British Graduate Education External Quality Assurance Study

Many developed countries had stepped into the mass higher education, the increase ofnumber slowed down and the problem of quality was on the agenda. The quality ofhigher education is one of three stories of higher education in the 21st century. Mostcountries has established national or regional organizations for higher education qualityassurance, which carried out assessment or accreditation in institutional and subject level.The postgraduate education in the UK appeared later than other countries. But afterWorld War Two, the need of well skilled person increased rapidly, the rapid ofpostgraduate education develop very fast. Not only the number of students increased fast, but model of postgraduate education diversified. From 70s of last century, thegovernment of UK cut down input of higher education, and strengthened monitoring thequality of higher education. The UK has established a perfect external postgraduateeducation quality assurance system.This dissertation is divided into 4 parts.The first part is mainly about the evolvement of idea of postgraduate educationquality in the UK and the history of postgraduate education quality assurance. The UKscrupulously abode by the idea of"academy gold standard", pay much attention to innerfitness for postgraduate education and also pay more attention to inner developing logicof science. After the Second World War, the need of high level person increased, sopostgraduate education in the UK developed quickly and combined with society andeconomy tightly, which made the idea of postgraduate education diversified. Because ofthe evolvement of the idea of quality of postgraduate education, the model of qualityassurance changed a lot.The second part is mainly about the external postgraduate education quality assurancesystem in the UK. The activities of external quality assurance were organized by QAA.First, QAA constituted some policies and rules with relative organizations; then QAAimplemented the activities such as institutional audit, postgraduate education specialreview etc, in different levels. Other organizations such as HEFC and different researchcouncils also implemented relative assurance activities. The third part analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of external postgraduateeducation quality assurance system in the UK. Though the system of external qualityassurance is perfect, there are still some shortages, for example, too many organizations, different assessment criteria, too many assurance activities.The forth part analyzed the status quo of the external postgraduate education qualityassurance system in China first, then compared with that of the UK.