The vice chancellors of universities from Commonwealth countries have appreciated the Quality Assurance (QA) reforms and ranking model developed by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) Pakistan in a recent meeting of the conference of All Commonwealth Universities (ACU).
The meeting of ACU was held in Jamaica where the presence of HEC Pakistan to represent the higher education sector of the country was noticed and appreciated significantly. The presentation on QA system implemented in Pakistan and ranking model was made on the first day of the conference.
The participants and speakers of the following sessions of the conference continued appreciating the methodology, approach and strategy of HEC for making rankings an internal part of the entire QA system and treating these as one of the External Quality Assurance strategies aiming at improved quality of the higher education with indigenous model compatible with international practices and national integration. Almost all of the delegates of developing countries in general and from South Asia and Caribbean region in particular had shown great interest regarding the adoption of the QA system and the ranking model developed by the HEC for Pakistan. Keeping in view the overwhelming interest of the participants from all commonwealth countries and referencing by majority of the speakers, the ACU secretariat requested the HEC to provide them a copy of Pakistani QA system and ranking model to be shared with all the commonwealth countries as one the best models.
The group of vice chancellors from Sri Lanka were already carrying out a consistent follow up to work further with the HEC in January 2013 to adopt a similar model of ranking and QA in their country. It is worth mentioning here that the HEC had produced a similar development model for Islamic countries, and would now facilitate the rest of the developing regions as they were intending to follow the HEC model. It is an important step in the history of the HEC to have finally succeeded in getting its own QA model that was being recognized globally. The education experts termed this global recognition as an outcome of continuous reforms introduced by the HEC during the last decade aimed at improving quality of higher education.
