There is general recognition that increased demand for information about programme quality has accompanied the nearly universal massification of higher education, the consequential pressures on public expenditure, and the associated requirements of greater accountability. The UK government has sought to respond to this demand by establishing an…

Procedures for responding consistently to plagiarism incidents are neither clear-cut nor easily implemented and yet inequitable treatment is intrinsically unfair. Classifying the seriousness of a plagiarism incident is problematic and penalties recommended for a given incident can vary greatly. This paper describes the development and testing of a…

Collecting feedback from students on their experiences of higher education has become one of the central pillars of the quality process. Many surveys are being carried out but it is not always clear how fit for purpose they are. This paper compares the fitness for purpose of a nation-wide survey and a tailor-made institutional survey. The National…

The nation state is not helpless if it wishes to respond to the significant increase since the 1980s in the cross-border provision of higher education. In 2003, the General Council of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) nevertheless commissioned the development of practices and principles to further…

This paper analyses the take-up of proposals for a national quality assurance system in South Africa using different approaches to quality assurance to classify stakeholder responses to survey and interview questions. The context of the study was the introduction of an external quality assurance system for South African higher education by an…

The system of education in agriculture in Iran has not been effective enough in its provision of human resources to facilitate substantial changes in rural areas over the last few decades. This paper explores the challenges to the staff in the College of Agriculture at Razi University in introducing an alternative educational programme. Methods of…

This article examines an external evaluation of the quality assurance system at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) conducted by The Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (NOKUT). The external audit report along with internal reports provided by the seven faculties of the university served as the major…

Improving retention rates in post-school education has become a focus for policy-makers and researchers throughout the western world. Without doubt, any measure that helps students wishing to succeed in higher education is valuable. However, the dominance retention has achieved on a wide variety of educational fronts ranging from policy to…

In order to develop capacity to link knowledge to economic growth in developing countries, there is an urgent need to make quality the major element of higher education systems. In Iran, a developing country, such a need was felt a decade ago in the academic community. Based on research projects conducted, a model that combines collegial…

A critical look at the content we select for teaching and the criteria for that selection may help us to establish a theoretical framework for studying the quality of teaching and learning. The discussion of such criteria is central to the German and Nordic didaktik tradition. The criteria for content selection reveal how educational content is…

The use of data from student surveys has become a common element of universities' and governments' strategies to assure the quality of university teaching. With the introduction of a new government policy in Australia in 2005, these survey-derived teaching performance indicators now determine the distribution of many millions of dollars of funding…

Academics, although committed to quality in research and teaching, continue to resist quality assurance processes within their universities. This apparent paradox reflects a series of disputes surrounding issues of power, definition and efficacy. This article reports on a study of 30 academics from 10 Australian universities and details their…

This study is about what supervisors perceive as crucial aspects of quality in supervising students writing their bachelor theses. The questions on quality are related to a scientific perspective, a learning perspective, a societal perspective and a social perspective. The study demonstrates that the criteria on science varied considerably,…

This paper investigates the appropriateness of competence-based assessment in professional education validation, considering architectural education in Asia as a case study. Competence-based assessment originated in teacher training and vocational training settings in the USA and the UK. Competence-based assessment has been increasingly adopted by…

This study explores possible changes in the views of six faculty quality committees at a South African university. The initial investigation was replicated after five years and relates to the extent to which these committees perceive: (i) quality improvement as an indicator of faculty effectiveness; and (ii) faculties as the owners of quality. It…