Standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA)

3. External quality assurance

External quality assurance in Part II recognizes the internal quality assurance standards in Part I, ensuring the relevance of higher education institutions’ internal activities in all external quality assurance processes. In the same way, Part III refers to Part II. These three parts are therefore complementary to each other for the needs of both higher education institutions and agencies, if other stakeholders also contribute to the common framework. All three parts should therefore be taken as a whole.

The standards and guidelines for external quality assurance are:

	Standard	Guidelines
2.1. Internal quality assurance	External quality assurance reviews the effectiveness of the internal quality assurance processes described in Part I of the ESG.	Quality assurance in higher education is based on the responsibility of higher education institutions for the quality of their own programmes and other activities. It is therefore important that external quality assurance recognises and supports the responsibility of higher education institutions for quality assurance. In order to ensure the connection between internal and external quality assurance, external quality assurance takes into account the standards in Part I. They can be referred to in various ways, depending on the type of external quality assurance procedure.
2.2. Development of purposeful methodologies	External quality assurance must be explicitly defined and designed to meet the stated purposes and objectives, considering relevant regulations. Stakeholders must be involved in the design and continuous improvement of external quality assurance.	To ensure effectiveness and objectivity, it is essential that external quality assurance has clear purposes agreed upon by stakeholders.
2.3. Process implementation	External quality assurance processes must be reliable, useful, pre-established, consistently implemented and published. They include: self-assessment or equivalent external evaluation which usually includes a visit to the higher education institution report as a result of external evaluation consistent follow-up.	External quality assurance that is carried out professionally, consistently and transparently guarantees its own acceptance and influence.
2.4. External experts	External quality assurance is carried out by committees of external experts that include student representatives.	At the heart of external quality assurance is the broad range of expertise of external experts who contribute diverse perspectives to the agency's work, including those of higher education institutions, academic staff, students and employers/professions.
2.5. Outcome criteria	All final outcomes or opinions arising from external quality assurance, even when not formal decisions, must be based on clearly defined and published criteria that are applied consistently.	External quality assurance, primarily its outcomes, has a significant impact on the higher education institutions and programmes it evaluates and assesses. To ensure fairness and reliability of the procedures, the outcomes of external quality assurance are based on pre-established and published criteria, consistently interpreted and evidence-based. The external quality assurance system can have different types of outcomes, such as recommendations, opinions or formal decisions.
2.6. Reporting	The full reports of expert committees on external quality assurance processes must be published, clear and accessible to the academic community, external partners and other interested parties. If the agency makes formal decisions based on the reports, these must be published together with the reports.	The expert committee report is the basis for the follow-up activities that the higher education institution undertakes after the external evaluation, and it also provides information to society about the work of the higher education institution. In order to serve as a basis for action, the report must be clear and concise in language and content, and contain: description of the context (which places the higher education institution within its own context) a description of the specific external evaluation procedure and the expert committee that participated in its implementation; evidence, analysis and findings conclusions characteristics of good practices that the higher education institution has demonstrated in its work recommendations for activities in the follow-up phase.
2.7. Complaints and appeals	Complaints and appeals procedures must be clearly defined as part of the external quality assurance process, and higher education institutions should be informed about them.	To protect the rights of higher education institutions and ensure the fairness of decisions, external quality assurance is carried out in an open and accountable manner. Nevertheless, there is a possibility of misunderstanding or dissatisfaction with the process or its formal outcome.