Planned Government changes to the way it ranks tertiary institutions' research performance will go ahead.
The Tertiary Education Commission will ignore the results of the weakest researchers when it calculates the average quality of research at all institutions that teach degree and postgraduate courses .
The commission proposed the change in April after staff discovered big differences in universities' approaches to exempting their weakest researchers from the research evaluation.
It says ignoring the weakest researchers will ensure no institution gets an advantage by ruling out more of those researchers than other institutions do.
The rankings are not the main purpose of the evaluation but are important for marketing, especially for the top-ranked universities.
The evaluation is being held to determine how $150 million in research funding will be allocated each year for the next six years.
