It’s not so much what was said, but who said it!

… much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. …

The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. …

Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices. And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct.

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Oh no, not another quality document!

It just won’t go away, will it: the relentless focus and the ever-growing ‘industry’ of quality. It’s right across the higher education spectrum, of course, with its tentacles reaching inexorably into the world of open and distance learning. Please don’t think I’m anti-quality – it’s just that it gets tiresome at times, and some of the procedures and policies can detract us from other more directly teaching-focussed activities (a polite way of saying that quality incursions can be irritating and possibly irrelevant). Continue reading