Course Evaluation Evidence for Turkish Accreditation (YÖKAK / THEQC)

In short: YÖKAK (the Higher Education Quality Council of Turkey, internationally THEQC) evaluates institutions through its Institutional External Evaluation Program (IEEP) and the Institutional Accreditation Program (IAP) at least once every five years, against a framework built on the PUKÖ cycle (Planla–Uygula–Kontrol Et–Önlem Al, the Turkish PDCA loop) and aligned with the European Standards and Guidelines (ESG 2015). To pass on the education-and-training dimension, you must show not only that you collect student feedback but that you close the loop on it. This guide maps each relevant YÖKAK expectation to the specific course-evaluation evidence you need, and shows how a conversational, AI-moderated approach produces audit-defensible artefacts that a Likert-only survey cannot.

Why YÖKAK takes course evaluation seriously

YÖKAK is a public legal entity with administrative and financial autonomy, tasked with the external evaluation of Turkish higher education institutions and the authorisation of accreditation agencies. Its credibility rests on European alignment: YÖKAK became a full member of ENQA in 2020 and was registered on EQAR in 2022, and it also holds memberships in APQN, CHEA, and INQAAHE. That matters for procurement because it means YÖKAK reviews are not a parochial national checklist — they apply the same European Standards and Guidelines logic that NVAO, the QAA, ANECA, and others apply. Institutions that complete YÖKAK institutional accreditation enter the European quality-assurance landscape and gain recognition that travels.

The IAP evaluates institutions across four headings:

• A. Leadership, Governance and Quality — the institution's quality-assurance system and culture, including its internal quality processes and use of evidence.
• B. Education and Training — programme design, student-centred learning, teaching, and measurement and evaluation (the ESG 1.3 territory where course evaluation lives).
• C. Research and Development.
• D. Social Contribution.

The whole framework runs on the PUKÖ cycle: plan, implement, check, and take precaution/improvement action. Evaluators do not just want to see that you planned to gather student feedback; they want evidence you checked the results and took action — the "Kontrol Et" and "Önlem Al" stages. A pile of end-of-term Likert averages demonstrates the "Uygula" stage and almost nothing else. That is the gap most institutions discover during a site visit.

What YÖKAK evaluators actually look for

During a site visit, the evaluation team holds meetings with academic and administrative staff, students, and external stakeholders, and examines the institution's quality-assurance culture, process management, stakeholder engagement, and continuous-improvement approach. The institution receives a customised Institutional Feedback Report. In practice, on the education-and-training dimension, evaluators probe for:

1. A systematic mechanism for collecting student feedback on courses and programmes (the "Plan/Implement" stages).
2. Evidence that feedback is analysed, not just stored — including qualitative analysis, not only score averages (the "Check" stage).
3. Documented action taken in response to feedback, and evidence that students were told what changed (the "Precaution/Improve" stage — closing the loop).
4. Student-centred measurement and evaluation consistent with ESG 1.3.
5. Longitudinal evidence that the cycle repeats and that issues actually improve over time.

The recurring failure mode is strong on (1), thin on (2) and (3). You can administer thousands of surveys and still fail to show genuine checking and action, because a Likert mean of 4.1 does not tell an evaluator what was wrong or what you did about it.

Mapping YÖKAK requirements to course-evaluation evidence

The table below maps each YÖKAK / PUKÖ expectation to the concrete output you should be able to put in front of an evaluation team — and how Koji produces it.

