The SWOT Analysis, Tool for Commensurate the Involvement of the Evaluator Students in Quality Assurance System from Romanian Agricultural and Veterinary Higher Education

Abstract

Because education assurance and assessment represent integrant components for the competitivity increasing within higher education system, the students’ opinion imposes itself as an essential component. Given this reality, our study aims to perform the SWOT Analysis for quality assurance process, according to the compared vision of students evaluators from Romanian agricultural sciences and veterinary medicine universities (UASVM), in order to highlight on scientific basis, the efficacy of the implementation stage of the quality system in education at each analysed university, also for identifying the most important strategic choices at university level. Our study was implemented in the Universities of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine from Cluj – Napoca, Timisoara, Iasi, and University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine from Bucharest. The data used in the SWOT Analysis are public data, resulted from external institutional evaluation of the academic quality, performed when visits of evaluator teams occurred. The evaluators were: ARACIS (The Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) experts, student experts and a foreign evaluator. The results of the SWOT Analysis indicate unitary character of the educational process, as well as functionality of the quality system in Universities of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine from Cluj – Napoca, Timisoara, Iasi, and University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine from Bucharest. In these educational institutions, the specific component of the student evaluators’ involvement have adequate importance by contributing to improvement and development of the strategic visions of the reference institutions.