This paper traces some aspects of the growth over the last 20 years in the number of quality assurance agencies in higher education, that is, organisations with some responsibility for the quality of teaching, research and other activities in higher education institutions. Initially, staff of these agencies were largely amateurs in the field, and…

India has the second largest system of higher education in the world. It has 322 university-level institutions and more than 14,000 colleges catering for 8 million direct and full-time students. For such a large and diverse system, developing a national quality assurance mechanism and making the process operational have been formidable tasks. The…

The theoretical premise of this article is that policy is constructed and presented discursively. The Bologna process presents us with an example of such a policy construction process where the quality policy goals are set jointly in transnational settings, requiring different kinds of negotiations and discursive strategies. Discourse analysis of…

Just a few years ago, almost no one saw accreditation as a major force for change in higher education. It was generally regarded as something of an anachronism, a ritual institutions had to go through periodically just to stay legit. But accreditation is back. Anyone who doesn't think so should try Googling "accreditation": even with…

Using the Affiliations Unit of the University of Botswana as a case study, this paper explores how the operational milieu of an External Quality Assurance Agency (EQAA) impacts on its role and function. This milieu is described and selected frame factors are identified and evaluated, including the size of the country; the role of a hegemonic…

A customer can recognise a professional institute almost immediately from the manner in which the customer is dealt with. The institute makes the customer (read student) feel special and deals with the customer as a matter of priority rather than as a secondary issue, less important than the undertaking of other activities. The customers of…

The "Teaching and Learning Quality Process Review" (TLQPR) recently completed in Hong Kong had an emphasis on education quality work. This paper analyses how, from the perspective of academic staff in one university in Hong Kong, the good intentions embedded in that idea are enhanced or subverted by the broader ?quality system setting in…

The Behavior Analyst Certification Board[R] (BACB[R]) credentials behavior analysts at two levels. This article examines how well the BACB and the certifications it offers adhere to accepted professional credentialing standards. Future developments in the BACB certification process and implications for behavior analysis service delivery are also…

To develop an in-process quality control system, a sensor technique and a decision-making algorithm need to be applied during machining operations. Several sensor techniques have been used in the in-process prediction of quality characteristics in machining operations. For example, an accelerometer sensor can be used to monitor the vibration of…

This essay addresses the question, "What is quality in higher education?" In so doing it raises many interesting and vexing questions in relation to education. For example, is "quality" in higher education the same as, for example, "quality" with reference to the quality of clothing or the quality of meat in local…

One of the most ambitious and intriguing developments in higher education in the world today is the so-called Bologna process in Europe. An initiative of the European Union, this process began in June 1999 when twenty-nine ministers in charge of higher education met to begin creating a European higher education area within which the comparability…

For many years, the European evaluation community did not recognize evaluation standards as a relevant tool for quality assurance. References to the developments in the United States were exceptionally rare in the European evaluation literature during the 1970s and 1980s. One of the first articles on evaluation standards to appear in the European…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically test a new industry-specific scale, HEdPERF (Higher Education PERFormance) to capture the authentic determinants of service quality within higher education sector. Design/methodology/approach: The primary goal of this research was to test and compare the relative efficacy of HEdPERF against…

Evaluation of higher education can be described a species of its own with only few connections with other fields of evaluation. When considering the future developments in higher education evaluation (quality assurance), it is useful to observe its similarities and differences with various evaluation approaches in other than higher education…

During the past 40 years, health education has taken significant steps toward improving quality assurance in professional preparation through individual certification and program approval and accreditation. Although the profession has begun to embrace individual certification, program accreditation in health education has been neither uniformly…