Schools of architecture are covered by a joint procedure involving the Department of Evaluation of Higher Education and Research Institutions and the Department of Evaluation of Study Programmes at Hcéres.
Under the terms of a partnership between Hcéres and the CTI, engineering schools also benefit from a coordinated procedure defined by both institutions, which is designed to improve the links between evaluations and simplify the documentation file submitted by engineering schools. A single self-evaluation file meeting the requirements set out in each external evaluation standard used by both institutions is required, and the visit date is also coordinated.
Throughout the entire process, the experts are likely to ask the institution to provide documents in addition to those included in the file, via the Hcéres contacts. During the visit, the participants interviewed by the experts may also pass on any relevant documents, which may also be made available to the experts during the evaluation on a dedicated Intranet site created by the institution. On this account, the experts are subject to strict rules of confidentiality and professional secrecy.
The institution must ensure that these different documents are systematically transmitted to the project manager of the designated Hcéres team in order to ensure the consistency of the database associated with the evaluation.
After receiving the draft report, the institution can respond to it and request the correction of any factual errors, as well as any misunderstandings, omissions or erroneous terms.
After the president of the panel has agreed to their inclusion in the report, the amended report will be sent to the institution in a provisional version. The president/director of the institution will then be asked to submit comments on this version of the report, which will then be appended to it.
The report becomes final once the president of Hcéres and the president of the panel of experts have signed it.
Discussions only take place during the interviews listed on the visit schedule. If necessary, the project manager who accompanies the panel during the visit will pass on any requests for additional documentation to the institution.
There is no direct contact between the experts and the institution throughout the entire evaluation process.
The type of professional integration should be specified in the same way for all doctors, e.g. professor, research fellow, post-doctoral contract, secondary education, fixed-term or open-ended contract in the private sector, independent professional, job-seeker. Simply mentioning that the graduate has returned to his or her home country is insufficient.
YES: each doctoral school must provide a detailed analysis of its results for the current contract. In the event of even a partial merger, the review may concern both the overall number and the proportion of doctoral students concerned by the merger. The “single” file will include the reviews and the plan for the future school.
No. Evaluations conducted by Hcéres lead to the production of a report based on the experts’ written contributions. The report is the only type of feedback provided.
In accordance with the Order of 25 May 2016, a research unit, as a general rule, can only belong to a single doctoral school.
However, if permitted by its size and justified by the scope of its scientific activities, its constituent teams (and therefore its research unit) may be assigned to several doctoral schools.
On an exceptional basis, a research team belonging to a doctoral school (and therefore to its parent research unit) may also be attached to a second doctoral school, e.g. to ensure the development of professionally oriented multidisciplinary approaches.
Officially, institutions are not required to follow the standard to the letter, but they are strongly advised to conform to its broad thematic structure (cf. methodological document entitled “Key points for self-evaluation”). Indeed, this approach facilitates the work of the evaluation panel which must analyse the self-evaluation report by carrying out an overall examination of the references in each thematic section of the standard. However, institutions are free to decide how they organise each of these sections. Institutions are not required to submit an individual response for each reference and criterion, and they may choose to adopt a different approach to meeting all the requirements in a given section.
