Me, an expert? On evaluations
I’ve had the pleasure to evaluate Université Paris V — René Descartes with the CNE and the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) with EUA so far. I will also be going to Molde University College with NOKUT, and maybe I will get a chance to see a german university also.
Both the EUA and the CNE evaluations were quite peculiar. On the one hand, these two agencies don’t regularily include students in their review teams, so I had to find my place in those teams. Luckily, this was made very easy by the other team members in the respective teams. It was more difficult to define my role towards the representatives of the universities under review; in France in particular where most of the meetings were just me from the team meeting one, two or more people from the university.
Another peculiarity that I haven’t quite gotten used to is the fact that the review teams have secretaries. My experience in student organisations has usually been that I’ve ended up writing the reports, policy papers or other documents myself or as a collaborative effort. In the two quality reviews, there were team reviews and some individual notes, and a team secretary has gone on to write the report. In the french review, I haven’t even seen the report yet.
I think I learnt quite a lot from these two visits, and I’m looking forward to the next. But it’s difficult to put words on what I’m looking for…