Academic audit

At a senate meeting held late last year the Rector announced that a University-wide internal academic audit will be carried out in 2004. This is a good idea. Although one should not depend too much on audit to provide prefect results, it is definitely a worthwhile exercise.

It has now been announced that the first stage of the audit will concentrate on the services offered by faculties, institutes and centres as a whole. Follow-ups audits will be course specific. Eventually it is expected that the University will extend its auditing exercise to external academic visitations.

Incidentally, has the University worked out the costings for such an audit? At some point one will have to work out the cost-effectiveness of the exercise. The exercise is also essential because it can be predicted that the audit will clearly point out to missing "essentials". These will definitely require financing to correct. How will this financing be provided?

One hopes that the audit exercise can point out ways how to adjust the financial expenditure of the University. It should serve as a tool to provide the stimulus for improving what is good and correct any deficiencies.

It is also worth keeping in mind that it would be considered strictly unethical to use the audit to smear some faculty or other. The audit is using a number of tools to reach its conclusions. The auditors will be gathering information from external examiners' reports, from interviews with officials, with academic and support staff as well as with present and past students. Where appropriate the auditors will be interviewing employees of the entity's graduates.

It is very important that from the beginning interviews and questionnaires will be carried out in a scientific manner especially when one comes to interviewing employees and past students. Techniques of statistical sampling and such exercises as test retest may be difficult to apply. One cannot rely on volunteers as the negative aspects tend to feature more if selection of samples tested are not very carefully done.

To ensure that the University obtains the best possible advantages out of this audit the Pro Rector prepared a draft document and has invited queries, comments or suggestions on the document. This gives a good start to the audit exercise.

The document features the methodology of how administrative data, legal and academic documentation, aims, objectives and curricula, external examiners' reports, effectiveness of teaching and learning, assessments, available resources for teaching, learning and research and the support received from the general university administration are to be audited.

This is a very important undertaking for the University to ensure that its services are of the highest quality and comparable to its counterparts in Europe. Probably we will find out that the faculties' resources leave much to be desired and yet through no small sacrifice and dedication of most of the academic, administrative and support staff as well as students the results are as good as anywhere in Europe and even much better that those in many places. Yet there will still be room for improvement. There is no doubt that all concerned will co-operate to make this internal academic audit a successful exercise.