01.7 Does the Accreditation Council issue certificates for the accreditations it has awarded?

No. The Accreditation Council stores the accreditations it has issued in the accreditation database at https://antrag.akkreditierungsrat.de; the Accreditation Council’s accreditation decisions can be viewed publicly there and the corresponding notifications can be downloaded in the internal area. The documents provide information about the Accreditation Council’s decision, including the reasons, any conditions imposed and the specified accreditation period. In particular, the page with the accreditation information for each study programme, each university-internal QM system and each Alternative Procedures can be linked so that the current status is documented and can be communicated at any time. Each certificate would fall short of the information content of these database entries.

Certificates would have to be maintained and reissued on an ongoing basis, for example when the accreditation period is extended, when a course name changes or another essential change is made, when new partial study programmes are assigned in combined study programmes or when partial study programmes are discontinued, et cetera. The documents would have to be documented on the database page, would make it more confusing and would duplicate the information in the Resolutions, albeit not completely.

Despite the possibilities for automation in the electronic informationand application system“ELIAS”, the maintenance of certificates would entail additional programming effort and additional complexities, for which neither personnel nor financial capacities are available in the sense of a lean and affordable accreditation system. This is all the more true as the Accreditation Council has also received various requests for English-language certificates, for which the existing accreditation information does not provide a basis, so that the texts required for this would have to be created and checked separately.

In addition to the database, the Accreditation Council provides an electronic seal for accredited study programmes, QM systems and Alternative Procedures, which can be used for self-promotion, especially on the Internet.