The University of Helsinki passed the international quality assessment and was given a certificate of the audit for the next six years. The audit also evaluated some of the university programmes, including our department’s Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes.  As a result of our long-running improvement efforts in education, the department has become accustomed to success in these evaluations. We did it once again: the audit promoted our Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes to the highest, advanced level, as the only programmes.  The research, development, and innovation work at the university was also assessed to the same advanced level.

We should be very pleased with this result, as it is not a given to even pass the audit, a bitter experience that some of this country’s universities had to go through. In order to keep ‘riding the wave,’ we cannot rest on our laurels by continuing to follow current excellent routines, but we also have to continue assessing our work while seeking out new areas for development and new action models. 

At the final seminar of the audit on 16 March, our former head of studies, Jaakko Kurhila, was one of the invited speakers. In his talk, Jaakko presented some reasons for our success, stating that most of the development challenges set by the auditioning body to the university, such as disseminating good work routines, has long been included in the department’s day-to-day work.

Let’s keep up the good work – go, us!

The whole auditing report is available here.