| Abstract: | Quality Assurance is a world-wide phenomenon that urges Higher
Education Institutions (HEIs) to be accountable and reflect improvement in
all their activities. There are several methods to Quality Assurance, which
look into at the organizational structure rather than that of individual
activities. The leadership in Ethiopia, as in many other countries in the
developing world, is attempting to integrate Quality Assurance into its
higher education system. The primary focus in this study is on the concept
of quality as fitness for purpose, internal quality assurance, and external
quality assurance systems to look into the developments in the quality
assurance regime in the institutions. The study primarily employed
questionnaires, to collect data from graduating students of the six public
and private HEIs. The study attempted to address a basic research question:
What are the practices and improvements observed by students in the HEIs
following HERQA’s institutional quality audits? There are two principal
reasons for collecting feedback from students. The first is to enhance the
students’ experience of learning and teaching and the second is to
contribute to the monitoring and review of quality and standards. The
emphasis here, therefore, is on quality assurance. An analysis of the data,
which embraced both quantitative and qualitative, implied that the
prospective graduating students in the sample institutions seemed to be
unconvinced with respect to the quality improvement in regard to the
different aspects of quality. HEIs should emphasize heavily on the internal
quality assurance practices. The study unfolded a range of opportunities
and challenges to the development of quality assurance and quality culture.
The study has implication for both theoretical and practical worlds of
Ethiopian HE where quality assurance is in its nascent stage and resources
are limited.Key words: quality; quality assurance; external quality assurance; internal
quality assurance; perceptions |
