IMPLEMENTING AN INTERNAL QUALITY ASSURANCE SYSTEM FOR DOCTORAL EDUCATION

Despite the significant developments in quality assurance (QA) in European higher education along the last decades, doctoral education has been left a bit apart from institutions' internal QA systems. Indeed, there are still a significant number of universities that so far have not incorporated this level of studies into their QA practices. Doctoral education is considered to be a bridge between research and education, which tends to make the development of adequate QA mechanisms harder, since the teaching and learning and the research and scholarship parts of the doctoral degrees need to be both taken into account if we intend to assure and improve their quality. This is a challenge when designing and implementing QA mechanisms for doctoral education, and one that the University of Aveiro choose to embrace. As such, the university's doctoral school decided in 2016 to start designing a QA subsystem (SubGQ_PD) for their doctoral education offer, aligned with its internal QA system. In the academic year 2016/17 the university has put in place the part of the system concerning the research work. Different actors intervene at different levels, including the students, their supervisors, other members of the academic staff, the programmes' directors, the departments' directors and the Doctoral School's director. This paper intends to describe the implementation of this part of the doctoral education QA system, including the steps followed and the main results obtained. So far, the implementation allowed to identify a set of best practices in the research work component, as well as to detect some problems related to the progression of the scientific work, the supervision and the lack of some resources, which were target for further analysis and corrective actions.