UK universities should assess applicants on potential, not prior “excellence”, if they want to address the underrepresentation of PhD students from ethnic minority backgrounds, proposed new guidelines on postgraduate admissions suggest.
The call to drop “rigid assessment criteria based on undergraduate grades” in favour of “more holistic evaluation” and introduce guaranteed interviews for candidates from minority backgrounds who meet minimum requirements are two of the recommendations by the Equator project, based at Sheffield Hallam University, which aims to improve ethnic representation in geoscience research.
In a report published in the journal Nature Geoscience on 3 August, researchers note 26.5 per cent of UK undergraduates come from ethnic minorities but this falls to 19 per cent at postgraduate level.
Drawing on analysis of admissions practices at UK doctoral training organisations and feedback from students, the Equator project calls for wide-ranging changes to how PhD applicants are assessed, advocating greater use of “holistic interview questions designed to prompt candidates to showcase their transferable skills and character attributes”, such as resilience or creativity.
