Course Evaluation Evidence for Swiss & Austrian Accreditation (AAQ & AQ Austria)

Switzerland and Austria sit beside Germany in the German-speaking quality-assurance landscape, but their accreditation systems are legally and institutionally distinct. If your institution operates under the Swiss HEdA (assessed by AAQ) or the Austrian HS-QSG (assessed by AQ Austria), your course-evaluation data is not just an internal nicety — it is evidence that your internal quality assurance system actually works. This guide maps what each system asks for to concrete outputs you can produce, and is honest about where a simple survey is enough versus where conversational evaluation adds real value.

Building accreditation evidence in Germany too? See our companion guide, Course Evaluation Evidence for German Accreditation, and the EU-wide baseline, Turning Student Feedback into ESG / ENQA Accreditation Evidence.

The two systems at a glance

Switzerland — AAQ and the HEdA. Since the Higher Education Act (HEdA / HFKG) came into force in 2015, institutional accreditation has been mandatory for any institution wishing to use a protected designation — "University", "University of Applied Sciences", or "University of Teacher Education". The procedure inspects the institution''s internal quality assurance system, not the institution directly. It is run in three stages — self-assessment, external review by an independent expert group, and a decision by the Swiss Accreditation Council on the recommendation of AAQ (the Swiss Agency of Accreditation and Quality Assurance; other recognised agencies such as FIBAA may also conduct procedures). Institutions must meet 18 quality standards, set out in Annex 1 of the Accreditation Ordinance, grouped into five areas: (1) quality assurance strategy, (2) governance, (3) teaching, research and services, (4) resources, and (5) internal and external communication. Accreditation is renewed every seven years, and — notably — the expert group must always include a student.

Austria — AQ Austria and the HS-QSG. The Hochschul-Qualitätssicherungsgesetz (HS-QSG) is a cross-sectoral law covering public universities, private universities, universities of applied sciences (Fachhochschulen), and university colleges of teacher education (Pädagogische Hochschulen). For public universities and several sectors, the core instrument is the audit of the internal quality management system under § 22 HS-QSG, certified every seven years. The audit assessment areas defined in § 22(2) include: the quality strategy and its integration into management instruments; structures and procedures for quality assurance in studies and teaching (and research/development); organisation, administration and personnel; integration of internationalisation and social objectives; and information systems and stakeholder involvement. Private universities and UAS degree programmes additionally require accreditation.

The common thread: both systems judge whether you have a functioning quality cycle in teaching and learning — collect feedback, analyse it, act on it, and show that you did. Course evaluation is where most of that evidence is generated.

What both systems actually expect from course evaluation

Strip away the national labels and four expectations recur:

1. Systematic, regular collection of student feedback on teaching and study programmes — not ad hoc, but a defined cycle.
2. Genuine analysis, including the qualitative "why", not just average scores.
3. Closing the loop — documented evidence that feedback led to decisions and changes ("you said, we did").
4. Student involvement as partners in quality assurance, which in Switzerland is reinforced by the mandatory student on the expert panel.

A pile of Likert averages satisfies expectation 1 and gestures at 2. It rarely produces defensible evidence for 3 and 4. That is where evaluation design — and the tooling behind it — starts to matter for the audit outcome, not just for internal use.

Requirement-to-output mapping

Accreditation requirement	System reference	Concrete evidence to produce	How Koji supports it
Regular, systematic feedback on teaching and studies	CH HEdA Area 3 (teaching, research and services); AT § 22(2) studies & teaching	A documented evaluation cycle with consistent instruments across cohorts	Standardized, bias-aware AI-moderated interviews run every term, formative and summative
Analysis that captures the "why", not only ratings	CH Area 3; AT studies & teaching procedures	Thematic reports identifying recurring strengths and issues, with representative evidence	Automatic thematic analysis of interview transcripts and open-text at scale
Closing the loop / acting on feedback	CH Areas 1 & 5; AT quality strategy & information systems	"You said, we did" records linking findings to actions and outcomes	Closing-the-loop action tracking attached to each finding
Stakeholder & student involvement	CH mandatory student on expert panel; AT § 22(2) stakeholder involvement	Evidence students are heard as partners, with high, representative participation	Conversational format lifts engagement and depth versus static forms
Longitudinal, institution-level reporting for the audit	CH 7-year cycle; AT § 22 7-year certification	Cohort-over-cohort trend reporting across programmes and faculties	Standardized data structure enabling longitudinal cohort and programme reporting
Information systems feeding quality governance	CH Area 5 communication; AT § 22(2) information systems	Consolidated, exportable evidence base for self-assessment reports	Exportable reports and structured data for the self-evaluation dossier

