Assessment insights

In July 2016, TEQSA released a consultation paper on proposed extensions to TEQSA’s external reporting program, seeking submissions in relation to proposals for future reporting, particularly in relation to assessment outcomes and compliance with the Higher Education Standards Framework (the Standards).

Submissions were broadly supportive of high level analysis of areas of the Standards in relation to which issues were regularly encountered and of risk assessment outcomes and their relationship to the outcomes of assessments. In its summary report on the consultation process, TEQSA indicated it would subsequently publish a report on assessment outcomes. It is now timely, given the change to the 2015 Threshold Standards for applications submitted from 1 January 2017, to reflect on outcomes of applications submitted up to 31 December 2016.

This report provides an overview of assessment outcomes, organised by five themes: 

  • assessment outcomes by year and application type
  • prevalence of particular sets of issues leading to adverse assessments
  • differences in assessment outcomes by provider type
  • the time TEQSA takes to complete assessments 
  • the relationship between risk assessments and regulatory outcomes. 

The provider categories used in the analysis are, as proposed in the consultation paper1:

  • universities
  • higher education providers — for-profit
  • higher education providers — not-for-profit (divided by TAFE, faith-based and ‘other’ providers).

A range of regulatory outcomes are characterised as ‘adverse’ in this paper. Around 25 per cent of adverse decisions are outright rejections of an application — the remainder involve some combination of conditions and reduced period of provider registration or course accreditation. This means that, in around 75 per cent of adverse cases, TEQSA has approved the application with some form of sanction. This approach gives providers notice that TEQSA considers some form of improvement to be necessary, while allowing reasonable opportunity for providers to make improvements.

A copy of the report is available above in MS Word and PDF formats.