The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was an exercise undertaken approximately every five years on behalf of the four UK higher education funding councils (HEFCE, SHEFC, HEFCW, DELNI) to evaluate the quality of research undertaken by British higher education institutions.
The purpose of the exercise was to determine the allocation of funding to UK Universities at a time of tight budgetary restrictions.
According to Roger Brown and Helen Carasso, only about 40 per cent of the research-related funding was allocated based on the assessment of the submissions.
Behram Bekhradnia, the directory of policy at HEFCE, came to the conclusion that the research assessment needed to become "much more robust and rigorous."
The results of the 1992 exercise were nevertheless challenged in Court by the Institute of Dental Surgery and the judge warned that the system had to become more transparent.
Various unofficial league tables have been created of university research capability by aggregating the results from units of assessment.
[citation needed] Compiling league tables of universities based on the RAE is problematic, as volume and quality are both significant factors.
For RAE 2008, institutions are invited to submit four research outputs, published between January 2001 and December 2007, for each full-time member of staff selected for inclusion.
[3] In response to criticism of earlier assessments, and developments in employment law, the 2008 RAE does more to take into account part-time workers or those new to a sufficient level of seniority to be included in the process.
[4] Amongst the criticisms is the fact that it explicitly ignores the publications of most full-time researchers in the UK, on the grounds that they are employed on fixed term contracts.
[8] In its view, The RAE has had a disastrous impact on the UK higher education system, leading to the closure of departments with strong research profiles and healthy student recruitment.
It was announced[11] in the 2006 Budget that after the 2008 exercise a system of metrics would be developed in order to inform future allocations of QR funding.