Favoritism in Research Assistantship Selection in Turkish Academia

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.