“Customers don’t measure you on how hard you tried. They measure you on what you deliver.”

This well-known quote from Steve Jobs is as relevant in the scholarly domain as it is in the world of business.

 

It rings especially true at the NWU when it comes to the delivery of high-quality graduates who can make valuable socio-economic contributions to South Africa.

 

Quality assurance permeates all facets of university life: infrastructure, leadership and management, academic and support services, and student life in and out of the classroom, among others. All must contribute to creating a culture of quality and the opportunity for every student to be successful.

 

In this article we focus specifically on the various processes that ensure our academic programmes are of outstanding quality.Some of these processes are internal university requirements, while others are the result of having to comply with the external regulatory environment.

 

Let’s start with the internal measures:

 

• The academics in a faculty conceptualise a programme by doing a thorough situation analysis to determine the viability and market appetite for such a programme.

 

• After the faculty management and the Senate Committee for Academic Standards (SCAS) have approved the situation analysis, the academics, together with the Centre for Teaching and Learning and the Qualification and Academic Programme Planning Unit, develop the academic programme for submission to SCAS for consideration and approval.

 

When it comes to external regulation, we can distinguish between processes that involve professional bodies and those that regulate the higher education compliance environment.

 

• Professional councils and boards regulate the standards of academic programmes for certain professions. Bodies such as the Engineering Council of SA or the SA Institute of Chartered Accountants regularly review the quality of our academic programmes to ensure that graduates can register with them and follow a career path in the field concerned.

 

• There are three external regulatory bodies that set different requirements for the approval, accreditation and registration of new qualifications or changes to existing qualifications. These are the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), the Council on Higher Education (CHE) and the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) (For more information, see text box on the left).

 

• To top it all, there are regular national projects that require universities to scrutinise the quality of academic programmes. The CHE also does comprehensive university-wide audits on a rotational basis – the NWU went through such audits in 2004 and in 2010. We expect that universities will again undergo national reviews during 2019/20 as part of the CHE’s Quality Enhancement Project.

 

Reading the above, you can see that we go out of our way to make sure that our academic programmes are of the highest standard. Rest assured that this level of effort is not only because we are required by law to do so, but also because we realise that our stakeholders measure us by what we deliver.