Rubrics, Assessment and eProctoring in Education

Monash University has been recognised for building innovation; work with international students and providing equity of access to higher education, taking home three awards at last night’s Australian Financial Review Higher Education Awards.

Well, peer review is broken. Again. Or, if you prefer, still.

The problems are well known and often repeated: self-serving reviewers demanding citations to their own work, however irrelevant, or dismissing competing research outright; bad data not being picked up; completely fake articles sailing through review. A recent discussion on the ALA Infolit mailing list centred on a peer-reviewed article in a reputable journal (indexed, indeed, in an expensive academic database) whose references consisted solely of Wikipedia entries. This wonderfully wry PNIS article - one of the most approachable and most entertaining overviews of the issues with scholarly publishing - claims that peer reviewers are “terrible at spotting weaknesses and errors in papers”.