In response to the shifting educational landscape and the growing emphasis on responsibility and quality, quality assurance systems in higher education have experienced significant modification throughout time. These systems are essential for assuring the delivery of high-quality educational programmes and preserving the standing and reputation of…

This study examined the experiences of accreditation professionals, specifically SACSCOC staff members, visiting committee members, and accreditation liaisons, who participated in virtual site visits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Accountability pressures in higher education have placed scrutiny on the accreditation process, and little is known…

Purpose: This study aims to review processes of accreditation for Chilean Universities. Along with cataloguing evolutionary milestones, the study analyses effects at the institutional and program levels. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopts a meta-evaluative approach and is based on secondary information sources, including both…

What do students learn in school? In the 21 century, this question has become a political dilemma for countries around the globe. It is a deceptively simple question, but there has never been an easy answer. The problem of measuring student learning appears to express an educational problem: What and how much do students learn? Most student…

Purpose: Providing higher education institutions (HEIs) with a tool for self-assessing their social responsibility (SR) that generates the information and knowledge necessary to a strategic approach to adopting the Green Paper recommendations about the SR of HEIs. Setting out the collaborative policy development process to construct the tool…

With the transition to knowledge-based economies, higher education (HE) has become a driving factor for economic and social development. Alongside high-quality education and excellent research, social responsibility (SR) has become an important aspect of universities' accountability and legitimacy. Considering the growing importance of SR for…

Policymakers have expressed increased interest in program-level higher education accountability measures as a supplement to, or in place of, institution-level metrics. But it is unclear what these measures should look like. In this report, we assess the ways program-level data could be developed to facilitate federal accountability. Evidence shows…

While enrolling in a college for a degree is still considered to be more of the expectation than the rule in households across the United States it is facing public criticism regarding its overall cost versus long-term benefits. This has prompted researchers to reevaluate practices in higher education to determine ways in which post-secondary…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to assess higher education institutions' (HEIs) social sustainability by applying Integrated Social Value (ISV) analysis to eight universities belonging to the Catalan Association of Public Universities in Spain. Design/methodology/approach: ISV analysis is a social accounting methodology that considers both…

In an age of accountability, numbers matter. Therefore, the accountability movement has led to the assessment movement. Higher education should be held accountable, and colleges themselves should take the lead in making sure colleges are meeting goals. Assessment was originally meant to improve higher education. Instead, assessment quickly became…

The present study is related to the problem associated with student assessment with online examinations at higher educational institutes (HEIs). With the current COVID-19 outbreak, the majority of educational institutes are conducting online examinations to assess their students, where there would always be a chance that the students go for…

Between 1997 and 2019, 16 out of 41 performance-based funding (PBF) states discontinued their PBF policies for public colleges and universities. Adapting policy diffusion theory to PBF discontinuation, we investigate whether policy discontinuation in one state is related to discontinuations in other states, and differentiate between the two policy…

The Culture of Assessment Matrix is a one-page rubric intended to provide institutions of higher education with a simplistic way to quickly gauge the status of their institution's assessment culture and the degree to which the culture is an integral part of the institution's operations, expectations, methods of accountability, and reward systems.…

The global pandemic prompted universities to rethink how assessment might be reconfigured to better support student learning across different modes of delivery resulting in unprecedented, large-scale, and rapid institutional change. Significantly, there has been a dearth of empirical studies examining the nuances of staff experiences of how they…

This paper shows how Karen Barad's "agential realism" provides a powerful analytical framework for assessing higher education accountability. It takes the example of the UK 'National Student Survey' (NSS), a questionnaire, which purports to ascertain student course satisfaction in universities. The paper demonstrates how agential realism…