Scientists criticize agreement between Capes and Public Ministry on postgraduate evaluation

The SBPC (Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science) published this Wednesday (14) a note in which it criticizes the agreement signed between Capes (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) and the MPF (Federal Public Ministry).

The agreement concerns the four-year evaluation of the years 2017 to 2020 carried out by Capes. This evaluation is carried out to indicate the grades of postgraduate programs in Brazil. For example, it is on this basis that a program may no longer have scholarships available to students or even be de-accredited.

The decision is criticized by the SBPC because of a passage that allows graduate programs to use the grade of the previous four-year evaluation, from the years 2013 to 2016, if they have their grade downgraded in the most recent classification.

The evaluation process is the result of information provided by the master’s and doctoral programs. From then on, these data are analyzed by committees from different areas of knowledge, and deliberations by a Capes technical council still take place.

Until then, the evaluation of the four-year period from 2017 to 2020 was in a legal imbroglio. A decision by the Rio de Janeiro attorney’s office prevented Capes from publishing the results. According to the arguments of the MPF (Federal Public Ministry), there were illicit criteria in the ranking of the country’s master’s and doctoral programs.

The case was one of the reasons for the stampede of dozens of researchers linked to Capes at the end of 2021. The group claimed that the presidency of the body would have shown negligence to fight in court for the resumption of the evaluation, which the entity’s management has always denied. Now, Capes has received authorization to publish the assessment by means of a term signed with the MPF.

According to the document, programs are only prevented from using the grade of the previous assessment if the parameter that caused the lowering of the new grade is provided for by law, did not exist in the classification from 2013 to 2016 or if the graduate program was already aware of this parameter at the beginning of the new evaluation.

“According to this agreement, a program cannot be evaluated and signaled that it is wrong, that it is doing a poor job or even that it can cause harm to its students”, says Renato Janine, president of SBPC.

Sought by the report, Capes did not comment on the SBPC’s criticisms until the publication of this text.

Janine says that evaluation should not be seen as punitive, but as a pedagogical process that indicates the positive and negative points of graduate programs.

“If a program is doing well, it should go up in grades. But if it’s doing poorly, it will be downgraded or even terminated if its maintenance is harmful to master’s and doctoral students.”

THE Sheetthe Public Prosecutor’s Office of Rio de Janeiro states that “it is not and has never been against the peer review system, carried out every four years by Capes”.

The attorney’s office explains that the signed term does not regulate Capes’ assessment. “What was agreed, however, is that no new evaluation parameter can be applied to the period prior to its creation”, he adds.

According to the prosecutor’s office, the assessment carried out between 2017 and 2020 had the retroactive application of new rules – that is, it did not follow the agreement to apply parameters only for later moments.

“It is evident that new rules can harm PPGs (graduate programs), even if created in good faith”, says the note.

Another point criticized by Janine is the communication between Capes and the academic community about the agreement. SBPC claims to have had access to the term only when it had already been signed.

“We had heard that this agreement was going to happen, but we didn’t know that it was already signed and even less what the terms were”, says Janine.

For him, it would be necessary for Capes to review the term and strengthen communication with scientists.

The prosecutor understands that the decision was not taken in a hurry and that a public hearing was held with the participation of the scientific community.