External review
The Register Committee will make its decisions based on the information provided in the external review report.
The nature of the ESG makes it difficult to assess an agency’s compliance based just on papers, application forms or correspondence. Reaching a decision on whether or not an activity, or a certain way of doing things, can be considered substantially compliant with the ESG is a complex process and the external review is a crucial element in arriving at such judgements.
Thus it is of utmost importance that the external review is sound and reliable, and provides the Register Committee with sufficient information. As these reviews are organised by third parties outside any supervision by EQAR, the Procedures for Applications stipulate some important requirements that external reviews have to fulfil in order to be acceptable to the Register Committee. These are summarised below.
Terms of Reference
The Terms of Reference for an external review should normally be agreed between the applicant and the review coordinator (see below) in advance. This ensures that all parties involved are clear about their roles and responsibilities and that the review process is properly defined.
The Terms of Reference should at least define the purpose of the external review, the composition of the review panel and outline key steps in the review process.
The EQAR Secretariat is at applicants' disposal to answer questions with regard to EQAR's rules and requirements that may arise when planning an external review.
Purpose
For inclusion on the register, the applicant’s compliance with the ESG is considered. An assessment of the level of compliance with the ESG should therefore be clearly defined as one purpose of the external review.
In some cases, however, a review might also have other purposes, such as an independent overall assessment of the applicant’s performance. Such a review with additional purposes might as well be used for an application to EQAR.
Principle of independence
The external review needs to be conducted in an objective and unbiased manner. The review coordinator and the review panel need to be completely independent from the applicant. It has to be ensured that neither the review coordinator nor any review panel member has a conflict of interest.
EQAR attaches high importance to the independence of the external review as it has to rely on the results written down in the review report and the judgements made by the review panel. For that reason the review coordinator is required to sign an explicit No-conflict-of-interest Declaration (see Procedure > Application documents).
Review coordinator
The review coordinator is the organisation that conducts the practical organisation of the review process and is sometimes also referred to as “sponsor”. EQAR will not coordinate reviews itself.
The external review might be initiated or commissioned by a national authority (for example by the ministry of higher education) or by the applicant itself.
In the former case, the national authority might itself be the review coordinator (so-called “nationally-coordinated review” or “national review”) or commission a third party as review coordinator. In the latter case the applicant itself has to identify a suitable review coordinator. A common example is a review coordinated by ENQA on request of a quality assurance agency.
The review coordinator plays an important role in developing the Terms of Reference, recruiting an independent review panel and being responsible for the overall management of the review process. The coordinator also has to provide appropriate guidance to the review panel throughout the whole process.
To guarantee an unbiased and objective process it is therefore crucial that the review coordinator is completely independent from the applicant. Furthermore, the review coordinator must have the necessary professional capacity to organise an external review, so that it can adequately fulfil all its responsibilities.
Review panel
The review panel should consist of at least four persons. These need to be fully independent from the applicant and should possess sufficient knowledge, expertise and experience to review the applicant’s compliance with the ESG. The roles of Chair and Secretary are often foreseen amongst the review panel members.
The review panel should comprise of members who represent a broad range of expertise and who cover the perspectives of the different stakeholders in higher education. At least one academic staff member and one student of a higher education institution must be part of the review panel.
To ensure an international dimension at least one review panel member must come from a country other than the applicant’s.
In order to safeguard the independence of review, review panel members must have no conflict of interest in exercising their role.
Report
The external review report needs to provide sufficient evidence of the applicant’s substantial compliance with the ESG. The Register Committee’s decisions are primarily based on the external review report, the quality and reliability of which are therefore of crucial importance.
The report should clearly address each relevant ESG (standards 2.1 to 2.8 and 3.1 to 3.8) and reflect on the agency’s compliance with it.
Depending on the purpose of the external review (see above), the report might contain further analysis and judgements.
Alle review panel members should agreee on the review report, although it might well contain majority judgements or opinions on certain issues.
The review panel should send the draft report to the applicant for comments on factual errors before it is finally agreed upon. Should the applicant still have comments on the final report, those should be submitted to EQAR with the application.
The review report should be submitted to EQAR and should include all annexes and dissenting opinions, where such exist.
