The national Quality Assurance Agencies of most European countries have developed accreditation criteria considering the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG, 2015). The paper reports the findings of a comparative study of the national accreditation criteria for programme evaluation which are in use in five European countries, namely Greece, Denmark, Austria, Britain and Ireland. The official published documents available on the Agencies’ websites were reviewed and analyzed. The paper presents and discusses the variation of the criteria additions and omissions from the ESG model for each individual case. The reported comparisons show that a ‘general model’ is followed since the agencies of the five countries operate in substantial compliance with the ESG. However, each country places emphasis on different criteria.
Keywords: European Standards and Guidelines, Higher Education, Quality Assurance, Quality Management, accreditation criteria, national systems
