Research Assessment Exercise 2008

Newcastle University Business School’s research success in recent years is reflected in the results of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), in which 90% of the School’s research was judged to be of international standing.

The RAE is a government exercise in which the quality of research is assessed across all universities in the UK. It thus provides a rigorous and objective assessment of our research achievements. The Business School was entered under Unit of Assessment 36, Business and Management Studies.

For the 2008 RAE, the outcome of the assessment was given as an an overall 'quality profile', which outlines the percentage of research activity judged to fall under each of four grades:

Percentage of research activity in the submission judged to meet the standard for:
4*
3*
2*
1*
10
40
40
10

50% of the School’s research was deemed to be either ‘world leading’ (4*) or ‘internationally excellent’ (3*) in terms of its originality, significance and rigour, and a further 40% was judged to be of an ‘internationally recognised’ (2*) standard.

These are excellent results for the Business School. Looking at performance across the grades, our 2008 profile gives us a grade-point average (GPA) of 2.5. Ranking the 90 business school submissions on this basis, Newcastle’s position is 29th (=). This represents a significant improvement on the position of 44th achieved in the last RAE, held in 2001. The School fully intends to build on this achievement and carry forward its success to the next assessment exercise.