UK: Academics 'afraid to criticise students' - study

28 August 2011

Academics are afraid to give negative student references or put candid remarks on exam scripts because of an overbearing risk-management culture in universities, according to a researcher who has undertaken a two-year study of the issue, writes David Matthews for Times Higher Education.

Dr Kim Soin, reader in accounting at the University of Greenwich, said academics needed to engage with the concept of risk management to ensure their concerns were heard, or risk losing "control of what they do and how they do it". Soin, who conducted the research with Sharon Wheatley, a lecturer at BPP Business School, said that the growth of risk-management systems in universities had made some academics "quite fearful" and risk averse.
Full report on the Times Higher Education site

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