# Course evaluations and quality assurance in Chinese higher education


Since the beginning of formal course evaluations in 1985 with the
appraisal of engineering education, systems of quality assurance
developed rapidly. Evaluation and recognition of excellence among
courses were used to foster competition and reform of curriculum and
teaching approaches (HEEC 2010).

One of the two universities I visited during my research, University B,
is a normal university (university with teacher training as an important
part of their mission). The academic affairs officer there explained to
me how their course evaluation developed, since they first began
evaluating courses internally in 1987. Those course evaluations looked
at the quality of the teachers, the academic level of the teachers,
teaching team composition, teaching content, and teaching materials. The
initial courses selected for evaluation were the key obligatory courses
in each specialization. After beginning experimentally in 1987, they
regularized the process in 1988, and added the competition to become
designated as an “excellent course” (youxiu kecheng, 优秀课程). The
following year, they added the requirement that every single course
would pass an “approved course” (hege kecheng, 合格课程) test.

The test was quite simple, it just required a course to have an approved
teacher or teachers, a syllabus, and use approved teaching materials.
The academic affairs officer at University B explained that their
motivation was to get rid of those courses without a syllabus, where
teachers went “all over the map”, and to standardize educational
quality. University B continued this evaluation system until 1992, when
the provincial Bureau of Education began evaluating key courses, which
continued for almost ten years. In 1997, the State Education Commission
began to organize the National Teaching Achievements Awards, which were
received by 422 teachers in the first year (MoE 2010). In 2000, the
province also began evaluating and selecting excellent courses.
University B had been prepared to evaluate again, but that was the one
and only round of evaluations, because the system then became superseded
by the National Top Level Courses Project (Mr. B0).

In the meantime, the State Education Commission had issued “Regulations
for the Award for Instructional Achievement” in 1994, as a result of
studying the power of teaching awards to motivate teachers and
administrators (Wang Xiufang 2003). In the late 1990s, the Commission
began randomly selecting a few universities each year for teaching
audits. These were conducted at all levels of universities, and included
examining teacher performance, portfolios, textbooks, student
assignments, teaching records and examination papers. Some provinces and
municipalities, like Shanghai, also began organizing their own
centralized course evaluation projects. In addition, it became common
for universities to let senior and retired university faculty attend
classes taught by junior faculty to provide feedback and critique
(Vidovich, Rui and Currie 2007).

In addition to a narrow focus on teaching and courses, systems for
evaluation and quality assurance of entire institutions also appeared.
In 1990, the State Education Commission released the “Draft Regulation
of Higher Education Institution Evaluation”, which was the first
regulation of higher education evaluation (HEEC 2010). This was followed
by the “University Evaluation Standards Project”, which released
standards for the evaluation of six different categories of
institutions: comprehensive universities, industrial colleges,
agricultural and forestry colleges, medical colleges, finance and
economics colleges, and foreign languages colleges.

All new undergraduate degree-granting colleges were required to undergo
this evaluation, and by the end of 2002, 192 institutions had gone
through the process. In 2003, the “Action Plan of Education Innovation
2003-2007” made it clear that all higher education institutions must
undergo quality evaluation every five years. The work is carried out by
the provinces, and supervised by the new Higher Educational Evaluation
Centre of the Ministry of Education, which was founded in 2004. This
centre maintains a pool of over 1,000 experts, who performs the
evaluations, and provides them with regular training (HEEC 2010).

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis "The Chinese National Top
Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote
Quality in Undergraduate Teaching" by Stian Håklev, University of
Toronto 2010.

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