| Abstract: |
This article analyzes the procedure for the initial employment of research
assistants in Turkish universities to see if it complies with the rules and
regulations. We manually collected 2409 applicant data from 53 Turkish
universities to see if applicants are ranked according to the rules suggested
by the Higher Education Council of Turkey. The rulebook states that applicants
should be ranked according to a final score based on the weighted average of
their GPA, graduate examination score, academic examination score, and foreign
language skills score. Thus, the research assistant selection is supposed to
be a fair process where each applicant is evaluated based on objective
metrics. However, our analysis of data suggests that the final score of the
applicants is almost entirely based on the highly subjective academic
examination conducted by the hiring institution. Thus, the applicants GPA,
standardized graduate examination score, standardized foreign language score
are irrelevant in the selection process, making it a very unfair process based
on favoritism. |