Area of Application & Accreditation Goals

 

Goal of Accreditation

The implementation of accreditation processes is based on decisions made by the German Rectors' Conference, HRK for short, and the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs, KMK for short, related to the restructuring of the classification system. Accreditation is a particular tool for quality assurance and control.  The goal of accreditation is to ensure quality in teaching and learning by determining minimum standards.

Program Accreditation

An evaluation process is run within the framework of accreditation, in which authorized accreditation agencies use predefined measurements to check whether a course of study meets certain minimum standards, with its subject material, resources, and its graduates' professional qualifications. This is the so-called program accreditation.

System Accreditation

The accreditation council determined the criteria for system accreditation in February 2008. These criteria include a process, in which the accreditation agency does not evaluate the course of study to be accredited, but rather the quality assurance system of the university. The expectation behind this, is that an efficient quality assurance system ensures that all systems within the established course of study meet the demands of program accreditation.

North-Rhine Westphalian law allows both possiblities.

RWTH Aachen Expands Teaching and Learning Quality Assurance System

Reaccreditation processes within program accreditation are being run in individual courses of study at RWTH Aachen. A renewed evaluation of individual study programs must first take place before, it is possible to establish, whether the goals and proposals formulated in the "ex-ante accreditation" were actually achieved.

The teaching and learning quality assurance system is being expanded independent of this process, in order to fufill quality demands in the German and international markets.