University of masses and institutional evaluation: Notes for a balance 20 years after the creation of the National Commission of Evaluation and Accreditation (CONEAU) in Argentina

Abstract

The CONEAU has developed University external evaluation activities by adopting the perspective of the
assessment diagnostic and understood as a Variant adapted to the institutional conditions prevailing in the
Argentine University System. Pair evaluators have neglected contextual variables from the environment in
which they are inserted the universities, as well as the historical background that set the bases of ‘institutional
culture’. To establish a correct policy of accreditation which take into consideration local conditions of
application of the standards the State need to have the possibility of exercising a gaze that encompasses the
whole of the system. The current external evaluation reports do not favour this look, or at least aren’t designed to induce it and facilitate it. The limitations of the diagnostic evaluation doesn’t make easy inter agency comparison by virtue that allowed wide margins of variation according to the circumstantial committees of pair evaluation (CPE). Public policy approach that would make it possible to overcome these limitations is to incorporate the dimensions of impact and relevance, which until now have been excluded from the analysis,
in accordance with the right of university institutions to operate unrestricted exercise of their autonomy