THE PROFESSIONAL ACHIEVEMENT OF STUDENTS AS A MEASURE OF THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF SHUMEN

The autonomy possessed by the higher schools in Bulgaria for conducting the educational process and research activity explains their responsibility in implementing policies and activities to ensure the quality of educational services. In the context of European and national trends, Shumen University „Konstantin Preslavski“ successfully fulfills its mission of ensuring the quality of education. The university has built a very good system for maintaining and ensuring quality, presented by the documents developed at the institutional level (strategy, handbook, policy, regulations, etc.), a system for monitoring, evaluating, maintaining and managing the quality of training and academic composition and activities for the realization of the goals and tasks of the annually developed projects by the quality commission. The emphasis in the university project „Pedagogical practices and continuing education – current problems and challenges“ developed in 2022 is placed on the practical training of students, the success of their implementation. Its priority goal is to track the realization of graduated students in order to evaluate the effectiveness of training in the specialties of the professional fields. In the context of the tasks set by the project, this article presents the results of two types of research – surveys among regional administrations in the country regarding the realization of Shumen graduates with a pedagogical profile (information on 7,018 graduates was processed); survey conducted in 2022 among 794 Shumen graduates (students from two graduations, respectively: graduates of 2021 – one year after graduation; graduates of 2018 – three years after graduation). Based on the analysis of the survey results, conclusions were drawn regarding the effectiveness of the activities to improve the quality of education.