To which extent can evaluation and accreditation cultures be combined?
A recent collaboration between AEQES and CTI for the joint evaluation and accreditation of civil engineering programmes raises the issue
Abstract
In December 2009, after an official demand coming from four universities of the French community of Belgium (FCB), AEQES1 (a generalist evaluation agency) and CTI2 (an engineering accreditation agency) initiated collaboration in order to organize a joint mission whose objective was twofold: the evaluation of engineering programmes according to AEQES’ legal requirements and their accreditation according to CTI’s criteria. This paper presents the main outcomes of this joint mission to be finalized in October 2013.
After describing the institutional background of the two agencies, the methodological implementation of the collaboration is presented and analyzed. In the conclusion, the authors try to provide satisfactory answers to the following questions: “How to combine evaluation and accreditation cultures? How to conciliate the sometimes confronted objectives of quality enhancement and accountability in a single exercise?”
This paper was presented at EQAF and reflects the views of the named authors only.
