September 2009 — Volume 3, Issue 5

The long and winding road to academic standards

Academic standards – a topic guaranteed to ignite intense and often acrimonious debate and one squarely on the government’s agenda intricately linked to quality assurance and to safeguarding one of the nation’s largest exports.

But although it’s a topic routinely trotted out in specialist newspaper comment pieces, those with the greatest stake in the conversation, students and their families, are still looking for clear messages.

So it’s no surprise that the Bradley Review of Higher Education, with its strong student focus, tackled standards head on and that the government followed with the announcement it was creating a new regulatory body with “standards” explicitly in its title.

The government’s Transforming Australia’s Higher Education System states that the Tertiary Education and Standards Agency (TEQSA) will be at the centre of a new standards-based quality assurance framework that will establish minimum standards, including academic standards, required by higher education providers to be registered and accredited.

It will build on the strong foundation established by the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) and respond to one of the issues this body has identified – the need for a range of sanctions, proportionate to identified deficiencies, for higher education providers that do not measure up against standards.

Dr David Woodhouse took on what many believed was a poisoned chalice when he was appointed foundation Executive Director of AUQA in 2000. Almost 10 years after the regulatory body was created he says it’s timely to note AUQA’s contribution to the increased attention to standards over the last decade.

AUQA was set up with four objectives with the first two requiring AUQA to perform and report on quality audits of self-accrediting institutions based on the organisation’s objectives. Dr Woodhouse explains this mode of operation was chosen because it was suitable for a diverse system that wished to maintain that diversity and to avoid national ranking.

Ironically, he points out that some vice-chancellors who questioned participating in AUQA audits might have been more willing participants had the process lent itself to external ranking.

In addition, AUQA took two initiatives that sought to address concern expressed about an audit solely against an institution’s “own” objectives in case it set low or inappropriate measures. The result was that AUQA looked to the National Protocols for Higher Education Approval Processes as external reference points using Protocol 1 which defines a university for auditing purposes.

The other initiative was to recognise that people link quality and standards and would likely therefore ask a quality agency to comment on university standards. This led to the development of a set of questions
to investigate a sample of universities. The questions included:

• How are standards determined and updated?
• What processes are in place to assure consistent implementation of the standards?
• How are outcomes monitored?
• How are standards compared nationally and internationally?
• What is the result of these comparisons of outcome or content?

Dr Woodhouse says that few universities could respond effectively to this list of questions with common responses including the following:

• Examiners’ meetings check grade distributions (ie, they check internal consistency)
• Most of our courses have professional accreditation (ie, we relinquish our responsibility for checking standards to external bodies)
• We are just starting on benchmarking (but with little to show for it)
• We have sample cross-marking by other institutions (only a couple of institutions were able to provide this “good” response, according to Dr Woodhouse).
   

Another objective for the first cycle of audits was to comment on the overall standing of the Australian
higher education sector based on audit findings.

But Dr Woodhouse says this objective was not sufficiently well thought out and, coupled with the inability of universities to provide independent, objective information about the standards achieved by their students,
meant that AUQA was unable to achieve an outcome.

“The best we could do was report on the benchmarking and other quality procedures in place,” he says, noting that this has been represented by critics of the audit body as failure or reluctance on the part of AUQA.

As AUQA entered audit cycle 2 universities were expected to better respond to the standards-related questions devised in the first round particularly as AUQA’s governing ministerial council at the time had revised the organisation’s objectives to require it to report on standards.

The difficulty, according to Dr Woodhouse, was that Australia did not have the necessary systems in place
for this. As a consequence AUQA developed a framework for standards which was used in audits the following year. As institutions appeared to be struggling with producing reports on their academic achievement standards, AUQA set up an advisory group to propose a sector-wide process for creating the necessary systems for assessing and reporting academic achievement standards. In May 2009 the group
issued a discussion paper that elicited around 50 responses.

Looking back over the last decade, Dr Woodhouse says that there is now a much greater willingness to address the issue of standards and a realisation that institutions must be able to be more explicit about the outcome standards they achieve, in a form that is widely intelligible and useful.

“AUQA has been a major contributor to this change in attitude by working collegially but firmly with the institutions and then reporting both their achievements and the path still to be travelled,” he says.

Dr Woodhouse is keen that the experience and reputation built up by AUQA is not lost. He believes there is room in the new regulatory environment to strengthen checking of standards at the discipline level, to check the National Protocols and to focus audit reports on a particular problem as well as apply meaningful and graduated sanctions, for example, enforcement of program alignment with the Australian Qualifications Framework.

He would like to see action on matters of concern including how to decide when to investigate or intervene in
an institution’s activities as well as see some system-wide investigations. Work is required around the
credential creep of coursework masters degrees, professional doctorates, multiple degrees and partnerships, he argues.

After nearly 10 years, AUQA has successfully achieved almost all that it was asked to do, he reflects.