Internal Education Quality Assurance Systems in the Documents of Russian Universities: Quality Assurance or its Appearance?

Abstract

The quality of education, despite the variety of approaches to its understanding, is usually ensured in two contours: external and internal. The external contour is most familiar to the Russian education system, where a control model of quality assurance is implemented in the form of state accreditation. Internal contour may be voluntarily implemented through internal education quality assessment systems. The purpose of this study was to determine how common such systems are among Russian universities, what they look like and whether they represent working systems of quality assurance. For this purpose, the websites of 697 universities were examined for the presence of references to internal quality assurance systems, and a content analysis of publicly available local acts on internal quality assurance of 365 universities was carried out. As a result, it was found that the majority of civil universities in the country have acts, describing such systems (66%), but they are isomorphic, and the procedures contained in them are incomplete. This allows us to conclude that acts on internal quality assurance systems are adopted by universities not to achieve quality, but to show an external controller that such system is present, as required in the control model for ensuring the quality of education.

Keywords

• quality of education
• quality assurance
• internal quality assurance
• quality of higher education
• state accreditation
• state control
• internal quality assessment systems
• quality management systems