An Exploratory Case Study of a Quality Assurance Process at an Ontario University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Currently, quality assurance is a widespread global practice in higher education. This exploratory case study at one Ontario university uses a Foucauldian-informed post-structuralist discourse analysis to interrogate the definition of ‘quality’ as it relates to quality assurance. More specifically, this study hopes to raise an awareness that what constitutes quality is taken for granted in quality assurance practices for universities. From an examination of resource documents and interviews with faculty administrators (n=12), the key findings of this study expose an over-arching neoliberal discursive framing of quality and quality assurance. The marketization of higher education leads to an over-emphasis on procedural compliance and a propensity to quantify educational experiences. There was an incongruence between the current approach to quality assurance and education. This research argues that an economic lens borrowed from the business sector is problematic because it assumes principles used in manufacturing a material product can be applied to something as intangible and transformative as education. This research calls on educational leaders to critically reflect on underlying assumptions to expose the power struggles embedded in our quality assurance discourses in order to better understand how dominant ideology obscures other perspectives. An understanding of how quality can be defined from different perspectives disrupts the assumption that a neoliberal economic lens is the only way to view academic quality. Those engaged in administering quality assurance are urged to challenge dominant neoliberal premises and consider alternatives that apply an ethical lens to higher education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".