Core Values of HEQAC

HEQAC believes in, supports, and encourages the following values:

Academic advisement: Academic advisement is a term used in the United States. In the UK, for example, this would be referred to as personal tutorial support.
Academic freedom: Academic freedom is the right for individual scholars to learn, teach, research, and publish without interference or fear of reprisal.
Academic recognition: Academic recognition is a set of procedures and processes for the acknowledgment and acceptance (subject to conditions), between institutions and countries, of higher education qualifications.
Academic standards: Academic standards refer to the achievement of students and can be either the standard set (to be met or surpassed) or the standard achieved by a student.
Accountability: Accountability is the requirement, when undertaking an activity, to expressly address the concerns, requirements, or perspectives of others.
Autonomy: Autonomy is being able to undertake activities without seeking permission from a controlling body.
Best practice: Best practice refers to effective, ideal, or paradigmatic practice within an organization that others would benefit from adopting or adapting.
Code of Practice: A code of practice is a documented set of recommended or preferred processes, actions or organizational structures to be applied in a given setting.
Competence: Competence is the acquisition of knowledge skills and abilities at a level of expertise sufficient to be able to perform in an appropriate work setting (within or outside academia).
Continuing professional development (CPD): Continuing professional development (CPD) refers to study (that may accumulate to whole programs with awards) designed to upgrade the knowledge and skills of practitioners in the professions.
Effectiveness: Effectiveness is the extent to which an activity fulfills its intended purpose or function.
Efficiency: Efficiency is the extent to which an activity achieves its goal whilst minimizing resource usage.
Employability: Employability is the acquisition of attributes (knowledge, skills, and abilities) that make graduates more likely to be successful in their chosen occupations (whether paid employment or not).
Empowerment: Empowerment is the development of knowledge, skills, and abilities in the learner to enable them to control and develop their own learning.
Enhancement: Enhancement is a process of augmentation or improvement.
Excellence: Excellence means exhibiting characteristics that are very good and, implicitly, not achievable by all.
Fitness for purpose: Fitness for purpose equates quality with the fulfillment of a specification or stated outcomes.
Globalization: The flow of technology, knowledge, people, values, ideas, finance, and trade across borders.
Governance: Governance in higher education refers to the way in which institutions are organized and operate internally and their relationships with external entities with a view to securing the objectives of higher education as a realm of inquiry and critique.
Impact: Impact in the context of quality in higher education refers to the consequences that the establishment of quality processes (both internal and external) has on the culture, policy, organizational framework, documentation, infrastructure, learning and teaching practices, assessment/grading of students, learning outcomes, student experience, student support, resources, learning and research environment, research outcomes and community involvement of an institution or department.
Integrity: integrity refers to the completeness, consistency, and accurateness of raw data in the data lifecycle
Improvement: Improvement is the process of enhancing, upgrading, or enriching the quality of provision or standard of outcomes.
Interdisciplinary: Interdisciplinary refers to research or study that integrates concepts from different disciplines resulting in a synthesized or coordinated coherent whole.
Leadership: Leadership in quality assurance means working with other people to set and achieve objectives, and to organize and coordinate the implementation of strategies. It also entails delegation and control, doing the evaluation, and providing feedback.
Qualities: Qualities are the characteristics, attributes, or properties of a person, collective, object, action, process, or organization.
Quality: Quality is 1. (n) the embodiment of the essential nature of a person, collective, object, action, process, or organization. 2. (adj) means high grade or high status (as in a quality performance). 3. a shorthand, in higher education, for quality evaluation processes.
Quality control: Quality control is a mechanism for ensuring that an output (product or service) conforms to a predetermined specification.
Quality culture: Quality culture is a set of group values that guide how improvements are made to everyday working practices and consequent outputs.
Quality management: Quality management is the process, supported by policies and systems, used by an institution to maintain and enhance the quality of education experienced by its students and of the research undertaken by its staff.
Standards of competence: Standards of competence specify the technical abilities, knowledge, and skills required to become a safe and accomplished exponent of a particular profession or another field of activity.
Transparency: Transparency is making activities and services clear and easily understood and open to scrutiny and challenge.
Validation: Validation is a process of confirming that an existing program of study or a newly designed one can continue or commence operation.

We don’t believe, and do our best to stop the following:

Accreditation mill: An organization that awards accreditation to institutions or agencies for money without requiring the institution or agency to meet appropriate quality standards, lacking any review of activity, and without any requirement for subsequent periodic review.
Degree mill: A degree mill is an organization or institution that issues degree certification for appropriate payment, with little or no requirements for the individual to demonstrate full competence at the relevant degree level in the discipline area.
Diploma mill: A diploma mill is an organization or institution that issues certified qualifications for appropriate payment, with little or no requirements for the individual to demonstrate full competence at the relevant level in the discipline area.