"Quality in higher education is a multidimensional concept, which should embrace all its functions and activities: teaching and academic programmes, research and scholarship, staffing, students, buildings, faculties, equipment, services to the community and the academic environment. … [It] also requires that higher education should be characterized by its international dimension: exchange of knowledge, interactive networking, mobility of teachers and students, and international research projects, while taking into account the national cultural values and circumstances".
UNESCO, Article 11 of the World Declaration on Higher Education
Quality Assurance
Quality assurance is an ongoing process that ensures the delivery of agreed standards. It uses evidence to check that goals are being achieved and that goals and practices are being reshaped to bring about improvement. To be meaningful it needs documented standards and best practices; the often-quoted yardstick is “fitness for purpose”.
The NZVCC exercises quality assurance in two different but complementary ways. Its committee, the Committee on University Academic Programmes (CUAP), is charged with setting up and applying inter-university course approval, accreditation and moderation procedures. It is the body, therefore, to which universities must submit any proposals to offer new qualifications or make substantial changes to existing qualifications. All proposals are subjected to scrutiny through a peer review process and some are amended thereby or even rejected. As a follow-up to the initial approval CUAP operates a graduating year review process whereby universities report on the outcomes of the first cohort to pass through a new qualification.
The New Zealand Universities Academic Audit Unit (NZUAAU), established by the NZVCC, is an independent body, the chief function of which is to support New Zealand universities in their continuing achievement of standards of excellence in their academic responsibilities in research and teaching. To fulfil this function, it concentrates its effort on the enhancement of the universities' own programmes of continuous improvement. It works by conducting institutional audits on university campuses. The audit begins, however, with a process of self-review within the institution. The audit panel addresses that self-review and takes the institution further into its plans for future improvement.
In carrying out audits the NZUAAU's objective is:
"Timely completion of academic audits producing audit reports acknowledged as authoritative, fair and perceptive, and of assistance to universities".
[Source: Academic audit manual for use in Cycle 4 academic audits, New Zealand Universities Academic Audit Unit, Te Wāhanga Tātari, December 2007]