ShareAQU Catalunya publishes the 2025 annual report of the president of the COAPEL
The document reports on the activity of the Appeals Commission throughout the past year.
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At the first Governing Council meeting of 2026, AQU Catalunya made public the annual report of the president of the Appeals Commission (COAPEL), a position currently held by Neus Vidal, professor in the Department of Electronic and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Barcelona. In the document, the Commission reports on all its activity during the past year. Throughout 2025, it met a total of seven times and, in order to carry out the preliminary review activity of evaluation files, it relied on a group of 39 external expert reviewers (academic staff), in addition to the five members, the secretary and the president of the Commission. Of these 39 people, 27 were men and 12 were women, 30 came from Catalonia and 9 from the rest of Spain. In addition, 37 were full professors and two were emeritus professors.
Among the results of COAPEL’s activity, it stands out that during 2025 no appeals or review reports regarding degree programmes or institutional accreditation were submitted or resolved. Regarding academic staff appeals — the count refers to the 2024 calls because these are the closed calls, while those from 2025 are still being resolved in 2026 — 156 appeals were submitted last year out of a total of 371 unfavourable evaluations, representing 42% of the total. Of all academic staff appeals, 51% were filed against negative evaluations of the assessment activity of contracted academic staff.
In response to a previous request from the Governing Council, the annual report of the president of the Appeals Commission includes an annex detailing appeals submitted by field and area of knowledge. Specifically, in the Humanities, the fields of History and Art and Philology recorded the highest number of appeals, with 14 and 7 respectively. In the Social Sciences, the fields with the highest number of appeals were Law and Education, with 12 and 7. In Sciences, Mathematics led with 8 appeals. In Life Sciences, the field with the highest number of appeals was Cellular and Molecular Biology. In Medical and Health Sciences, Medicine recorded a total of 7 appeals. In Engineering and Architecture, the fields of Information and Communication Technologies and Industrial Technologies topped the ranking with 17 and 15 appeals respectively.
The COAPEL report also includes the number of administrative litigation appeals filed by individuals who disagree with the Commission’s decisions. In total, four were filed in 2025, one was upheld, two were dismissed, ten remain pending — accumulated from previous years — and one was withdrawn.
The Appeals Commission is responsible for resolving allegations and appeals lodged against decisions of the Research Assessment Commission, the Institutional and Programme Review Commission, their specific subcommissions and the other evaluation, certification and accreditation commissions referred to in Article 11 of Law 15/2015, of 21 July 2015, on the Agency for the Quality of the University System of Catalonia. The COAPEL may carry out two types of reviews: review reports and appeal resolution decisions.
The full 2025 activity report can be consulted here.