Approaching self-assessment
Improving how a tertiary education organisation (TEO) performs means finding ways to make it better and create positive changes for students and stakeholders.
It's important for organisations to assess themselves effectively, which means looking at what is being achieved and making decisions based on that information.
How a TEO approaches self-assessment, and the processes it uses, is up to the TEO. We expect these approaches to be comprehensive, robust, transparent and authentic.
Using data in self-assessment
There are different ways to evaluate achievement and performance, but most involve quantitative and qualitative data to better understand what's happening in a programme or organisation.
Looking at multiple different data sources means staff engaged in the process gain a deep level of understanding.
Evaluating data and evidence
Evaluating involves talking, thinking, and interpreting data and evidence. It also means identifying and clarifying beliefs, and challenging assumptions and knowledge.
Starting points for self-assessment
The open-ended key evaluation questions (KEQs) used in external evaluation and review (EER) provide a useful start to self-assessment.
Tertiary evaluation indicators (TEIs) provide a framework for thinking about how quality and value might be evaluated in an organisation.
The indicators can also be useful for an organisation to:
- define their scope of self-assessment activity or activities
- frame some evaluative conversations
- identify strengths, areas for improvement, and opportunities for innovation.
An organisation might use self-assessment to learn more about a specific part of their business that they want to understand better.
For a thorough assessment, the organisation needs to plan over a period of time and look at the whole organisation.
More information
How key evaluation questions link to tertiary evaluation indicators