Developing the unified accreditation system for engineering and technology programmes in Russia

Programme accreditation is considered to be an important aspect of quality assurance of engineering education and is defined as ?recognition given to a program as meeting applicable criteria as a result of an evaluation process? [1]. According to the Federal Law ?On Education in Russian Federation? professional accreditation of educational programmes should be understood as recognition of quality and level of graduate competencies as meeting the requirements of professional standards and the labor market [2]. Since 2002, the national system for professional accreditation of engineering programmes offered in Russian HEIs has been successfully developing by the Association for Engineering Education of Russia (AEER) that represents the Russian Federation in the European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education (ENAEE) and is a signatory of the Washington Accord (IEA). In 2013 the AEER accreditation criteria and procedure were updated and elaborated resulting in the development of the unified accreditation system for engineering and technology programmes [3]. The aim of the current paper is to describe the methodology for developing the unified accreditation system in Russian engineering and technology education and to present a review of AEER accreditation system. The article discusses the current requirements for Russian engineering and technology education and analyzes correspondingly the advantages and disadvantages of the former issue of AEER criteria and procedure. On the basis of this discussion, it underlines the importance of applying the updated AEER accreditation criteria and procedure for quality assurance in Russian engineering and technology education [4]. The developed unified accreditation system provides a common approach to accreditation of educational pogrammes at various levels, which stimulates the coherence of educational programmes for the providing of a single engineering education area in Russia that meets international practice.