Quality Assurance Systems in Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation

ENHANCEMENT OF QUALITY ASSURANCE SYSTEMS IN HIGHER EDUCATION IN APEC MEMBER ECONOMIES
1.3 Diversity
In a vibrant region such as the APEC region, with linguistic, political, economic and cultural
differences, the higher education systems and policies of the various economies and the
developmental stage that they have reached are very diverse, and correspondingly the quality
assurance practices vary widely.
In fact, the term `quality assurance’ is used to denote different practices in the APEC
economies and quality assurance is exercised through many modes. While the approach to
quality assurance has variations to serve unique national contexts, there is agreement on the
essentials. Whatever the basic approach to quality assurance, the survey indicates that most
quality assurance systems have certain common features. The institution (or program) that
undergoes the quality assurance process provides relevant information to the agency. In most
cases, this is part of a self-assessment which provides a critical analysis of the
institutional/program data. This is followed by a site visit of an external review team that
results in the report / recommendation / observations about the quality of the institution /
program. The final step in this evaluation process is the decision on the review team’s
recommendations / observations, and the disclosure of all or part of the outcome.
While the survey reveals that all quality assurance processes follow this common framework,
there is a lot of variation in the way the processes are implemented. This is not unexpected,
since the APEC economies themselves are very varied. They vary in size from a few million
people to over a billion, in stages of both general and educational development, in systems of
culture and government, and in national and international aspirations. The next few pages of
this report provide an overview of the commonalities and variations observed among the
APEC economies related to various aspects of quality assurance. Drawing on the
commonalities and variations, this report provides some insights into what quality assurance
agencies consider has worked well in their experiences.
1.4 Number of Agencies
Many of the economies have several quality assurance agencies (and the number does not
correlate with the size of the population). Therefore, this report does not cover all quality
assurance efforts, although from several economies there are two or more responses. When
responsibilities are shared, there are differences in the specific objectives and clientele.
However, in general the multiple agencies within the same economy do have a lot of
commonalities, as they are driven by the same national context, so some inferences may be
drawn. Care has been taken to get a national view from the agencies that participated in the
survey. Also, in economies where quality assurance is implemented by multiple agencies, the
agencies that were surveyed provided information about other players at the national level
and that was helpful for understanding the national scenario.
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