Individual colleges and universities will get the power to evaluate the professional titles of college teachers, according to a recently-released document from the Chinese Ministry of Education. Although the resulting benefits are huge, universities must improve their management procedures for bestowing such titles, wrote Mu Zhu in a commentary for
Guangzhou Daily.
The move means colleges will be able to dispense with the existing research results-oriented evaluation standard, and to make use of a variety of standards in different cases, thereby giving teachers a more objective, fairer assessment. Meanwhile, according to the commentator, it means greater responsibilities for the higher learning institutions: they must improve management to wipe out problems like opaque "black box" operations or the effects of cliques.
The peer review mechanism must be first of all perfected, and evaluation should focus on teachers' representative works and real contributions. Specifically, the peer reviewers database should be composed of experts with some authority and be updated regularly; the reviewers should be selected randomly on a case-specific basis; and the evaluation should be made person-to-person and in public.
Then education management, human resources and social security management bodies should upgrade their supervision by examining the colleges’ work in regard to such selections. An appeal mechanism should be established, according to Mu, so that teachers can make their voices heard if they have doubts with the evaluation results and process.