The Agency for Higher Education Quality Assurance and Career Development

«Level of understanding of quality assessment in Germany is quite high»

The representative of the Foundation for international Business Administration Accreditation FIBAA Dr. Heinz-Ulrich Schmidt (Germany) answers the questions of the «Education Quality».

• Mr. Ulrich, we have written about your agency not once and we know that you have experience in independent quality assessment conduct and accreditation of educational programs in Russian higher education institutions. All the more so as you conduct programs accreditation in different countries and thus you have an opportunity to compare experience. Don’t problems emerge in such cases caused by differences of approaches and assessment procedures? 
• Usually such situations don’t emerge. Our agency is international and we do work in different countries. But in all countries where we conduct assessment procedures and accreditation of educational programswe use the same criteria – the FIBAA criteria. Of course, at that regional specific features are taken into account, it means national statutory, regulatory and practical context. 

We use different work formats. For example here in Russia we conduct joined accreditation with our Russian partner – Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education and Career Development (AKKORK). Together with AKKORK we have already fulfilled accreditations in some major higher education institutions. And there are countries, for example, Lithuania, where we just provide experts for participation in accreditation procedures of a national agency. And then we work according to criteria and standards of the agency, which has invited the experts. But it is worth mentioning, that all these agencies are members of ENQA that is why they work according to common European standards ESG.