The evaluation of the university students in the European Higher Education Area

Abstract

Subject teaching guides constitute a contract between the university and the students that includes, among other issues, the content of the course, assessment systems and competencies that students must have. The objective of this study is to analyze assessment systems reflected in the teaching guides published for different degrees by four Spanish universities. To do this, information has been collected from 552 teaching guides from these 4 universities, 3 of them public universities and one a private university, and an analysis performed using frequencies, means, contingency tables, the tests included, the differences by universities, and branches of knowledge. Contrary to what would be expected of the student evaluations made in the European Higher Education Area environment, only a few of the teaching guides associate evaluations with competencies. The final examination continues to be key; thus the application of continuous evaluation is not in general use, with self-assessment and co-evaluation being in the minority as evaluation systems. New technologies are not widely used in the student evaluation, and the mere attendance to a class is an evaluation system reflected in several teaching guides.