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During the last few years, Russian, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz higher education systems have been
reformed and are progressively evolving within the context of Bologna Process (European Higher
Education Area), towards a common higher education framework. The opening of Russian, Kazakh
and Kyrgyz universities has been encouraged by many international projects, notably European ones.
In the beginning of 2010, the European Tempus project European-Russian-Central Asian Network of
Master Degrees “Informatics as a Second Competence” (ERAMIS) started to set up a network
between a group of universities from Europe, Russia and Central Asia. The members of the project
are: five universities from Europe (Finland, France, Germany, Poland, and Spain), four universities
from Russian Federation, three universities from Kazakhstan, two universities from Kyrgyzstan, and
three enterprises from Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.
The main objective of this project is to create a network of master degrees in computer science as a
second competence intended for specialists in social sciences, exact sciences, and engineering. The
objective of the master degree is to give specialists coming from other disciplines, a training enabling
them to master computer techniques and programming languages in order to create, develop, manage
and maintain new software tools for their specific domains.
One of the secondary objectives of the project is to develop an own culture of quality assurance
between the partners. In order to achieve this objective, the Monitoring, Evaluation and Improvement
Committee (MEIC) was established inside the project. The main task of this committee is to provide
quality control and monitor the activities and outcomes of the ERAMIS project.
The MEIC has established a transparent quality assurance system mainly based on the guidelines
from the “Council Recommendation of 24 September 1998 on European Cooperation in Quality
Assurance in Higher Education (98/561/EC)”. Due to the international and heterogeneous nature of
this project (14 universities from 8 countries), one of the most difficult tasks has been to develop
comparable criteria and methodologies.
In this paper, we present our quality assurance system, although the assessment of students is the
main topic because it is one of the most important elements of our quality assurance method. Student
assessment procedures are designed to measure the achievement of the intended learning outcomes.
Assessment also provides valuable information for universities about the effectiveness of teaching and
learners’ support. Our assessment procedure allows the partners to compare the results between
subjects, programmes, and universities, and leads to an exchange of experiences of best practices.
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