Universities should use the quality audit as a developmental tool and can make it work for them, says a senior manager who was involved in the audit process of a Gauteng university.
She says: ‘People hear the word ‘audit’ and they think high stakes, big consequence or that it’s a financial audit. There is an assumption by the higher education quality committee (HEQC) that any institution which is audited is in the game already and this is not a gatekeeping exercise which says you cannot offer that programme or we are going to close you down. The audit gives a university an opportunity to tell the HEQC what it is doing. The HEQC then tells the institution how it can improve. It is a meta-evaluation.”
An executive member of a Gauteng university says that many universities were not set up to benchmark themselves, but the audits now force universities to do that. One good recommendation that came out of one of the audits is that a university should have external examiners to moderate the content of examinations and the reliability and validity of the assessment.
Meanwhile, the senior manager of the Gauteng university says the HEQC is flexible in its approach. ‘It wants an institution to take responsibility for what it is doing. It is up to the institution to decide how to approach the audit.” Universities may object to a panelist if they have a valid reason and there been have instances where panelists have been replaced. ‘The audit has a fair amount of credibility. There is nothing punitive about the system and credit goes to the people who designed it.”
Though she feels that the 19 sets of criteria ‘is comprehensive and could go into less detail in some areas”, an academic from the Free State says: ‘The criteria addresses the broad institutional arrangements for effective teaching and learning, research and service learning programmes — the core functions of a higher education institution. Issues of governance, management, finances and other institutional operations are only looked at in relation to their impact on these areas. They provide a systemic framework for all institutions to be evaluated in the same way.”
The Gauteng senior manager says a flaw is that the HEQC never trained vice-chancellors on the audit process. It trained deputy vice-chancellors, deans and senior academics who are panelists. ‘This is a big flaw as you need the buy-in of the vice-chancellor in an audit.”
For the Free State academic, receiving the audit report late resulted in an institution losing momentum with the finalisation of its improvement planning.
Is it the audit worthwhile for a university? The Gauteng senior manager says: ‘It’s a killer for staff who do the leg-work. Institutions should make the audit work for them — one way is by aligning their strategic goals with the findings of the audit. From the self-evaluation you should know your weaknesses and the HEQC’s findings should not come as a surprise. If your management information system picks up problems, such as high staff turnover, then you are home and away in terms of quality management.”
For the Free State academic, ‘when used properly, it enables continuous institutional quality improvement. It was, however, an extremely time-consuming and costly process”.
Some staff at other universities such as Stellenbosch and the University of Cape Town found the self-evaluation process more valuable than the panel site visit.
According to Dr Lis Lange, executive director of the HEQC, ‘It is true that there are many criteria and that the schedule of the audit site visit is very tough on both the audit panel and the institution. However, the criteria need to cover all the different aspects of the educational enterprise and be consistent with the HEQC approach to understanding quality.”
She says the HEQC is seeking to create a common benchmark for all higher education institutions which could be read in the context of their specific mission definitions and modes of delivery and not against a preconceived idea of quality inherited from the apartheid past.
She concedes that although vice-chancellors have not been formally trained on the audit, ‘they are far from being outside the loop”.