Why the qualitative gap matters for the audit

Both AAQ and AQ Austria assess whether your quality system informs decisions. Reviewers — and the student on a Swiss panel — can tell the difference between an institution that collects scores and one that understands its students. A self-assessment report that says "satisfaction averaged 4.1/5" is weak; one that says "students consistently reported that lab sequencing undermined the second-year methods course, we restructured it, and the next cohort''s feedback confirmed the fix" is exactly the closing-the-loop narrative an audit rewards.

Static surveys make that second sentence expensive to produce, because the qualitative signal has to be hand-coded every term. AI-moderated interviews that probe follow-ups, plus automatic thematic analysis, lower that cost — turning closing-the-loop documentation from a once-a-cycle scramble into a routine output. Koji''s interview engine is the same conversational research engine used on the main Koji platform (koji.so); the education product applies it to students, courses and programmes.

Honest scope: where a simple survey is enough

To be fair to the alternatives: if your institution only needs to demonstrate that feedback is collected and reported, and your QA office already has the analyst capacity to theme open-text by hand, a well-run traditional survey tool (EvaSys, Explorance Blue, Qualtrics, or even institutional Microsoft Forms) can satisfy the letter of the requirement. National systems do not mandate any particular vendor or conversational method. The case for conversational evaluation is strongest when (a) qualitative depth is thin, (b) closing-the-loop evidence is hard to assemble, or (c) analyst time is the bottleneck — which, for most teaching-and-learning units, it is. Choose the tool that makes your quality cycle credible, not the one with the longest feature list.

A practical timeline for the seven-year cycle

• Years 1–5 (build the evidence base): run consistent formative and summative evaluations every term; theme results; record actions taken. The goal is a continuous "you said, we did" trail, not a retrospective reconstruction.
• Year 6 (self-assessment): consolidate longitudinal, programme-level reporting into the self-evaluation dossier; map each quality standard / audit area to concrete evaluation evidence.
• Year 7 (external review & decision): the expert group (including a student, in Switzerland) reviews the system; be ready to show not just data but the loop — analysis to decision to verified improvement.

Institutions that treat evaluation as a continuous evidence pipeline walk into the review with the narrative already written. Those that treat it as an end-of-cycle survey spend Year 6 trying to manufacture one.

Common pitfalls that weaken an audit

A few avoidable mistakes recur in self-assessment dossiers:

• Reporting scores without the loop. Reviewers treat average satisfaction as a starting point, not as evidence; what convinces them is the documented decision that followed and the cohort data confirming it worked.
• Reconstructing evidence in Year 6. A loop assembled retrospectively looks exactly like what it is. Capture actions as they happen, term by term.
• Thin qualitative data. Three-word comment-box answers cannot support a programme-level claim; depth has to be designed into collection, not hoped for afterward.
• Treating the student panellist as a formality. In Switzerland especially, a student helps verify the standards — your evidence should withstand a student''s read, not only an administrator''s.

Avoiding these is less about tooling than discipline, but the right tooling makes the disciplined path the path of least resistance.

Related Resources

• Course Evaluation Evidence for German Accreditation
• Turning Student Feedback into ESG / ENQA Accreditation Evidence
• Course Evaluation Evidence for Nordic Accreditation (NOKUT, UKÄ & FINEEC)
• Turning Course Evaluations into NVAO Accreditation Evidence (Netherlands & Flanders)
• Course Evaluation Evidence for AACSB & EQUIS Business-School Accreditation

Turn your evaluation cycle into audit-ready evidence

If your AAQ or AQ Austria review is on the horizon, the time to build a closing-the-loop trail is now, not in Year 6. Talk to Koji about running standardized, conversational evaluations that produce the longitudinal, action-linked evidence both systems reward.