[Corpora-List] corpora-list: publishing lists of accepted and rejected papers

[Patrick Paroubek]

>At least in my experience, any academic institution in the
>Scandinavian countries. Applicants are evaluated by an external
>committee, which produces an annotated ranking. The ranking is made
>known to all applicants, and is available for consultation by members
>of the public. I don't believe it's posted in either physical
>billboards or websites, but anyone who asks can find out the results.
>
>The openness doesn't seem to discourage applicants. After all, anyone
>with even a slight familiarity with academia knows that getting a
>paper, a grant or a job application rejected is par for the course. I
>find the pudency with which such rejections are kept from public
>scrutiny elsewhere in the West quite Victorian.

Concerning the disclosure of information about the applications, the
question is where do you stop? A simple ranking is not very informative,
since there are so many different factors involved. Some people might then
feel that a short text from the expert committee justifying each ranking
ought to made public, exactly like when you submit a paper. And that could
generate as much controversy as the non-disclosure solution.

Another point is that for a given application the selection committee
tries to assess the appropriateness of the candidacy against the assignement
offered, and not some sort of intrinsic value of the candidates, which 
a ranking often can be perceived to imply. 

The publication of statistics on the paper published raises already enough
controveries in the world of science whithout adding the possibility to create
more by giving the means to people to generate statistics on the near misses
at job applications.

>>From the moment that each candidate has access to his ranking, and that
he can publish it at will, I think that it is best to let each people
decide whether he wants his ranking to be made public or not.

-----
Patrick Paroubek / ILES Group / Human-Machine Communication Dept.
LIMSI - CNRS, Batiment 508 Universite Paris XI, BP 133 - 91403 ORSAY Cedex - France
phone: (33) (0)1 69 85 80 04 fax: (33) (0)1 69 85 80 88 email:pap at limsi.fr

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