Quality assurance in engineering education on a national and European scale

Activity 2 of project E4, “Quality Assessment and Transparency for Enhanced Mobility and Trans-European Recognition”, included the working group on “Quality Assurance in Engineering on a National and European Scale”. Its report can be found in Part 2 of Volume D, final report of the E4 Thematic Network (Firenze University Press 2003). The Report of this Working Group is formed by three parts. Chapter 2 explores the horizon of evaluation, and briefly summarizes evaluation mandate, focus and procedures in the light of quality and quality assurance, accreditation, responsibility, with particular reference to higher education. Chapter 3 explores the ideas from a number of European evaluation models for higher education, and shows that their contents can be read in the frame of four fundamental “aspects” or “dimensions” of quality: – Requirements, objectives – Teaching, learning, assessment – Learning resources – Monitoring, analysis, improvement Chapter 4 underlines that a Programme should be evaluated on the basis of its ability to put into effect a policy focusing—clearly and distinctly—on the external and internal efficacy of the learning process: specify worthwhile learning goals and enable most students to achieve the established objectives. The set of “aspects” examined in Chapter 3 is expanded into a minimum set of “factors”, that the Programme should address in a stable manner before it is submitted to an external evaluation. In developing this activity, a selection of a few representative models was examined, bringing out the essential structure that they have in common. The reference documents can be found in the References section of this article. What follows is extracted from the conclusions of Chapter 4.