The European Standards and Guidelines and the Evaluation of Agencies in Germany

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary findings from the application of the European Standards and Guidelines (ESG) to the Accreditation Council’s accreditation criteria and the review of three German accreditation agencies done by the German Accreditation Council. It focuses on the main characteristics of the ESG and their implementation into the German accreditation system. Three lessons can be learnt from the experience of the implementation of the ESG. Guidelines should concentrate on principles that can be applied to different forms of quality assurance; Integrating regional or international standards or guidelines into existing sets of criteria or standards fosters mutual understanding or even convergence; attempts to make guidelines comprehensive and extend procedural principles of quality assurance, have important side effects on higher education systems.

Keywords:

• European Standards and Guidelines
• Bologna Process
• quality assurance
• accreditation
• assessment criteria

Notes

[1] Editor’s note: The register remains a contentious area and it is precisely the issues of ownership, criteria and access that were raised against the proposed World Quality Register; see Quality in Higher Education, 8(3), pp. 211–4.