16.2 What is checked during the accreditation of dual study programmes?

On the basis of § 12 para. 6, the Accreditation Council expects the higher education institution to demonstrate in the accreditation procedure, based on evidence, how systematic content-related, organizational and contractual interlinking of the different learning venues is ensured within the framework of the specific study programme concept. The higher education institutions are responsible for the design of the interlinking in these three dimensions. The recommendations of the German Council of Science and Humanities from 2013 provide important information on the systematics of a dual study programme, especially in contrast to other formats.

The Accreditation Council has established that, in practice, the dimension of content dovetailing in particular leads to uncertainties and misunderstandings both on the part of the higher education institutions making the application and on the part of the accreditation agencies carrying out the assessment. Some fundamental considerations can be extracted from the Accreditation Council’s decisions to date:

• The Accreditation Council generally bases its assessment on the study programme and not on the complementary practical activity. This means that the content must necessarily be interlinked in the curriculum. A course-related training/professional activity in an area related to the content of the study programme does not sufficiently justify the profile feature “dual” even if parts of the professional activity are credited to the course without further transfer credits or parts of the course are credited to a training course.
• The content must be systematically interlinked. Selective points of contact with Professional Practice, for example in the context of an internship semester or the final thesis, do not justify the profile feature “dual”. In the opinion of the Accreditation Council, this also means that the curriculum of the dual variant of a study programme must differ from that of a complementary “conventional” full-time variant at least in terms of the specific requirements for students.
• The interlinking of content must be anchored in the course documents (e.g. module descriptions, study and examination regulations).
• It must be possible to demand binding interlinking of content from the practice institutions as part of the university’s quality control and quality assurance, for example via cooperation agreements.