Course Evaluation Evidence for Spanish Accreditation (ANECA ACREDITA & SGIC)

In the Spanish system, renewing a degree's accreditation through ANECA's ACREDITA programme (or the equivalent regional agency) is not won on satisfaction scores alone. The external panel wants to see that your internal quality assurance system (Sistema de Garantía Interno de Calidad, SGIC) systematically collects student feedback, analyses it, acts on it, and documents the result. This guide maps the ACREDITA evaluation framework to the concrete evidence a modern course-evaluation process should produce — and is honest about where a traditional satisfaction survey is already enough.

Answer first: For ACREDITA, course evaluations matter most under Criterio 3 (Sistema de Garantía Interno de Calidad) and Criterio 7 (Indicadores de satisfacción y rendimiento). Reviewers expect not just encuestas de satisfacción and their results, but a documented closing-the-loop cycle: what students said, what the comisión de calidad decided, what changed, and whether the next cohort's evidence improved.

How ACREDITA is structured

ANECA is Spain's national agency for quality assessment and accreditation, a full member of ENQA and registered on EQAR, operating within the European Higher Education Area and aligned to the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG 2015). Official bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees must renew their accreditation cyclically through the ACREDITA procedure (in several autonomous communities this is run by regional agencies such as AQU Catalunya, ACSUG, Madri+d, Unibasq or AAC-DEVA, using an equivalent model).

The evaluation is built on the Documento Marco framework: three dimensions and seven criteria. The self-assessment report (informe de autoevaluación) plus a body of evidence is reviewed by an external panel that visits the institution and holds audiencias with distinct collectives — students, teaching staff, graduates, employers and support staff.

Dimensión	Criterio	Where course-evaluation evidence is used
1. La gestión del título	C1. Organización y desarrollo	Evidence the programme runs as designed; feedback on workload, sequencing, coordination
1. La gestión del título	C2. Información y transparencia	Public availability of results and quality information
1. La gestión del título	C3. Sistema de Garantía Interno de Calidad (SGIC)	The mechanism that collects, analyses and acts on student feedback — central
2. Recursos	C4. Personal académico	Feedback informing teaching-staff adequacy and development
2. Recursos	C5. Personal de apoyo, recursos materiales y servicios	Feedback on facilities, services and learning resources
3. Resultados	C6. Resultados de aprendizaje	Qualitative evidence on whether learning outcomes are achieved
3. Resultados	C7. Indicadores de satisfacción y rendimiento	Satisfaction indicators of all collectives; performance/retention indicators — central

Mapping ACREDITA requirements to concrete outputs

The table below translates what the panel looks for into the specific artefacts your evaluation process should generate. These map to Koji outputs, but the requirement column is vendor-neutral — use it as a checklist regardless of tool.

ACREDITA expectation	Evidence the panel wants	Concrete output
C3 — SGIC collects student opinion systematically	Documented, repeatable instrument applied every cohort	Standardised evaluation run identically across courses and cohorts
C3 — Feedback is analysed, not just stored	Thematic analysis of qualitative responses, not raw comment dumps	Automatic thematic analysis with themes traceable to verbatim student quotes
C3 — Closing the loop (cierre del ciclo)	Record of decisions and acciones de mejora taken in response	Action-tracking log linking each theme to a decision and an owner
C7 — Satisfaction indicators of all collectives	Student, graduate and (where relevant) employer satisfaction, longitudinally	Longitudinal cohort reporting with consistent indicators over time
C7 — Indicators congruent with design and resources	Ability to explain why an indicator moved	Probed, specific feedback that explains the number behind the satisfaction figure
C1 / C6 — Programme runs as designed; outcomes achieved	Qualitative evidence on workload, coordination, learning outcomes	Standardised qualitative evidence segmented by course and module
Información y transparencia (C2)	Results published and accessible	Exportable, shareable reports for the web de calidad

Where course evaluation usually falls short for ACREDITA

Most Spanish degrees already run encuestas de satisfacción del estudiantado. The common weaknesses panels flag are not the absence of surveys but:

1. Low response rates that make the satisfaction indicator hard to defend as representative.
2. Thin qualitative evidence — a satisfaction percentage with a handful of one-line comments does not explain why students are (dis)satisfied, which is exactly what C7's "congruence with design and resources" expects.
3. A weak or undocumented loop — the SGIC collects data but cannot show, cohort over cohort, that feedback led to specific acciones de mejora and that those actions worked.

