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Evaluation and Self-Evaluation of Universities in Europe

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Evaluating university assessments

Self-evaluations, particularly regarding teaching and research, have long been conducted at universities. Now, however, a new proposal has set out to establish a more in-depth, pluralistic and decentralised assessment of university resources and structures as well.

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In order to understand the dynamics of the evaluation process, many factors need to be examined. Some of these include the decision to evaluate, the patterns of reference, the aims of the evaluation, the actors, the organisational conditions, costs, results and impact. Essentially under evaluation are the universities' resources, which encompass personnel, the organisation as a whole as well as the financial aspect. The aim is understanding how these are best utilised to obtain maximum results. Since the university itself is a resource, it is necessary to analyse its structures to determine if the current ones are working and if new structures are needed. There are traditional university structures that include faculty, departments and research centres. Additionally, there are support structures such as libraries and computing centres as well as non-academic structures including administrative and technical services. The EVALUE project compared the evaluation process in eight countries across the EU. As such, they produced several key findings. The majority of the evaluations conducted were concerned with the academic structures of teaching and research followed by those of non-academic structures. The evaluations were equally internal and external. As it turns out, a vast majority of the evaluations have been conducted in universities of a broad scope. Such universities usually evaluate in terms of their academic and non-academic structures rather than their support structures. On the other hand, profession-oriented universities such as those that specialise in education and applied sciences, for example, tend to evaluate support structures more. The findings resulted in a final report and discussions with representatives of the European Rector Conference. In light of this, the dynamics of the evaluation process in Europe's universities will more than likely undergo considerable changes in the future.

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