The State Audit Office conducted the performance audit of External Quality Assurance of Higher Education covering the activities carried out by the LEPL National Center for Educational Quality Enhancement (the NCEQE) from 2011 to first half of 2015.
The accreditation process of higher education programs is the main external mechanism for higher education quality assurance and serves to ensure the compliance of study programs with existing standards. The State Audit of Georgia studied the accreditation procedure implemented by the NCEQE. The analysis revealed that the NCEQE accreditation mechanisms have major deficiencies on each stage of the process what hampers the achievement of higher education goals which aims to train competent individuals, capable of satisfying modern requirements of labor market.
- Establishing accreditation standards with pre-determined assessment criteria and performance indicators is essential for effective accreditation process. Audit has revealed that due to the absence of pre-determined performance indicators, the HEIs are not obligated and therefore, fail to present relevant and sufficient information and supporting evidence for self-assessment reports. Furthermore, it is possible to fulfill different standard requirements with the same criteria. Therefore, those standard components do not serve their purpose. This hinders consistent evaluation of the level of compliance of study programs with the accreditation standards.
- In the existing accreditation process, experts’ contribution is of a crucial importance. However, the Register of Experts is not properly managed by the NCEQE. Inefficient management of the experts’ database and the absence of set regulations in respect of the number of experts and terms of procedures caused irrelevant and inconsistent selection of experts for the expert committees in the audit period. In 29% out of all accreditation visits, the program evaluation was not conducted by an expert of relevant field. In 17.5% out of all visits, the NCEQE has not allocated sufficient resources corresponding to the number of programs to be reviewed. In 29% of all cases, experts had less than average amount of time (5 days) to study all the relevant accreditation documents.
- The audit revealed, that the NCEQE hardly ever fully uses the 90-day term, assigned by its statute for accreditation procedures of each program in an efficient manner. The number of study programs to be reviewed per Board meeting was in no way reflected on the term that is allocated to the Board for reviewing study program accreditation documents and respective experts’ opinion. Moreover, the analysis of the orders on accreditation visits and visit terms revealed that in 41% of cases the preparatory term and/or the number of experts was not proportionate to the number of programs to be examined.
- Also the NCEQE has not implemented the follow up mechanism on study program accreditation process which shall ensure the compliance of study programs with the existing quality requirements. The audit has revealed that since 2011 no monitoring visit has been carried out based on the annual self-assessment reports.
The State Audit Office of Georgia has developed the recommendations which facilitate the elimination of existing deficiencies and consequential system improvement.
