A Study On Quality-Assurance Of Graduate Education In Japan

At the end of the 1980s, with plenty of internal and external reasons, Japan started the reform on graduate education, which marked a new era for its rapid development. While expanding the scale of its graduate education, Japan gave an equally high emphasis on its quality. In order to achieve this goal, the Japanese Government adopted many corresponding measures in areas like educational institutions, financial input, cultivation mode, evaluation system and so on. As it proves, those measures are highly effective. However, there still exist some problems that can't be neglected, which pose challenges for its future development.This thesis is mainly composed of six parts:The first chapter is focused on the expansion of Japan's graduate education scale, explaining its background and process, and also giving an analysis of its achievements and problems.The second chapter emphasizes on quality-assuring graduate education through adjusting education institutions. It introduces issues such as adjusting education institutions, integrating advantages of scientific research institutes into building graduate schools, and joining the strengths of enterprises, government and universities in cultivating graduates and so on. The third chapter stresses increasing financial input to quality assure graduate education, analyzing approaches in the aspect of increasing financial input, such as safeguarding the basic financial input to improve conditions for graduate education; implementing growing input on key areas to cultivate high-quality scientific-research talents; adopting incentive mechanism to increase financial support to graduates and so on.The fourth chapter is focused on innovating cultivating process, analyzing adjustments in cultivation mode and process, such as reform on recruitment and enrollment; creation in curricular design; standardization in seminars and symposia; supervision on thesis-writing, and emphasis on communication and practices and so on.The fifth chapter emphasizes on perfecting evaluation system, analyzing the composing elements, operation mode and features of quality assurance system in graduate education.The sixth chapter stresses the experience and problems of quality assurance in graduate education. This chapter firstly summarizes the successful experience of quality assurance in graduate education, such as maintaining sensitive and strong awareness of quality; providing abundant educational resources; improving cultivation process; stressing diversity and pertinence of graduate education; establishing effective quality evaluative system. And then it points out problems in quality assurance in graduate education.