25 November 2021

Blended local QA and UPM assessments in Vietnam

By
Noppanun Sookping
AUN Programme Officer;

By Office of the University Performance Metrics (UPM)

UPM is a new rating system of University Performance Metrics, the development of which was funded by Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training to assess the responsiveness of the universities in the 4th Industrial Revolution era. Since it was launched in August 2020, UPM has served assessment at the institutional level for the participation of more than 50 universities from the Asian region including Brunei Darussalam, Myanmar, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan. The rating results have been well received and highly appreciated by all the participating institutions.

Last August 2021, the UPM launched its rating system at the program level involving 44 indicators across 7 categories, including Strategic Alignment, Teaching, Research and Innovation, University Ecosystem, Internationalization, Community Services, and Program Strength with corresponding weights. As soon as it was first introduced, this new rating system has already been adopted and implemented at universities in Brunei, Indonesia and Vietnam. In particular, UPM program ratings were blandly performed with national QA assessments for 11 Bachelor programs at the Thuy loi University and Hung Yen University of Education and Technology. In this case, the universities prepared similar sets of data but submitted independent QA and UPM self-assessment reports and then obtained the results at the same time. 

This blended approach has proved to be advantageous to higher education institutions as it can make full use of the data and evidence for both quality audit and assessment, clarifies comparable outcomes and achievements for institutions’ quality management as well as branding development.

This blended approach can be applied at both institutional and program levels, for two types of higher education institutions: research oriented and teaching intensive, according to two disciplinary classifications: (i) Science, Engineering & Technology and (ii) Social Sciences since UPM rating can be appropriate for the majority of universities in the region and the world.