Friday, February 27, 2004
Form design issues and the lottery effect
EPSRC, the government funding agency for science research, has a form that you complete in order to apply for funding. Strangely, whilst it is laid out quite well, it is a pain to enter information into, edit that information or move it around - and it doesn't do any automated summations or summaries either. I simply can't understand why not. Perhaps it's to discourage flippant applications?
The bigger issue for EPSRC is that it gets so many decent applications that it can't even fund a significant proportion of them. The best solution is to increase science funding, but, assuming that isn't on the cards, what else could we do? My view is that we should tackle the lottery effect. This is where people decide that the best approach is to submit many, many proposals, in the hope that a few get through. This puts both an excessive burden on the EPSRC reviewing and panel selection process, and means that people's research becomes dictated by the chance of which proposal gets funded. Better to restrict people to, say, two proposals a year: they would then have to focus on making these as good as possible, in the direction they wished to go, and a far greater proportion of them could also be funded, making it more worthwhile applying in the first place.
EPSRC, the government funding agency for science research, has a form that you complete in order to apply for funding. Strangely, whilst it is laid out quite well, it is a pain to enter information into, edit that information or move it around - and it doesn't do any automated summations or summaries either. I simply can't understand why not. Perhaps it's to discourage flippant applications?
The bigger issue for EPSRC is that it gets so many decent applications that it can't even fund a significant proportion of them. The best solution is to increase science funding, but, assuming that isn't on the cards, what else could we do? My view is that we should tackle the lottery effect. This is where people decide that the best approach is to submit many, many proposals, in the hope that a few get through. This puts both an excessive burden on the EPSRC reviewing and panel selection process, and means that people's research becomes dictated by the chance of which proposal gets funded. Better to restrict people to, say, two proposals a year: they would then have to focus on making these as good as possible, in the direction they wished to go, and a far greater proportion of them could also be funded, making it more worthwhile applying in the first place.
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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