Assessing Education Quality: Measures and Processes *

The means of assessing the quality of education offered by an institution, faculty, or department has recently become a hot issue in many countries. The three approaches to quality assessment are accreditation, evaluation and academic audit. Accreditation Accreditation asks whether academic credits can be trusted and, in the United States, whether an institution’s students should be eligible for federal financial aid. America’s accreditation system originally addressed the threshold standards needed to assess credit transfer and financial aid eligibility. Does an institution have the resources needed to provide threshold quality levels (e.g. inputs like the quantity and quality of faculty, libraries, physical plant)? Does it comply with accepted criteria for diversity, academic freedom and the like? U.S. accreditors are redesigning their processes to evaluate and improve quality at all levels as well as to certify threshold standards. For example, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) now defines itself as a ‘capacity building organization with regulatory functions’ where ‘capacity’ includes the ability to improve and assure education quality. In addition to WASC’s use of audit principles, the North Central Association’s new system uses criteria from the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and other regional and disciplinary accreditors are experimenting along similar lines. Evaluation Evaluation of delivered quality at the subject level by teams of outside experts has been the mainstay in the UK and a number of other European countries. European oversight agencies tend toward direct evaluations of quality by outside experts. Britain calls its evaluations ‘subject-level assessments’ to emphasise that the focus of attention is the department rather than the institution. The programme began with the polytechnic universities in the late 1980s and was extended to all of the country’s 150 or so universities a few years later. (The UK’s new programme uses evaluation only on an exception basis, if an institution fails an audit). The Netherlands introduced evaluation at about the same time, Denmark started in 1992, and a number of other countries have implemented or are considering similar programmes. Education quality evaluation requires that a team of experts in the discipline visit the department and gauge the quality of education actually delivered to students. Self-studies help focus the visit, but team members also review syllabi and examination papers, interview faculty and students, and visit classrooms. The team forms it own conclusions rather than relying mainly on the selfevaluation. Evaluation provides incentives for improvement, but this is offset by its intrusiveness. One cannot evaluate delivered quality without ‘getting inside’ the department. Once inside, the outside experts may second-guess professors on what are essentially matters of judgment. This problem is particularly severe when the experts have less research prestige than local faculty. Research prowess doesn’t necessarily confer good pedagogical judgment, but experience in the UK, particularly, demonstrates how the lack of a strong research record can undermine an evaluator’s credibility.