Impact of the quality assessment of undergraduate education on university change in China

This research analyses a higher education quality assessment scheme in China: the Quality Assessment of Undergraduate Education (QAUE) scheme. It seeks to find out the impact of the QAUE on university change, and explore the reasons why the intended changes have or have not been generated in the evaluated universities. In order to do this, case studies were conducted in three Chinese universities with different statuses. The data of these cases was collected by means of document analysis and semi-structured interviews. The case studies show that, to a certain extent, the QAUE has caused universities to change in China, but not all the expected changes have been made. The effects on the various dimensions of quality provisions at different universities were not the same. It was found that the impact of the QAUE was not a linear consequence of policy implementation, but the result of an interaction between the external quality assessment scheme and the evaluated universities. Thus, the impact was not only determined by the design of the QAUE scheme, but was also related to the characteristics of the evaluated universities and their initiatives. Based on the empirical findings from the QAUE and the theories about organisational change and the operating mechanism of external quality assessment, a model is proposed to describe how quality assessment interacts with the evaluated universities and causes them to change. In this model, quality assessment is regarded as being an external force which brings the external norms of "good" higher education into the evaluated universities and pushes them to adapt their operations to these norms. Change will only take place when the external force is integrated with the evaluated universities' internal motivation and capacity to implement change