Quality assurance
Oct 09, 2009
There are large differences in quality of higher education institutes in Brazil. The Brazilian Ministry of Education is responsible for evaluating the HEI´s
All Higher Education Institutions in Brazil, Private and Public, are regulated by the Ministry of Education. Only authorized Institutions and courses are allowed to function in Brazil.
Another important role played by the Ministry of Education is Quality Assessment of Higher Education. The commission responsible for evaluating the Graduation courses in Brazil is CONAES (Comissão Nacional de Avaliação do Ensino Superior – Higher Education Evaluation Commission). This commission is formed by representatives from: INEP (National Institute of Educational Research and Studies), Capes (Coordination of Higher Education Personnel Improvement), higher education professors, higher education students and from the civil society.
This Commission developed the SINAES (Sistema Nacional de Avaliação do Ensno Superior – Higher Education National Evaluation System), a system designed to measure quality of Higher Education courses and institutions.
The main criteria adopted by SINAES evaluation process are:
- Institutional Self Assessment: The Higher Education Institutions must answer a questionnaire informing about the professors, physical structure, methodology, and other subjects concerning the quality of the Institution.
- External Institutional Assessment: an evaluator commission visits the HEI´s and verify the answers submitted by the Institutions on the Institutional Self Assessment.
- Evaluation of Studying Conditions: this criterion is applied whenever the evaluator commission finds appropriate. Its evaluation subjects depend on the course analysed.
- ENADE (National Students Accomplishment Examination): this examination is administrated to graduating students of some courses of each institution. INEP is responsible for selecting samples of students and courses.
The Quality Index granted by SINAES in IGC (Índice Geral de Cursos – General Courses Index). This index varies from 0 to 500.
In Strictu Sensu Post Graduation Courses, the organ responsible for quality assessment is CAPES. The CAPES Index is based in criteria very similar to SINAES. The main differences between both evaluations are: there is no student examination in CAPES and the CAPES index varies from 1 to 7.
For more information about the ICG of the brazilian HEI´s, or the Capes evaluation of post graduation programmes, contact Neso Brazil.