The Accreditation of Master Programs. A Study case

Abstract

A number of papers were published by the authors focussing both on new education technologies for bachelor programs and on the accreditation of bachelor programs. The results have been obtained during the participation within European programs, but also by the direct involvement of the authors in the process of evaluation and accreditation of academic programs at national and international level. In this paper, a step forward is proposed by presenting a case study analysis regarding the accreditation of master study domains in Romania. A master domain includes few different programs connected within a certain academic field of science. In order to have the right to deliver a diploma for a specific bachelor program any university must follow a process of authorization and consequently an accreditation one. For the master level, a new different procedure and corresponding methodology have been recently developed. The assessment is only achieved at a domain level and only for the accreditation. The universities thus have a greater level of autonomy in organizing the master programs by comparison to bachelor programs. Starting from this reality, related to the quality of higher education, a number of opportunities and threats could be identified.