John Macklin, director of the research school at Leeds University, has spent a huge amount of time since March 1995 on the teaching quality and research assessment exercises.
He handed in the self-assessment document in March last year, met the lead assessor in September and arranged a visit for December. No sooner was this out of the way than he was forced to start preparing for the RAE, which took until the following March.
"The amount of work we put into the two assessments was extraordinary. It could not have been achieved in normal working hours," he says. "The effort, plus the time spent on normal teaching, is not something that could be sustained indefinitely.
"Life has become much more bureaucratic," he says. "You are always aware that you are being checked up on and so even when you're not preparing for the TQA, you start taking minutes of all your meetings.
"The assessors may ask you in a few years to explain on paper how you train new lecturers, so now we take notes of training meetings."
Despite this growing mountain of documentation Professor Macklin, who has headed the school for nine years, feels it is important to be concerned with quality, but questions whether the work could be streamlined.
"I felt there was a disproportion between what we could get ready and what they could actually see. I would prefer a system that was less time consuming," he says.
Leeds has set up support systems to help academics with these assessments, including a departmental support unit, research support unit and teaching quality unit.