A prActicAl guide Benchmarking in european Higher education

Accreditation
Accreditation is a quality assessment with an attached judgment that the
evaluated unit (programme or organisation) meets the minimum standards
required to operate in a national higher education system.
Accreditation may apply to a higher education institution or e.g. a faculty,
giving it the right to award degrees (in a specific area of knowledge). Thus in
many European countries, higher education institutions need institutional
accreditation before they are given the right to operate. Another example is
the accreditation of business schools by the European Quality Improvement
System (EQUIS – see www.efmd.org/equis), intended to distinguish highlyachieving
business schools.
Alternatively it may apply to a certain study programme, which is recognised
to be of a certain nature and level (e.g. a bachelor’s degree in biology). Moreover,
accreditation of a study programme may have consequences for its
graduates’ entering a profession. For instance, in some countries graduates
from an accredited programme are exempt from having to pass examinations
to become registered in a professional organisation.
Accreditation has official, often legal consequences and is therefore a procedure
with heavy emphasis on forming opinion statements that can be upheld
in administrative or legal procedures. One important consequence of this is
that accreditation almost invariably proceeds from previously-published
standards. For institutional accreditation such standards may be of an organisational
nature and include e.g. numbers of full professors. For study
programmes standards concern the curriculum, staff and facilities, or (increasingly)
knowledge and other competencies of graduates. Sometimes,
such programme standards are called ‘subject benchmarks’, although in the
UK, where the term was introduced in the 1990s, these ‘subject benchmarks’
were not obligatory and were used in a quality assessment process not leading
to formal accreditation.
A Practical Guide - Benchmarking in European Higher Education
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