Procedures and rules for applying for program accreditation 2020

Procedures and rules for applying for program accreditation 2020

The Administration of Accreditation and Licensing would like to encourage Higher Education institutions to seek Academic and Program Accreditation upon completion of their readiness to obtain it. The Administration of Accreditation affirms its keenness to raise the level of quality and avoid the consequences of decisions that result in serious problems for educational institutions and their programs and for students alike. Therefore, the General Administration of Accreditation decided not to accept urgent accreditation requests submitted by institutions that did not complete their internal system for quality assurance and management.

Based on the above, the Administration for Accreditation must be satisfied with fulfilling the qualification requirements to apply for accreditation before receiving any application in an official capacity. Its activity as an institution of higher education is the establishment decision for government institutions and licensing for private institutions.

The main steps of the accreditation process include:

1- The educational institution completes a preliminary evaluation of its performance levels based on the standards of the Council (it is expected that a large number of educational institutions will have completed this stage), the institution’s submission of an application for accreditation, provided that the application includes an acknowledgment from the university, the institution’s administration, or the like, of the following:

·         It is likely that the institution has met the standards of the first level.

2- The CAQA approval of the institution’s request and determines the expected date for the external evaluation processes.

3- The educational institution completes the self-assessment process in accordance with the standards and procedures prepared by the Council, which takes from six to nine months. CAQA will advise the institution during that period to ensure that it understands the particular requirements.

4- External evaluation of the educational institution by an independent evaluation team formed by the Council.

5- The Council made a decision regarding the accreditation of the educational institution based on the report of the external evaluation team.

Instructions

Program accreditation, from the perspective adopted by the Council, is a recognition at the general official level that the necessary standards are met in the management and delivery of a specific program and recognition of the quality of learning outcomes acquired by program graduates. The standards targeted here must not be less than those applicable in regional institutions of high quality.

The formal accreditation procedures by the Council for any program include a rigorous self-assessment based on the second level criteria.

This self-assessment is followed by an independent external evaluation by an evaluation team that aims to verify the results of the self-assessment and takes into account the extent to which the quality standards approved by the Council have been met.

The relationship between institutional accreditation and program accreditation

Although the elements of quality are mainly related to the program subject to evaluation, the quality of the program and the guide needed to grant the accreditation depend to a large extent on the procedures followed in the educational institution, and these may not be under the control of the program administrators as they affect its quality and must be taken into account when evaluating the program. Therefore, the Council prefers evaluating the institution as a whole before starting to approve its programs.

The Council is aware that during this difficult period that the Higher Education system in Yemen is going through, which precedes the comprehensive implementation of the quality assurance system, this may cause delay of the accreditation of a large number of programs of satisfactory quality and that meet the qualification requirements to apply for accreditation. To avoid this unjustified delay, the Council decided receiving program accreditation requests from programs that meet the qualification requirements to apply, provided that the parent institution has met certain quality assurance requirements.

The Council would like to confirm that the special arrangements included in this document are only intended to determine the eligibility of programs to apply for accreditation, and no program will be approved until after verifying that all criteria are met regardless of the entity responsible for evaluating a particular service.

Before program evaluation starts, it will be assumed that all activities at the institutional level meet the criteria, and it will be necessary to verify that the criteria are met in the aspects of institutional activity listed below before starting the program evaluation processes:

Eligibility requirements to apply for program accreditation:

1- The program must be one of the programs authorized by the institution and submitted in accordance with the statutory justifications (that is, the institution is legally authorized to grant the certificate with which the program ends in the concerned specialization according to the content of the decree to establish the institution for government institutions or the content of the license granted to the institution for private institutions).

2- The president of the university (or the dean of the college) to which the program belongs must have approved the progress of the program accreditation request.

3- The program has been described according to the form prepared by the council for this purpose. The description should be approved by the relevant main committee in the educational institution.

4- All program courses have been specified according to the form prepared by the Council for this purpose.

5- A clear description of the content of the program’s courses and requirements of the program in addition to the regulations governing students' affairs enrolled in the program, including the requirements for the educational institution and for the relevant program.

6- The availability of an annual report for the program and for each of its decisions approved by the Council, for at least one year when applying for accreditation, and for a second year with the external evaluation visit.

7- The results of the student’s opinion survey for evaluating the program should be available for at least 50% of the program’s courses. The reports of those surveys should be available for at least two years when preparing the self-assessment report.

8- The program should have at least two graduated batches, and the feedback should be available from the graduates of the program.

9- The institution must have chosen one or more similar programs in other institutions or colleges for the purpose of benchmarking to evaluate the quality of the program. The program must have prepared a list of performance indicators on which the comparison will be made. If these indicators include data that have not been officially published, the program must take the necessary measures to obtain them through those programs.

Minimum institutional requirements for the program to be eligible to apply for accreditation

When a specific program that ends with an academic qualification desires to obtain program accreditation, given that the educational institution in which the program is offered has not yet obtained institutional accreditation, there are a number of requirements that must be met in order for the institution’s application to be accepted in qualifying the program for academic accreditation.

These requirements include the following:

1- That the educational institution applying for the program has prepared its strategic plan.

2- That the educational institution providing the program has established a quality center or unit, and that work is underway to prepare a strategic plan to improve quality.

3- That the institution submitting the program has prepared a list of performance indicators for the purpose of ensuring quality, and that the list includes indicators specific to the program. Data related to these indicators must be available to the institution in general and to most of the programs offered by the institution, including the program that wishes to qualify to apply for accreditation.

4- The institution should have a clear description of the procedures for approving the program and monitoring the procedures for approving its amendment

5- The educational institution that offers the program has surveyed students’ opinions for the purpose of evaluating the quality of courses and programs in at least 50% of its faculties or departments, and the institution has data for surveys at the institutional level in the common aspects between faculties and departments to ensure the possibility of using that data for benchmarking the programs offered by the institution.

6- The educational institution providing the program should have a mechanism for academic supervision and counseling for students. The institution should have procedures for evaluating the appropriateness of the services provided to students enrolled in the institution in this regard.

7- That the educational institution offering the program has provided facilities and capabilities suitable for the various activities that are appropriate for the students enrolled in the institution.

8- That the educational institution providing the program has provided suitable educational resources to support its educational programs. The institution should have procedures to identify and respond to program needs and evaluate the suitability of the services provided in this regard.

9- The institution should have a system for providing the academic departments, colleges, Quality Assurance Committee, the Course Plans Committee, or its equivalent, with statistical data on student achievement. Such data must include, at a minimum, the information listed below, and this information should be available for the purpose of benchmarking between the programs that provided by the institution:

a.       Distribution of students’ marks in all courses.

b.      Distributing the average marks of students in all courses in each department (operating program), each college and the entire institution (it is preferable to provide the average for each academic level or academic year separately).

c.       Student passing rates for all courses.

d.      Students’ passing rates for all courses in each department (or program), each college and the entire institution (it is preferable to provide students’ completion rates for the courses of each academic level or academic year separately).

e.       The rates of students moving from one level to the next and the rates of students completing graduation requirements for all programs.

f.        Graduate employment data.

Notes:

Program accreditation by the Council for Academic Accreditation and Quality Assurance is based on the accreditation regulation. All standards will be applied whether the services provided are subject to the administration of colleges or departments or to the administration of any administrative unit of the parent institution.

Application for program accreditation

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