What HEC Quality Criteria Did Not Measure

[Written in December 11, 2003]

This was written on the basis of HEC Survey that was circulated by HEC in 2003. Many of these areas are still not being covered.

The survey still relies too much on brick and mortar measurements.

Following important areas for determining the strength of an institute of higher learning and measuring its quality have not been covered in this survey and should be included:

• Financial control
• Administrative control
• Academic control
• Records Management
• MIS Support

Financial management and control:

• Do you have a financial plan
• Do you have a proper accounting system based on GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounted Principles)?
• Is the General Ledger automated?
• Is your accounting system strong enough to compare activity in any university’s account on a monthly basis with the corresponding activity in a previous year? E.g. comparison of monthly expenses in Feb 03 with Feb 02?
• Do you have an automated budgeting system where revenues and forecasted and expenses are budgeted. Is there a system for variance analysis?
• Do you have a costing system? Do you have cost centers and analysis of costs according to various cost-centers?
• Do you have a proper receivables tracking system with aging analysis?
• Is there a payables forecasting system?

Administrative management and control:

• Do you have a purchasing system
• Do you have an inventory management system
• Do you have an attendance recording system
• Do you have a payroll system
• Do you have an HR system

Academic Control

• Do you have a student attendance recording system?
• Is there a system for imposing penalty on excessive absences?
• Do you have a system for tracking the number of student-teacher interaction hours
• Are the assignments, quizzes and class participations graded and part of the final evaluation
• Is there transparency regarding student papers. Are the graded papers shown to the students?
• Do the student know about their semester work grades before the final exam?
• Do you have an internship system and a system for monitoring and tracking the internships.
• Do you have a system for periodic exposure to industry through the guest speaker sessions
• Do you have a grading system
• Do you have a class scheduling system
• Do you have an exam scheduling system
• Do you have a system for anonymous evaluation of teachers by the students.

Records and Registration

• Do you have an automated registration system?
• Does your registration system automatically checks the pre-requisites
• Can you get statistical reports regarding the frequency distribution of Grades: Class-wise, Faculty-wise, Semester-wise, Course-wise, department-wise
• How long does it take for you to issue a degree or a transcript
• How long does it take for you to decide about exemptions and eligibility

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