Thursday 3 March 2011

Students: how not to treat your research

You might think that a government-commissioned review of higher education funding would be utterly scrupulous in the way that it conducted and processed its research, even if the head of the commission, one Lord Browne, is a perjurer.

You'd be wrong. In a move which would get him expelled were he a third-year undergraduate writing a dissertation, it turns out that he spent almost £70,000 on qualitative focus groups, and then promptly suppressed the evidence because the results weren't what he wanted to hear. He could have presented their views and provided a counter-argument, but - in true Tory style - he just decided to ignore them and go ahead anyway.

I guess old habits die hard.

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