Abstract:

Higher Education quality improvement is one of the goals that Bologna Declaration chases at the horizon of 2010. Nevertheless, one of the several problems this goal has to face is the assessment of the education quality at the University since it does not have a clear assessment, widely accepted, procedure.

Nowadays, at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, the main tool to educational quality assessment is the “Official Survey”. Students have to fill this survey at the end of every term. In this Official Survey, the students show their opinion about subjects, teachers and several educational aspects. As every assessment methods do, the Official Survey has pros and cons. In order to overcome some of its cons, we are applying an additional and complementary assessment tool since 2003: The Personal Survey. This new survey is mainly being applied in the subject SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS due to the particular properties this subject has to develop educational innovations.

With the Personal Survey, we manage to involve the students in the improvement of the teachers’ skills and in the proper development of the subject by making profit of the feedback generated at class. In addition, due to its particular design and anonymity assurance, students are massively filling this Personal Survey and several reasoned proposals based on both individual and group experiences are being received.

The Personal Survey has an additional advantage: It does not need any statistical treatment so teachers do not have to wait to know their results and we can directly use them. It allows us to study/analyze them spending enough time to include proposals and reviews in the following year planning.

In the end, this new tool is giving us very good results and it is showing potentials that allow us to believe it can be a useful tool to assess Higher Education quality assessment. Some of these potentials are easiness, dynamism and clarity, avoiding numerical classifications. This survey focuses on giving ideas and pursues improving education quality by students’ constructive criticism.

Keywords:

higher education, bologna, teaching, quality, assessment, survey.