Abstract:

In recent year, IR (Institutional Research) has become important so as to improve university management by using data in each university in Japan. On the other hand, IA (Internal Audit) is carried out to support management activities of organizations including universities. Both IR and IA aim to accomplish their tasks in independent position by using various data in each organization.

IR is a series of activities which consist of specifying problems, gathering data, analyzing data, reporting data, and making decisions. In Japan, IR was spreading in the last 10 years while IA has been carrying out over 60 years. The targets of IR are education, research, finance, and so on. The targets of IA are general affair, organization systems, development, and so on. The targets of IR are also included in the targets of IA. But the analysis by IA is a necessary condition of IR but it is not a sufficient condition. IR is a very useful tool to make up for IA.

In this research, we clarify the difference of data analysis between IR and IA, especially in terms of activities in higher education. Moreover, we introduce the methods that we empirically recognized to be useful in both IR and IA.

The role of IR is to analyze the data obtained from each university. These data were related to education and research, but recently financial data is also included them. We show some examples of these analyses of these data.
Education: monitoring the progression of learning of each student by using school records, and preventing students from leaving university by using attendance records.
Research: comparing a university with other universities by using the data from academic repository.
Finance: showing how the research funds were obtained and were used.

The role of IA is to audit any organizations including universities by using data obtained from themselves. In Japan, a summary of IA is issued by the Institute of Internal Auditors Japan annually. In this summary, several examples of IA are shown in 35 categories. Three of these categories are related to universities. They are duties of general affairs, system, and development.

We show a case of a theme audited in a university. This title of the theme is "How did you employ the students as assistants?". While this theme is converted to "Did you employ the students appropriately?" from a point of view of IA, it is also converted to "How was the educational quality change after employing the students?" from a point of view of IR. For IA, it is appropriate that ten students were employed in 2 hours for each, but it is inappropriate that they were employed in 30 hours for each because of too long working time. For IR, if the exam results were improved by employing the students, we can judge that the activity of employing them was a good practice. Of course, if the quality of lesson became bad, we can judge that we will abolish this activity.

In our research, we show the common point and analysis between IA and IR. All data in an organization are not audited because they are too big. Then the data are limited generally. The appropriateness of IA will become better if the method of analysis used in IR is accepted. We will continue our efforts analyzing data used both of IA and IR.

Keywords:

Institutional Research, Internal Audit, Japanese University, Data Analysis.