Accreditation of graduate courses in Brazil: analysing the evaluation of the first proposals of professional doctorates in the country

EasyChair Preprint 1064

Abstract

This paper investigates the assessment of the first-ever proposals for accreditation of professional doctorates in Brazil. This modality of course was implemented in the country in 1998 and was designed to bridge the gap between academia and the productive sector, further integrating scientific research and societal needs. At first, the modality was restricted to the master’s level, and only in 2017 new legislation authorised institutions to submit professional doctorate proposals to CAPES: the Brazilian agency in charge of accrediting graduate education. By May 2019, 30 new courses were approved, and this research analysed the evaluation reports of all of the 135 proposals initially submitted, in order to identify the criteria used to either or not accredit the courses. From the coding of such reports, it was also possible to map what the agency expects to see in successful proposals, as well as to ascertain if the evaluation process has been conducted coherently and consistently across different fields. With that, this paper can also be seen as a contribution to Brazilian academia in the design of future professional doctorate proposals.

Keyphrases: Accreditation, evaluation, graduate education, professional doctorate

@booklet{EasyChair:1064,
  author    = {Andre Brasil},
  title     = {Accreditation of graduate courses in Brazil: analysing the evaluation of the first proposals of professional doctorates in the country},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1064},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}