Decentralized quality management

System accreditation at the Faculty of Humanities

The Faculty of Humanities currently offers 90 Bachelor's and Master's degree programs at 31 institutes and seminars. To ensure that the high demands on the quality of the study programs are met, they are supervised by an internal quality management and assurance system. Currently, the University of Göttingen is working on the transition from program to system accreditation. The aim of the new procedure is to examine the quality of the study programs on the basis of a catalog of criteria, to ensure this quality and to improve it if necessary. This requires the introduction of quality rounds and an internal evaluation of the study programs.

Advantages of the change

The faculty can independently check the quality of the study programs and make changes in a timely manner. A hierarchically neutral, dialog-oriented and discursive exchange in quality rounds ensures a broad inclusion of all stakeholders involved. Direct documentation of the quality review keeps the reporting system as narrow as possible.

Procedure

The study programs were divided into clusters according to content proximity. For small clusters with fewer than 200 students, a quality round is held every three years, for large clusters every two years. Within a cycle, several quality rounds can thus take place, during which all criteria must be considered and discussed at least once. A cycle ends with a central evaluation round.
The quality rounds are composed of representatives of the academic advisors, the teachers, the students, the administration and external experts. The participants discuss the individual criteria on the basis of guiding questions and with the help of data from the study program monitoring and student surveys and make recommendations in the form of a catalog of measures to those responsible for the study program.