Nora Loreto's blog Nora Loreto is a writer, musician and activist based in Qubec City. She is mid-way through a Master's in Education Foundations at the University of Saskatchewan. She is formerly the Editor-in-Chief of the Ryerson Free Press and the Communications and Government Relations Coordinator for the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario. Nora's music can be heard here: www.soundcloud.ca/nora-loreto and her blog is at www.noraloreto.ca . What quality assurance practices mean for Ontario's universities The traditional model of quality assurance, where professors and institutional bodies evaluate, approve and improve programs, has always existed in Ontario. However, the centralization and standardization of quality assurance has been accelerated by university and college administrators and encouraged by Ministry staff. External pressures for standardization from the OECD and processes emerging in Europe through the Bologna process have driven these changes. The Council of Ontario Universities (COU) started to coordinate quality assurance reviews in the mid-1990s. One of their subcommittees conducted seven-year audits of institutional review processes, and oversaw a board called the Ontario Council on Graduate Studies that evaluated and approved graduate programs.  The first year of auditing occurred in 1997. Near the end of the Progressive Conservative's second term in 2003, the government implemented a series of quality assurance measurements. After two terms in office marked by deregulated tuition fees, the focus on quality may have been an attempt to obscure their record as they faced a fall election. Driving this focus on quality assurance was government's desire for colleges to be "...flexible,