ENQA review

At least once every five years, NOKUT should undergo an external review in order to demonstrate its compliance with the ESG.

ESG is short for Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area. The standards were adopted by the Ministers responsible for higher education firstly in 2005, and then they adopted a revised version in 2015.

It is the ESG standard 3.7 that states that agencies should undergo an external review at least once every five years in order to demonstrate their compliance with the ESG. The evaluation provides a means for assuring the agency and its stakeholders that it continues to adhere to the principles enshrined in the ESG. It also helps the agency to reflect on its policies and activities. The evaluation is also a prerequisite for NOKUT’s membership in The European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) and NOKUT’s registration in The European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR).

Renewed membership for five new years

After an extensive evaluation process, our membership in ENQA was renewed in the summer of 2023. The evaluation committee concluded that NOKUT meets all criteria. We are complimented for our work in several areas. The committee's report also includes suggestions for further improvements.

NOKUT has also renewed the membership in EQAR for a new five-year period. EQAR (The European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education) is the official register of quality assurance bodies that meet the requirements of the ESG.

    • ENQA's evaluation committee points out that NOKUT has shown significant progress on those standards that were partially compliant in the previous evaluation five years ago. This applies, amongst other things, to the way NOKUT is monitoring how recommendations are followed up after periodic reviews of institutional quality assurance practices have been conducted, and that we write out thematic analyses from our evaluations and periodic reviews.
    • The committee is impressed with NOKUT taking a step outside the usual quality assurance activities, and developing new and innovative activities, such as evaluations of quality in education.
    • NOKUT is commended by the panel for its open dialogue with stakeholders and for revising its methodology. The evaluation committee believes that this is something that will contribute to strengthening quality enhancement and not just quality control.

  • The committee makes recommendations in three areas that must be followed up by NOKUT:

    ESG 2.2 Designing methodologies fit for purpose

    The first recommendation is that NOKUT, together with the institutions, must develop a better and more efficient method for collecting and giving access to documentation and analyses.

    This concerns, amongst other things, documents we receive for the periodic reviews and the accreditation processes. Here, the committee believes that we, together with the institutions, should use digital tools to a greater extent. This is expected to reduce the workload for the institutions and will be more effective than the current system, where we often receive very large amounts of documentation.

    ESG 2.3 Implementing processes

    The second recommendation is that NOKUT must communicate more clearly timeline and workload for the institutions in our evaluations of quality in education, as well as actively communicate any changes to the suggested timeline.

    ESG 2.7 Complaints and appeals

    The committee's last recommendation to NOKUT is to make the complaints procedures more transparent and accessible in the documents that are sent to the institutions.

  • The external evaluation of NOKUT in 2023 was a "targeted review". The principal aim of a targeted review is to provide the agencies that have successfully undergone at least two full ESG reviews with an alternative way to assessing their compliance with the ESG.

    A targeted review focuses on the agencies’ remaining challenges in reaching compliance with the ESG, while at the same time further strengthening the enhancement aspect of the review, thus offering a shorter and more resource-mindful review process. The self-assessment report is shorter (20–30 pages) and it must also be read in conjunction with the 2018 ENQA full review against all standards of Parts 2 and 3 of the ESG. The self-assessment report also includes a self-selected standard for enhancement, and NOKUT has chosen standard 2.2 "Designing methodologies fit for purpose" in this targeted review.

    The review panel that ENQA has appointed consists of:

    • Karin Järplid (chair, Sweden)
    • Simona Lache (secretary, Romania)
    • Pegi Pavletic (student, Croatia)


    Documents

Previous reviews

NOKUT has in the past been assessed three times against the Standards and Guidelines in the European Higher Education Area (ESG): twice by ENQA (2013, 2018) and once by NIFU STEP (2008) at the behest of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.

ENQA's review database

Read more about NOKUT on ENQA's website