Evaluation of doctoral courses at Alzahra University: the "scientisity" of admission, learning, and research processes

In the Science of Learning, and from a social constructivist perspective, evaluation of educational processes is a necessary task aimed at the improvement of both processes and products. The low quality of education is a problem that can bring about many damaging consequences. Evaluation is a way of identifying the problems and ways of solving them. There are evidences hinting at the low quality of the doctoral courses in Iran. To assess the quality of these courses and to identify the shortcomings that may be the root causes of the said problem, from among all such courses at Alzahra University, four were chosen and their programs, entrance exams, and dissertations were evaluated in terms of being scientific (i.e. "scientisity"). Their professor's and student's opinions were also surveyed in this regard. The findings are indicative of equally low levels of scientisity in all four doctoral courses. Considering the dominant culture in Iranian system of higher education and the absence of a scientistic attitude, these findings are surprising. Hence, one way of getting out of the current trouble would be the strengthening of scientistic attitude and promotion of scientistic culture in order to have better curriculum planning and implementation leading to higher quality outputs.