Abstract
The German accreditation policy was introduced in 1998 as a response to the Bologna Process and transition to a new degree structure. Accreditation was expected to ensure minimum quality standards in higher education curricula and to assess labour market relevance of newly established Bachelor and Master programmes in Germany. All new study programmes are expected to be re-accredited every five years. The structure of the German accreditation system consists of two levels. The Accreditation Council defines standards, procedures, and criteria for accreditation and Accreditation Agencies, accredited by the Council, perform the accreditation. The accreditation system has established a comprehensive, external quality assessment system for teaching and learning in Germany. The policy, however, suffers from several problems. A program accreditation is an expensive procedure and the expenses have to be covered by institutions without any additional support. The accreditation system cannot keep up with curricula reforms and many programmes therefore have had to start without accreditation. Furthermore, the accreditation system contributes to the emergence of an overly complex system of quality assurance that combines state level, federal level and European level responsibilities.
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Notes
- 1.
The reason for this is a constitutional law that all students have the right to finish their degree programme under the same conditions which were in place when they started it so no student can be forced to switch from a traditional to a new programme in the middle of his or her course of study.
- 2.
Technical universities have the highest number of study programmes awarding the degree of Diplom which is the usual one subject study programme in most of the technical and engineering sciences, but also in economics and social sciences. Basically the Diplom was/is the degree in all professional subjects. Universities of applied sciences also award or awarded a Diplom but with the additional letters FH in brackets behind the degree (for Fachhochschule) to denote the difference between the two types of institutions.
- 3.
For example the analysis of the implementation of bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics carried out in INCHER-Kassel on behalf of the European Physical Society since 2008.
- 4.
For non-German readers it should be mentioned here that the idea of defining a master programme as “postgraduate” is not very widespread in Germany. The traditional university degree programmes all finished at the level of a master degree from which the issue of getting a doctoral degree was clearly separated. This also holds true for the majority of graduate schools or graduate centres emerging currently in Germany. Most of them are clearly targeted towards doctoral students and apart from a few exceptions which have explicitly adopted the American model, German graduate schools do not accept students aiming for a master’s degree. Thus, selection for a doctorate takes place on the basis of master’s degrees not bachelor’s degrees and doctoral candidates are expected to be familiar with research methodology and theory of their subject or field of expertise.
- 5.
Performance contracts are now more commonly used to determine the annual budget provided by the responsible state for a given higher education institution located in that state.
- 6.
The Ministers of Science and Education of those countries having signed the Bologna Declaration meet every 2 years in the framework of so-called follow-up conferences in order to discuss progress made and possibly add to the reform agenda or correct it if developments go in an unwanted direction.
- 7.
The original name of ENQA was: European Network of Quality Assessment Agencies. It is now: European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.
- 8.
The Dublin Descriptors (named after the city where the Joint Quality Initiative – an informal group of experts for quality assurance from a variety of European countries – met to formulate them) are a short list of competences which can be expected from bachelor and master graduates and from Ph.D. candidates independent of their particular field of study.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Kathia Serrano-Velarde for providing me with her (as yet unpublished) paper and thus contributing not only additional information but also some of the ideas and perspectives which have been included in this analysis. However, all possible mistakes and misinterpretations are those of the author.
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Kehm, B.M. (2010). The German System of Accreditation. In: Dill, D., Beerkens, M. (eds) Public Policy for Academic Quality. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 30. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3754-1_12
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