Quality assurance activities at International University

The International University (IU) always put the quality assurance activities as the priority, especially in accreditation with international standards. In the IU Strategic Development term 2011-2015, vision to 2020, IU has set up the goal “Upgrade the education quality, approach the regional accreditation standards and international standards as well”. This was the important goal that IU would attempt to reach as soon as possible following the IU milestone in proving quality and internalization quickly.

Quality Goals of International University

Becoming the member of ASEAN University Network (AUN), many quality assurance activities in AUN standards has been applied in the whole system of VNUHCM. These focus on 02 fields: (1) AUN Actual Quality Assessment at Program level and (2) Running the credit transfer system (ACTS) within member institutions of VNUHCM. The ASEAN Credit Transfer System (ACTS) was initiated by the ASEAN University Network (AUN) with the primary objective to facilitate student and academic mobility in ASEAN. The system has been managed through the AUN-ACTS Secretariat which hosted by Universitas Indonesia since 2010. This gives national students many chances in exchanging to another university in AUN in short term, one semester or for the whole program. Students can enjoy the exchange experience along with opportunity to obtain the credits from the host universities.

Within these two specific fields, IU has got some remarkable achievements.

1. AUN Actual Quality Assessment at Program level:As AUN-QA guidelines, program which has at least 03 cohort of graduate would have registration for the actual quality assessment. Following this rule, 04 programs of IU are successfully completed the AUN Actual Quality Assessment. They are:

• Computer Science and Engineering Program of School of Computer Science and Engineering with score of 4.61/7 (2009)
• Biotechnology Program of School of Biotechnology with score of 4.7/7 (2011)
• Business Administration Program of School of Business with score of 4.8/7 (2012)
• Electronics and Telecommunications Program of School of Electrical Engineering with score of 4.7/7 (2013, AUN – DAAD) The assessment of the quality program of AUN is done on a 7-point rating scale. The score of 4/7 means adequate as expected. This meets the AUN-QA guidelines and criteria. The highest score is 7. Until now the regional highest score that the programs reached is 5.4. All the results that IU has achieved would show that IU has good programs and our quality is proven by AUN.
• Industrial and Systems Engineering Program of Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering with score of 5.0/7 (2015).
• Biomedical Engineering Program of Department of Biomedical Engineering with score of 5.1/7 (2015).

The highlighted result is the Electronics and Telecommunications programs of School of Electrical Engineering. This has been successfully assessed by AUN – DAAD (The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) is a publicly-funded independent organization of higher education institutions in Germany).

2. The credit transfer system (ACTS):VNUHCM has total of 145 courses participating in this system. IU has 58/145 courses that concentrates on 02 main training fields of Management and Engineering (36 courses of Business Administration program and 22 courses of Electronics and Telecommunications Program).

The results of 06 programs achieved by the AUN Actual Quality Assessment not only show the quality of IU in our country but also has positive affects to the countries in other regions as well as contributing to the culture of quality assurance at IU.