A bimonthly publication of AQU Catalunya

53

March 2011

There is such an abundance of international co-operation, benchmarking and experience-sharing going on between European quality assurance agencies that it is sometimes easy to forget the differences that persist. A quality assurance agency and the type of evaluation method it utilises are, in my opinion, very much a product of the respective country's system of higher education. The Finnish Higher Education Evaluation Council (FINHEEC), for example, has chosen a very enhancement-led quality audit model because of the need to respect university autonomy, a deeply rooted characteristic of the culture of higher education in Finland. Not every type of evaluation method is compatible with every culture of higher education however. One is severely lacking detailed experience in this respect, but intuition has it that, in another country, it may well be entirely unacceptable to audit, for example, a prestigious research university and pry into the personal role of an eminent professor in quality assurance activities. Conversely, one might pave the way for a disaster by enforcing a strict accreditation regime on a Finnish university . This is not to say that introducing foreign evaluation methods would not be useful and indeed it could lead into significant breakthroughs by gently shaking up the conventions of evaluation in a country where they are introduced.

International evaluations do, however, carry a certain amount of risk. The person coordinating the evaluation is often not as familiar with the panel members, and it is harder to collect tacit knowledge on a prospective panel member's previous performance in evaluation work. One thing however that is evident in all international evaluations, including the external review of agencies, is a clash of evaluation cultures. The severity of this clash depends a great deal on the panel members' experience and previous knowledge of the higher education system in question. The clash may be almost non-existent if the panel is extremely well acquainted with the higher education culture of the country, although the possibility of an entirely new idea, perspective and/or breakthrough as a product of the evaluation process may perhaps be less likely.

How does this clash manifest itself? Despite the tremendous and ongoing internationalisation of European quality assurance , much of the actual evaluation activity is still produced nationally by national agencies with national panel members dealing with national higher education institutions. This internationalisation therefore takes place mostly on surface only , with the sharing of experience, etc. Your average agency policy advisor, project officer or equivalent may travel a few times a year to an international conference to meet foreign colleagues, but will rarely actually coordinate an international evaluation , and what is important, more rarely still, conduct an evaluation in a foreign country.

External review is one of those rare occasions when we actually get to experience evaluation first-hand in a foreign country. One should therefore be prepared for discussions and a style of interviewing of a slightly different nature to what are considered normal back home. The panel members may, on the one hand, be harder than one would expect, interrupting mid-sentence and grilling individuals on an ad hoc basis. On the other hand, they may be gentler and opt for pleasant discussion, with problems and shortcomings hardly being touched upon. Cultural differences are something most people on both panels and in the respective agency will have to be quite understanding and sensitive about. External reviews are rather sensitive affairs at the best of times, and one can never be quite sure how a discussant actually interprets one's questions and answers. They do however provide a rare opportunity to hear different views on familiar problems and ideas that one might otherwise never think of, no matter how much internal development work you put in.