The Argentine institutional evaluation from the perspective of peer reviewers

Abstract

In Argentina, with the enactment of the Higher Education Law (LES) and the creation of the National Commission for University Evaluation and Accreditation (CONEAU), there was a particular association between the notion of quality and the evaluation that based the deployment of a seriesof processes, mechanisms and indicators that continue in force in the regulation of the university system. An example of this is the institutional evaluation.
The LES establishes that this evaluation allows to analyze achievements and difficulties in the fulfillment
of the functions of the university: management, teaching, extension and research. For this, it contemplates two phases: the institutional self-evaluation and the external evaluation. The first refers to the preparation of the institutional self-evaluation report by the evaluated university. The second is the
external evaluation that is carried out through a committee of peer evaluators belonging to the university system that visits the institution and draws up a report that identifies strengths and weaknesses.
In this presentation we propose to analyze this mechanism of institutional evaluation from the point
of view of the professionals who have acted as peer evaluators through the analysis of surveys and
interviews with 50 of them. With these tools we explored the peer reviewers’ view regarding: the conformation of the peer committee of which they participated and the training received; the visit to the university institution evaluated; its relationship with CONEAU; the modality of evaluation by pairs in itself and finally; the link with the improvement of educational quality