Accreditation
Pursuant to Article 26 and 27 of the Law on Higher Education in the Herzegovina-Neretva
Canton (HNC Official Gazette, no. 04/12) and Article 18 of the Rulebook of accreditation
of higher education institutions and study programs (Official Gazette of HNC, no.
04/14 ) accreditation is a procedure in which the following is determined: meeting
the universally accepted standards and norms with regard to the organization of
work, available space, material-technical and human resources, the quality of the
educational process, curricula and qualifications, and occupations for higher education,
which results in the issuance of the decision on the accreditation of higher education
institutions by the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of HNC's.
The Ministry shall issue a decision on accreditation based on recommendations issued
by the Commission of international and local experts in the field of higher education,
who were appointed on the proposal of the Agency for Development of Higher Education
and Quality Assurance of BiH (HEA).
The Committee consists of one member of the academic community in BiH, an international
expert working in the field of higher education, experts from the labour market
or the economy and one student who assess the fulfilment of the criteria for accreditation
of higher education institutions.
Criteria for accreditation of higher education institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina
are:
- Development and strategy of higher education institutions;
- Management, internal quality assurance and quality culture;
- Procedures for quality assurance of study programs;
- Procedures for student assessment;
- Human resources;
- The quality of natural resources;
- Information systems;
- Presentation of information to the public;
- International cooperation.
A higher education institution assesses itself the degree of compliance of each
of the criteria and on that basis it makes self-evaluation report submitted to the
Ministry together with other documents. The Ministry shall submit self-evaluation
report to the Commission for Accreditation selected on the proposal of the HEA,
and after reading the report of the Commission shall schedule a visit to the higher
education institution.
During the visit, which mostly takes two to three days, members of the Commission
hold numerous meetings with representatives of all stakeholders in higher education
institution. Members of the Commission meet with the management of the institution,
the members of the team for making self-evaluation reports, administrators, professors,
lecturers and assistants, students, alumni, representatives of the labour market,
community representatives and all others who can get useful information about the
level of quality of the higher education institutions.
After the meetings, each member of the Commission evaluates each of the criteria
for accreditation according to the indicators. None of the criteria cannot be evaluated
as unfulfilled. Commission at the end of the last day gives an oral notice of the
previous visits without reference to the result, and the final report is submitted
later by unanimously adopted and detailed recommendation on accreditation. The outcome
of the accreditation can be accreditation, partial accreditation and non-accreditation.