The two-year program was recently approved by the Dutch-Flemish Accreditation Organization (NVAO), which has judged a large number of Master's programs in the arts and social sciences. The NVAO has strict requirements for the scientific quality of the involved professors and their research programs. For the application, the UT's Executive Board has guaranteed two visiting-professorships for foreign professors to make a temporary contribution to the program.
Unique to this Master's program is the cooperation between the two faculties as well as its subject matter. `The focus in this program is on the combination of acquiring knowledge about social-scientific research methods and on intrinsic theories,' explains Jacques Thomassen, Professor of Political Science in the faculty of Business, Public Administration and Technology. He is working on forming the Master's program, together with colleague and senior lecturer Kees Aarts (Methods and Techniques) and the Behavioural Sciences Professors Jaap Scheerens (Department of Educational Organisation and Management) and Cees Glas (Department of Research Methodology and Data Analysis).
The UT Research Master's program will focus on large-scale survey research on the functioning of social systems. Two specializations will be formed within the program: Educational Evaluation, and Assessment and Democratic Governance. Students who want to participate in the two-year program must earn excellent grades while pursuing their Bachelor's degree. `At least a seven for the courses. Apart from that, there is an interview to gauge their motivation for a scientific career,' Cees Glas explains.
The great advantage of the Research Master's degree is that students will be directly involved in prestigious international research projects.
