Abstract
Academic audit emerged in the UK circa 1990 and is being applied in a growing number of venues across the world. This paper describes the variant, called “Education Quality Audit,” applied by Hong Kong 's University Grants Committee (UGC) in the mid 1990s and again 2002. The UGC's policy problem was how to discharge its obligation to Government and the public to assure the quality of teaching and learning without disempowering the institutions, infringing their autonomy, or spending too much in relation to the results achieved. Its solution was to evaluate the maturity of the universities' “education quality work” (EQW): that is, the organized activities dedicated to improving and assuring educational quality. EQW includes the assessment of student learning, and also educational goals, curricula, teaching methods, and quality assurance. Audit differs from external assessment in that it does not directly evaluate the quality of educational provision. Such evaluations are important, but they are difficult for external bodies to achieve in university education. Audit asks whether the entity itself makes the requisite measurements and what it does with the results. It assumes a delegation of responsibility to the institution and verifies that the delegation is being discharged effectively. The audit mantra is, “Trust but check.”
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Notes
- 1.
Because the RAE measures number of academic staff whose work meets preset quality standards, it can be viewed as combining QA with measurement of the amount of activity. For teaching, the analogous quantity measure is student numbers. One needs a separate QA exercise for teaching because the relation between student numbers and quality standards is not automatic. For more discussion on the RAE see French et al. (1999, 2001).
- 2.
Education quality audit was significantly improved during the second Hong Kong round, and again in the Missouri and Tennessee implementations as described in Massy, et al. (2007). Because this chapter is a policy analysis and not a case study, I will describe the current state of the art rather that the method as originally implemented. Areas where the method has changed materially will be noted, however.
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- 4.
Sweden’s National Agency for Higher Education coined a term for describing the subject matter of academic audit. The term translates to English roughly as “Education Quality Work” (EQW). Massy (2003, 2004) uses the term “Education Quality Processes” (EQP). However, designating EQW as EQP invites confusion with teaching and learning processes. In a recent development, Massy et al. (2007) extended the ideas of EQW to include research. They call the enhanced process “Academic Quality Work” (AQW).
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A primer on education quality work as audited in Hong Kong, Missouri, and Tennessee can be found in the Appendix. It provides brief descriptions of the “focal areas” of EQW (the subjects that audit should cover), some principles by which the efficacy of a respondent’s EQW can be judged, and a maturity scale for summarizing the audit results. The material is important because understanding the education quality audit as a policy instrument requires an understanding of EQW itself. Agencies that adopt education quality audit may wish to substitute their own materials, but having some kind of standards to audit against is essential.
- 7.
In Round 2, additional two-person sub-panels addressed research postgraduate programs and continuing education.
- 8.
The focal area definitions used by the UGC, called “domains” rather than focal areas, differed slightly from the ones presented here. Those domain definitions were curriculum, teaching and learning processes, student learning assessment, quality assurance, and resources devoted to quality processes. The current best-practice definitions evolved subsequent to (and as a result of) the first UGC audit round. However, given everyone’s familiarity with the original definitions, the UGC chose not to adopt the change for the second round.
- 9.
While the Hong Kong audits did not explicitly address the co-curriculum, co-curricular issues did arise frequently.
- 10.
The Tennessee audits make use of principles for the use of evidence in teaching and learning prepared by the Senior College Division of The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC).
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Acknowledgement
I am indebted to David Dill, Ralph Wolff of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges my colleagues on the Hong Kong UGC and the Region’s two audit panels, Steve Graham of the University of Missouri System, and Paula Short of the Tennessee Board of Regents for their help and encouragement in the development and application of the education quality audit method.
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Massy, W.F. (2010). Education Quality Audit as Applied in Hong Kong. In: Dill, D., Beerkens, M. (eds) Public Policy for Academic Quality. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 30. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3754-1_11
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