Article

The ‘Student Report’: a new way for students to participate in accreditation

Albert Gili Moreno, Project Manager in the Quality Assessment Department and secretary of AQU Catalunya’s ‘Student Advisory Committee

AQU Catalunya is introducing a new way for students to participate in the accreditation of their degree programme or centre, which consists of generating an independent report prepared by the students of the degree programme or centre being assessed. This initiative seeks to boost the student group’s representativeness in accreditation processes, which may be conditioned by different factors, such as the different degrees of strength of the structures of student participation and representation at each centre, possible difficulties in finding students for the hearings, or the level of knowledge of the group about quality procedures.

Against this background, the AQU Catalunya Student Advisory Committee, together with the Catalan University Student Council (CEUCAT), has agreed to establish a procedure for drawing up the Student Report based on international initiatives that are recognised as quality assurance best practices. Based on the experience obtained during the pilot phase, rolled out between 2019 and 2023, the project’s methodological documentation was consolidated and published in 2024. This documentation includes the Guidelines for preparing the 'Student Report' for the accreditation of degrees and university centres and two options for report templates, one dedicated to the accreditation of centres and the other to the accreditation of degree programmes. Designed to assist students in preparing their Student Report, these three documents have been published at a time when the number of institutions renewing their institutional accreditation, a process which by default includes the Student Report (in the case of degree accreditation, this is voluntary), is expected to increase steadily.

The report is designed as a document drawn up, approved and issued by the students with independence from the management teams of the centres and the university. Its content gathers the opinion and satisfaction of the student body regarding the assessed aspects. Nevertheless, the opinions reflected therein must be based on data and information obtained through the application of appropriate and relevant qualitative and quantitative methodologies. This includes data collected ad hoc by the students coordinating the report, data from the university’s or centre’s internal quality assurance system and information available through reliable data platforms, such as the EUC website. As a result, the Student Report becomes a piece of evidence supporting the accreditation self-report drawn up by the Self-assessment Committee (CAI) and complements, but does not replace, the existing mechanisms for student participation in accreditation.

While the published guidelines and reporting models establish general characteristics, they also provide for the flexibility necessary for the adaptation of each Student Report to the different realities of the centres, which can be given by aspects such as the number of official degrees taught, the diversity of knowledge areas or the distribution of campuses, among others. This adaptation must also be sensitive to the reality of the student body of the degree or centre being evaluated, taking into account, for example, the number of students who form part of it, the organisational model of existing student representation structures or exam periods.

In addition to facilitating the published methodology, support for the students who coordinate these reports requires prior training and support from a representative from the Agency to resolve technical questions that may arise during preparation. This prior training, which must include a specific session to provide tools for preparing the report, can also be complemented with a broader contextualisation activity, as would be the case with the course Training for students to guarantee university quality, co-organised by AQU Catalunya and CEUCAT, which took place in November 2024.

The experience obtained in the pilot phase indicates that the student coordinators of the reports must not only have support and training, but also appropriate recognition for the dedication involved in preparing the report. The fact is that all the stakeholders involved (the Agency, universities, CEUCAT, student councils, etc.) need to value the students’ dedication in preparing a report that is valuable both for the assessment itself and for the cycle of improvement of the degree programmes and the centre as a whole.