The Public Agency for accreditation of Higher Education (PAAHE) in Albania was established under the decision of Council of Ministers No. 303, dated 01.07.1999. The main task and duty of PAAHE is to evaluate Higher Schools in Albania.

PAAHE is a public state-funded institution, which is responsible to the Minister of Education and Science. It is composed of 11 persons: the Director, 8 programme officers and 2 service persons.

The agency has the task and responsibility for the evaluations, prepares the evaluation criteria, procedures, performance indicators and standards and the whole documentation for the Council of Accreditation.

The System of Accreditation has a National approach. This means that the same institutions, AAAHE and Council of Accreditation (CA) assess and make decisions on different or similar programmes or higher education institutions

Activities of the Agency

The scope of activities of AAAHE aims at both institutional and programme level. The purpose of the evaluation activities enhancement and improvement of quality in Higher Education Institutions, ensuring accountability, provide information to professional and wide public about quality in the Higher Education System and assist Higher Schools in establishing their Internal Quality Assurance System.

The activity of AAAHE concerns evaluation followed by accreditation decision. The evaluation is performed upon request by higher education institutions or Ministry of Education and Science (MES) or according to the annual agenda of PAAHE.

An evaluation is based on pre-formulated criteria, which are prepared from PAAHE, in collaboration with experts and representatives from the universities. After their approval by CA, these criteria are made known to all higher education institutions.

Evaluation covers different aspects of the institution and/or programme:

Mission statement

Management

Policy and decision making procedures and responsibilities

Quality of staff

Programme organisation

Curriculum design

Student selection, recruitment and assessment

Student workload: theory/practical work, involvement in the research

Development and organisation of the teaching process

Teaching methods

Quality of educational activity

Research policy and quality

Quality assurance mechanisms

Mission realised and achieved goals

Stakeholders, including students

Access to the labour market

The instruments used for the evaluations are the internal evaluation (or self-evaluation), external evaluation with visits on site, use of performance indicators, student opinion and, depending on the case, labour market study.

PAAHE has prepared two handbooks for the self-evaluation and for the external review. Draft standards have been also prepared both for institutional and programme evaluation. They are under way of consultancy with the higher education institutions, and after their approval by CA, they will be made public via electronic mail and in hard copy.

External evaluation

The quality of the evaluation depends significantly on the procedures and quality of the experts of the external team, in order to ensure judgement independence and impartiality. In our System of Accreditation, the agency proposes the members of the external evaluation team after consultation with the unit to be assessed; afterwards CA appoints them formally.

The members of the external evaluation team are academics, other experts outside academia and representatives from the labour market. After their appointment, the members of the evaluation team are met beforehand and get instructions about what is expected from them; they get also written information about the evaluation procedure and the protocol for external evaluation. After consulting the documentation the members of the external evaluation team get trained at the Agency by the programme officers specifically for each field.

At the end of their evaluation process, the external evaluation team has to prepare an evaluation report, which instructions are given in the protocol for external evaluation. The evaluation team is responsible for the report, which is presented to the agency and also to the higher education institution evaluated. The agency acts as a facilitator of the evaluation process and for the report, but it does not have the right to change or influence the content of the report. The external evaluation team is responsible for the content of the report and after submitting it to the agency, the report can be published but without any change. In our actual system the report can be made public but not widely distributed.