This is where an AI-moderated conversational approach strengthens the file. Because Koji probes vague answers in the moment — turning "la asignatura estaba desorganizada" into a specific, actionable statement about sequencing or assessment timing — the qualitative evidence under C3 and C7 is concrete and analysable. Themes trace back to quotes, and the closing-the-loop record can be documented and tracked for the next audiencia. Koji runs on the same AI interview engine as the main Koji platform used for customer and user research, applied here to students.

Building the closing-the-loop record (cierre del ciclo)

For C3 and C7, the single most persuasive artefact is a documented improvement cycle:

1. Collect standardised feedback each semester (formative mid-term checks plus end-of-course evaluation). See formative vs summative course evaluation.
2. Analyse themes across the cohort, not anecdotes.
3. Decide — the comisión de garantía de calidad records which actions it will take.
4. Act and publish — implement and surface results for C2 transparency.
5. Re-measure the next cohort and show movement.

Present this as a longitudinal narrative, not a snapshot. Panels reward institutions that can show the cycle turning.

Honest note: when a traditional satisfaction survey is enough

Be pragmatic. If all a given criterion needs is a headline satisfaction percentage for the Sistema Integrado de Información Universitaria (SIIU) or a regional indicator return, a simple, well-run institutional survey already satisfies it — you do not need conversational depth to report a single number. Likewise, if your university operates a mature, AUDIT-certified SGIC with an embedded survey instrument and a functioning comisión de calidad, the marginal value of changing tools is in the qualitative depth and the loop documentation, not in the score itself. The strongest case for a conversational approach is precisely the two recurring panel weaknesses above — shallow qualitative evidence and an under-documented improvement cycle — not the existence of surveys per se.

It is also worth reading why averaging Likert satisfaction scores can mislead before leaning too hard on a single mean in your self-assessment report.

Practical checklist for the self-assessment report

• Document the SGIC instrument and that it is applied systematically to every cohort (C3).
• Provide satisfaction indicators for each collective — students, graduates, staff, and employers where relevant — with trend lines (C7).
• Include thematic qualitative analysis that explains the indicators, with traceable evidence (C3, C7).
• Show the closing-the-loop log: feedback → decision → action → result (C3).
• Make results publicly available for transparency (C2).
• Align everything to ESG 2015, since ACREDITA and your regional agency operate within it.

Preparing for the external visit (audiencias)

The ACREDITA panel's audiencias are where qualitative evidence is tested directly. Reviewers ask students, graduates and employers whether the issues raised in evaluations were genuinely acted on — so the written file and the lived experience must match. Two practical steps help:

• Brief the collectives, do not coach them. Students invited to the audiencia should understand how the SGIC uses their feedback and where improvement actions are published, so they can speak to a working loop rather than to a survey they barely remember completing.
• Bring traceable evidence. When a panellist asks "how do you know workload was a problem, and what did you do about it?", a thematic finding linked to verbatim student quotes plus a dated acción de mejora is far more persuasive than a satisfaction mean on its own.

Remember that the agency you deal with depends on your autonomous community: ANECA acts directly across much of Spain, while AQU Catalunya, ACSUG (Galicia), Madri+d, Unibasq (Basque Country) and AAC-DEVA (Andalucía), among others, run an equivalent ACREDITA model regionally. The Documento Marco criteria and the ESG 2015 alignment are consistent across all of them, so evidence built for one transfers to another.

Related Resources

• Turning student feedback into ESG / ENQA accreditation evidence — the European framework underpinning ANECA
• Course evaluation evidence for French accreditation (Hceres & CTI)
• Course evaluation evidence for Italian accreditation (ANVUR AVA & OPIS)
• Course evaluation evidence for German accreditation
• Turning course evaluations into NVAO accreditation evidence (Netherlands & Flanders)
• Closing the feedback loop: course evaluation evidence

Ready to strengthen your ACREDITA evidence? Talk to Koji about standardised, GDPR-native course evaluation built for the European quality cycle.