Institutional Self Evaluation: A pre-requisite for External Quality Audit

Abstract

The Higher Education Relevance and Quality Agency (HERQA) is mandated to assure the quality of public and private Higher Education in Ethiopia. Quality assurance agencies use the term ‘quality assurance’ to denote different practices. Each practice serves different purposes to suit the national contexts in which agencies operate and the purposes they desire to serve. Although the approaches differ to suit the national contexts, the basic essentials are similar and have the following common features: they base their quality assessment on predetermined and transparent criteria; they use an institutional self evaluation and an external review; they emphasize public disclosure of the outcomes and declare the outcomes valid for a specific period of time. Most often quality assurance agencies follow a three stage process in their attempt to assure quality. The first stage requests higher education institutions to prepare a self-evaluation report and provide relevant information on the quality of educational programs they offer related to predetermined and well publicized criteria. The second stage focuses on a site visit by a team of external quality auditors to validate the self-evaluation report. The third stage is the final decision by the agency on the review team’s recommendations and disclosure of the audit outcome. To that end, the Higher Education Relevance and Quality Agency has reviewed experiences of quality agencies in selected countries and developed and publicized criteria for quality assurance in HEIs in Ethiopia. To date seven public universities have carried out and submitted self evaluation reports to the agency and two universities have been audited. These are important steps in the development of quality assurance for higher education in the country and are learning experiences for all concerned. The agency and all HEIs are expected to continue to work hard to improve the quality of the self-evaluation reporting and in providing relevant information for judging the quality of institutions and their programs. This paper describes the basic elements of the first stage of HERQA’s quality assurance system: a self-evaluation report of a Higher Education institution as a pre-requisite for an external quality audit. It outlines the purposes of an institutional self-evaluation, deals with the quality focus areas, the procedures to be followed for self-evaluation, the self-evaluation report and its use for quality enhancement.