In the past four years, several universities and private providers of higher education have been quality audited by the council on higher education’s subcommittee, the higher education quality committee (HEQC).
The audits follow a worldwide trend and enable the HEQC to have a national picture of quality arrangements in higher education and to monitor system- and sector-level quality improvement.
The legacy of apartheid resulted in a fragmented higher education system with unevenness in the management of quality between and within universities. The quality audits aim to facilitate continuous quality development and improvement in higher education and to enhance a university’s capacity to plan, act and report on quality-related objectives and achievements, explains an academic from an institution in the Free State.
One of the objectives is to “link the achievement of quality to transformation objectives and the fostering of innovation and diversity in higher education”.
The fundamental starting point to an audit is the vision, mission and strategy of the university, which determines the nature of the assessment that the audit panel will implement. So, if University A aspires to be the MIT of Africa, it would be assessed against its mission statement and the reality of the situation, juxtaposed with the institution’s self audit and an HEQC panel site visit.
The audit is based on criteria; it is a peer review — senior staff from other universities and often an independent international academic are on the panel. Universities are forced to be introspective about how they do things and they need to provide answers and evidence to four open-ended questions:
- What are the unique and distinc ways in which the institution enriches and adds excellence to the higher education sector and society, nationally, regionally and internationally?
- What does the institution do to produce a vibrant intellectual culture within the institution and in society at large?
- In what ways does the institution act as an incubator of new ideas, cutting-edge knowledge and technologies within the national system of innovation?
- What are some of the notable examples in the last three years of institutional success in promoting and enhancing quality?
There are 19 criteria that universities are assessed against, which include:
- The institution has a clearly stated mission and purpose with goals and priorities which are responsive to its local, national and international context and which provide for transformational issues.
- The institution has effective procedures which facilitate the quality of the internal and external moderation of its assessment procedures and results, in order to ensure their reliability and to ensure the integrity of the qualifications it awards.
- The institution engages in benchmarking, where appropriate, and draws on user surveys and impact studies in the process of planning and setting of priorities for quality development and enhancement.
Universities have to produce this self‒evaluation in the form of an audit portfolio, backed with evidence. This is then submitted to the HEQC, which may request more information. This introspection enables universities to identify problems at the outset and they then have opportunities to start resolving them.
The HEQC draws on annual information submitted by the institution to develop an understanding of it in advance and then considers the self-audit report. A panel then conducts a site visit and can interview up to 600 members of the university community over five days.
An academic from the Free State who was involved in his institution’s audit, explains: “To assess the accuracy, completeness and reliability of the information in the audit portfolio, the panel conducts interviews with various stakeholders and reviews supporting documentation. These activities, and particularly the interviews with staff and students, allow the panel to assess aspects that cannot easily be documented in written form. Such matters include the morale of the staff, the attitude of the students, the intellectual atmosphere and the commitment to quality.”
Verbal feedback is conveyed to the vice-chancellor at the end of the site visit. A draft which includes commendations and recommendations is presented to the university some months later, providing them an opportunity for corrections of factual errors or misinterpretation.
A final report is then produced and an executive summary is released publicly with commendations and recommendations. The audited university is then required to submit an improvement plan.
The audit is viewed as a stressful, time-consuming and costly exercise for the university and the whole process, including a year’s preparations for the site visit, until the handing over of the final report can take up to two years or more.