A prActicAl guide Benchmarking in european Higher education

CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES OF BENCHMARKING
Benchmarking relates to quality assurance, as mentioned above, and in particular
to the concept of continual institutional evaluation, since to undertake
benchmarking universities have to map, analyse and evaluate their internal
processes. Good identification and consciousness of one’s own practice is
indispensable for successful benchmarking.
Terms: indicators, benchmarks, rankings, checklists,
criteria, standards - and their interrelations
Some initiatives called ‘benchmarking’ only consist of collecting quantitative
statistics and performance indicators and lack the focus on learning which is
a distinguishing characteristic of benchmarking. We should clarify how in
our use of terms a number of things are related, realising that other actors
have different uses of the terms. A hypothetical example may help.
The first need is to know what constitutes ‘performance’. Higher education
institutions have a number of performances (teaching outputs, research outputs,
etc.). The higher education institution must decide which performance(s)
is/are in need of improvement. Besides an institution’s own performance
goals, often authorities define certain requirements too: increase the number
of students in mathematics, achieve social equity of access, minimise time to
degree, have a development plan, set a quality assurance policy, etc. Such
definitions of things to be performed, especially if set by external authorities,
are variously called standards, criteria, checklists and even benchmarks
(e.g. that is how the EU understands ‘benchmarks’ for higher education). In
the latter case, please note that our use of the term ‘benchmark’ is different:
for what we would call a standard (e.g. a higher proportion of students in the
sciences is desired), 7 one or more indicators can be found (e.g. ratio of
newly entering students in study programmes in the Faculty of Sciences); for
these indicators criteria may be formulated (e.g. the ratio should grow annually
by at least 20%)—and then data have to be collected to find out about the
situation regarding this criterion. In the next step, one might compare one’s
own ratio with those of others to find the highest around. The highest
relevant value found we would call the benchmark: say one higher education
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A list of standards, especially if they were formulated in terms of ‘presence’ or ‘adequacy’ of a number of items,
could be called a checklist, e.g. higher education institutions should have a formal quality policy, a formal
mechanism for curriculum review, and honest and open assessment of students (the first three ‘standards’ of
the European Standards and Guidelines).
36 A Practical Guide - Benchmarking in European Higher Education