Quality Assurance and Accreditation: A Glossary of Basic Terms and Definitions

Preface The present publication, Quality Assurance and Accreditation: Glossary of Basic Terms and Definitions, is the result of a UNESCO-CEPES initiative undertaken for the particular occasion of the Invitational Roundtable on “Indicators for Institutional and Programme Accreditation in Higher Education/ Tertiary Education” (Bucharest, Romania, 3-8 April 2003), that was organized in the framework of the UNESCO-CEPES project on Strategic Indicators for Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century1. The need to improve the quantitative assessment of higher education at system and institutional levels, the main objective of the project, has been complemented by this effort to gather and to organize the information and the mixtures of meanings surrounding the field of quality assurance and accreditation in higher education. This glossary is, in a way, a compilation of a set of definitions associated with the various terms applied in the fields of quality assurance and accreditation. It may be used as a reference tool to better understand the connotations of the terms in circulation and to compare existing models of quality assurance and accreditation, while also offering opportunities for an increased consistency of their conceptual framework. This publication will also be made available on the UNESCO-CEPES Webpage, allowing it thus to be updated and supplemented with information, on a regular basis. This project being the result of teamwork, I would like to thank all the UNESCO-CEPES staff members who have contributed to its realization, particularly, Lazăr Vlăsceanu, Laura Grunberg, and Dan Pârlea. It is our expectation that this publication will be found to be useful and will facilitate a better understanding of a very complex, but increasingly pertinent problem, that of quality assurance and accreditation, which is one of the underlying principles of the Bologna Process2. Jan Sadlak Director of UNESCO-CEPES Introduction There has always been an individual and social need to improve the quality of life of people, including the quality of what they learn over many years of organized schooling, how they learn it, and why they learn it. Concerns about the quality of higher education are also not recent, being an intrinsic part of any discussion on the subject. Over the years, various developments have taken place relative to the assessment, monitoring, and improvement of the quality of different components of higher education (its governance, its contents, its forms of pedagogy, the services offered, etc.). What is new refers to those developments which are related to quality assurance and its management. Such concepts as “quality assessment”, “quality evaluation”, and “quality assurance” are widely and regularly used nowadays within the wider processes of managing quality. Frequently used, these concepts are also frequently misused. It is for the latter reason that UNESCO-CEPES took the initiative to produce this glossary of quality assurance and accreditation terms and definitions. Many other attempts have been made to prepare such glossaries, as the references listed for the present glossary indicate. Among these, most are national, sub-national, or regional, with only a few having worldwide relevance. To propose a glossary which is meant to include a more universal set of meanings has thus been a challenging and risky task. We, nevertheless, embarked on such an endeavour being convinced of the need to assemble not so much a diversity but a commonality of meanings. The implication was that of observing how specific meanings are shared and how they operate in different contexts. We have encountered many expected and unexpected difficulties in producing this glossary that contains thirty key terms and fifty-two associated terms related to the latter. As the attempt proved to be quite tricky and as we discovered many contradictions and paradoxes in the literature surveyed