13.5 Recommendations

13.5.1: What are the recommendations that the agency and peer review panel make to the higher education institution?

The legal basis for recommendations is described in the explanatory memorandum to § 24 MRVO:
“This does not exclude the possibility that the peer review report may contain, for example, recommendations on the quality development of the study programme or the quality management system, which are aimed at improving quality beyond the standards to be used as a basis for accreditation by the Accreditation Council and therefore cannot form the basis for any conditions.”

Recommendations therefore serve to develop quality. They do not mean that a criterion from the MRVO is only incompletely fulfilled.

13.5.2: How does the Accreditation Council deal with ‘recommendations’?

The Accreditation Council very much welcomes it when Agencies and peer review panels use the instrument of recommendation. This happens very often, as a random sample has shown: The 130 applications dealt with for the first time at the 112th AC meeting on 31.03/01.04.2022 contained 781 recommendations, with a median of five recommendations per application.

As a rule, the Accreditation Council does not comment on this type of recommendation and does not comment on it or adopt it as its own, as this is not its task. It concentrates on (potentially) condition-relevant issues, see 13.5.3 below. If the Accreditation Council comes to the conclusion that a recommendation proposed by the peer review report is to be classified as problematic with regard to the criteria of the MRVO, it will point this out to the higher education institution in the notification. In practice, however, this only happens very rarely.

13.5.3: Does the Accreditation Council convert recommendations into conditions?

In exceptional cases, the Accreditation Council comes to the conclusion that a condition-relevant fact was only given as a recommendation. The Council then independently issues a condition. In the random samples (see 13.5.2), however, this only affected approx. five percent of all recommendations, i.e. approx. 95 percent remained as recommendations.

13.5.4. Does the Accreditation Council itself make recommendations?

In fact, the Accreditation Council itself sometimes makes additional comments on the study programme or the QM system in its notifications. The term “recommendation” is avoided for such comments. Instead, the Accreditation Council refers to the fact that it combines its decision with a “note” or several “notes”.

13.5.5 What is meant by “recommended resolution”?

In Article 3 para. 2 sentence 1 no. 4, the interstate study accreditation treaty names the “assessment and preparation of a peer review report with resolution and evaluation recommendations in accordance with the standards laid down in the legal ordinance pursuant to Article 4” as a basis for accreditation procedures. Therefore, the entire accreditation report represents a recommendation to the Accreditation Council as to how the quality of the study programme or the university’s internal QM system should be assessed. The explanatory memorandum to § 22 MRVO explains further:
“The Accreditation Council assesses compliance with the formal criteria on the basis of a formal report. The Accreditation Council assesses compliance with the academic criteria on the basis of a peer review report. As these are recommendations of the Agencies, the Accreditation Council is not bound by these assessments.”

There is therefore a further dimension to the concept of recommendation here. In everyday life, however, when we talk about recommendations, we are referring to the recommendations made by the Agencies and the peer review panel in accordance with Section 24 MRVO.