Higher education accreditation has spread internationally as a vehicle for quality assurance and improvement but is strongly influenced by accreditation practices in the United States. The organisational structure and processes of seven United States health professions accreditors were analysed to identify common characteristics that reflect…

Graduate higher education coverage has expanded worldwide due to globalisation, the demand for more specialised human resources and online education, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This article validates an evaluation model of academic service quality in graduate studies that integrates HiEduQual instruments with the Kano method for…

Student success has multiple meanings; however, the quantitative bias prevalent in the northwest American and Western Canadian postsecondary education sector restricts how student success is defined and measured. Standardised measures of student success assume that the student experience is homogeneous and risk the implementation of policies and…

This study probes the execution of internal quality assurance "vis-à-vis" learning outcome assessments in Japanese and Taiwanese universities. To this end, it applies Elken and Stensaker's theoretical framework of 'quality work' to ascertain the following: (1) how universities build internal quality assurance; (2) what learning outcome…

Quality is a multidimensional and transversal concept also in the field of higher education. This and other considerations revealed some problems during application of quality principles to study programmes, emerged from the first accreditation experience in Italy. The objective of this article is to provide a simple self-assessment tool for…

In 2017, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research implemented a project to develop curriculum guidelines for all health and social care programmes. The modified RAND/UCLA appropriateness method used by the group developing guidelines for programmes in prosthetics and orthotics is described. The method resulted in 126 learning outcomes that…

University ranking or higher education assessment in general has been attracting more and more public attention over the years. However, the subjectivity-based evaluation index and indicator selections and weights that are widely adopted in most existing ranking systems have been called into question. In other words, the objectivity and…

Starting from the main objective of external quality assurance (EQA) procedures to assure and improve the quality of higher education institutions and its provisions, the paper examines expected impacts of EQA procedures on institutions from the perspectives of three European quality assurance agencies. First, the paper examines the expected…

In Australia, a review of the higher education sector is usually triggered by a change in government leadership, followed by the development and implementation of the government's response in the form of a reform package to enact change. The aim of this study was to conduct an independent evaluation of a large-scale national government policy…

In this paper the current national legislations, the quality assurance approaches and the activities of impact analysis of three quality assurance agencies from Romania, Spain and Germany are described from a strategic perspective. The analysis shows that the general methodologies (comprising, for example, self-evaluation reports, peer reviews,…

In this paper, the theoretical perspectives and general methodological elements of impact evaluation of quality assurance in higher education institutions are discussed, which should be a cornerstone of quality development in higher education and contribute to improving the knowledge about the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of quality…

This paper reports on methodological approaches, experiences and expectations referring to impact analysis of quality assurance from the perspective of three higher education institutions (students, teaching staff, quality managers) from Germany, Finland and Romania. The presentations of the three sample institutions focus on discussing the core…

The scientific performance of 64 political science, sociology and marketing departments in Romania is investigated with the aid of the "g"-index. The assessment of departments based on the "g"-index shows, within each of the three types of departments that make up the population of the study, a strong polarisation between top…

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the debate on the notion of quality in higher education with particular focus on "objectifying through articulation" the assessment of quality by professional experts. The article gives an overview of the differentiations of quality as used in higher education. It explores a substantial…

The ways in which the value-added benefits of higher education are conceptualised and measured have come under increased scrutiny as universities become more accountable to their funding bodies in a difficult economic climate. Existing approaches for understanding quality learning often rely on measuring the subjective student experience or on…