Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
This article surveys recent work on the construction of performance indicators in higher education, focusing particular attention on degree results, student wastage and research output. Performance indicators ought to provide measures of value added by the various institutions under review. As such crude measures of output, which fail to take account of input differences across institutions, are inappropriate. So it is necessary to investigate what factors underlie inter-institution differences in measured output, in order to correct for input variations in assessing overall performance. The absence of market prices for teaching and research outputs severely hinders the construction of composite measures of the performance of higher education institutions, since in their absence no objective weights can be assigned to the different roles of these institutions. The resource implications of performance measurement exercises need to be clarified if rankings exercises are to have the desired incentive effects. Copyright 1992 by Oxford University Press.