Quality assurance in higher education needs to add the quality of student achievement to its agenda.

What is it about?

Most of what passes for quality assurance in higher education is about facilities, services, student characteristics and so on. Data on performance too often relies on institutional self-reports. There is very little about providing any sort of guarantee that students are actually achieving to the levels they are supposed to. It is a mystery what a Pass in a course actually implies in terms of acquired student capability. My article is an argument that lack of attention to this needs to be fixed. I describe an approach that could assist the process.

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Why is it important?

Employers and others often complain that they cannot rely on the higher education qualifications of graduates. Of course, a large proportion of graduates are appropriately competent in their fields, but too many are not. Employers do not know how much trust to put in grades on transcripts. This is a major quality assurance challenge, so far seriously neglected. The higher education community needs to take this on board, otherwise external agencies will.

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