
The results can be viewed on the RAE website under ‘Results’ by subject unit of assessment (UOA) or by institution. A more detailed description of the assessment process leading to the quality profiles and tabulated results by UOA is in “RAE2008: the outcome” at www.rae.ac.uk/pubs.
