Rethinking Quality Assurance in Information and Computer Science Degree Programs at Utrecht University: A Critical Systems Heuristics Perspective

Quality Assurance (QA) in higher education is a multifaceted process involving multiple stakeholder groups, such as students, alumni, lecturers, program directors, and educational support staff. Decisions made during QA directly shape university degree programs and have consequences for those who rely on these programs, including individuals who are not directly involved in the QA process. These decisions are inevitably shaped by the beliefs and values of participating stakeholders. Making such judgments explicit allows affected parties to reflect on and potentially challenge them. Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) provides a systems-oriented framework for examining and questioning these judgments within the context of university degree programs. Applying CSH to QA demonstrates the method’s heuristic capability to reveal possible sources of misunderstanding, as well as its critical capacity to uncover conceptual shortcomings in QA design. In this research, CSH is applied specifically to the Information and Computer Science (I&CS) Master’s programs at Utrecht University (UU) in the Netherlands. The analysis draws on the author’s professional experience as director of these degree programs through autoethnography. The intention of this paper is twofold: 1) To challenge the judgments and decision-making of those defining the QA process of the I&CS Master’s programs through the application of CSH and 2) to identify conditions under which the QA process can be improved. This implies that the system under investigation is the QA process itself, not the degree programs.