YÖKAK / PUKÖ expectation	Evidence an evaluator wants	Concrete Koji output
Planla — systematic feedback mechanism (ESG 1.3, Heading B)	A defined, institution-wide evaluation process covering every programme	Standardised AI-moderated interview protocol deployed across courses, with a documented, repeatable design
Uygula — implementation with student involvement	Evidence of broad, representative student participation	Conversational interviews that lift engagement beyond tick-box surveys; participation and coverage records per cohort
Kontrol Et — analysis, not just collection	Qualitative analysis of what students said, with themes and prevalence	Automatic thematic analysis: ranked themes, prevalence counts, representative anonymised quotes per programme
Önlem Al — improvement action / closing the loop	Documented actions taken and communicated back to students	Built-in action tracking linking each theme to an owner, an action, and a status — the closing-the-loop record
Student-centred measurement (ESG 1.3)	Feedback that probes learning and assessment fairness, not just satisfaction	Adaptive follow-up questions that probe assessment, workload, and learning experience consistently
Longitudinal continuous improvement	Multi-cycle trend evidence that issues improve	Cohort-over-cohort longitudinal reporting on recurring themes and their resolution
ESG / EQAR alignment & data protection	Defensible, well-governed data handling	EU/GDPR-first data handling and standardised, comparable evidence (note: Turkey's KVKK data-protection regime should also be confirmed in your DPA)

A note on data protection

YÖKAK's European alignment means data governance is part of the credibility story. Koji is built GDPR-first for European institutions; Turkish institutions also fall under KVKK (Kişisel Verilerin Korunması Kanunu, Turkey's personal-data-protection law, closely modelled on European principles). Confirm KVKK-specific terms in your data-processing agreement, and treat anonymity and confidentiality of student feedback as both an ethics and an evidence-quality issue. See our guide on anonymity, confidentiality, and GDPR in course evaluation.

Why conversational evidence is stronger for YÖKAK

A traditional SET (student evaluation of teaching) survey gives an evaluator a number. The PUKÖ cycle asks for a story with a resolution. Conversational, AI-moderated evaluation is structurally better suited to that demand for three reasons:

1. It produces the "Check" evidence directly. Because every interview is analysed into themes with prevalence and quotes, you walk into the site-visit meeting with the qualitative analysis already done — not a spreadsheet of means you have to interpret on the spot. This is the single biggest evidentiary gap in survey-only QA systems, and the focus of our piece on why a sentiment score is not insight.
2. It makes "Önlem Al" auditable. Action tracking ties each theme to a concrete change and a status, so "we closed the loop" stops being an assertion and becomes a record. The evidence that closing the loop matters is itself well established — see does closing the feedback loop actually matter.
3. It standardises moderation, reducing bias concerns. Every student is probed against the same protocol, which mitigates the inconsistency and known biases of open-text-only or charisma-driven survey responses. For YÖKAK's emphasis on robust, defensible evaluation, standardised conversation is easier to defend than ad-hoc free text.

The same AI interview engine underpins the main Koji platform (koji.so) for customer and user research; the education product applies that proven conversational method to the quality-assurance evidence chain.

A practical evidence checklist for your YÖKAK self-assessment report (KGBR)

When you assemble your institutional self-assessment (Kurum İç Değerlendirme Raporu / KİDR), make sure your course-evaluation evidence can answer each PUKÖ stage explicitly:

• Plan: Document the evaluation policy, cycle, and instrument design. State coverage (which programmes, how often).
• Implement: Show participation and representativeness figures per cohort, not just an aggregate response rate.
• Check: Include the thematic analysis — the recurring issues, their prevalence, and how they differ across programmes and cohorts. Avoid leading with averages alone.
• Precaution/Improve: For each major theme, show the action taken, who owned it, and how students were informed. This is your closing-the-loop dossier.
• Longitudinal: Show at least two cycles so the evaluator can see whether issues actually improved — the heart of continuous improvement.

If you can populate all five from one system, your education-and-training narrative writes itself. If your evidence is a stack of Likert PDFs, you will be reconstructing the "Check" and "Improve" stages by hand under time pressure.

When a traditional survey platform is still acceptable

To be fair and precise: if your institution already runs a mature, well-documented survey programme, genuinely analyses the qualitative comments (with staff time budgeted for coding), and maintains a real closing-the-loop record, a conventional platform such as EvaSys or Explorance Blue can satisfy YÖKAK. The framework does not mandate a specific tool — it mandates evidence of the full PUKÖ cycle. The case for a conversational platform is not that surveys are forbidden; it is that surveys make the "Check" and "Improve" evidence expensive to produce and easy to fall short on. Choose based on whether your QA office has the capacity to do that analytical and follow-up work manually, sustainably, every cycle.

Related Resources

• Turning Course Evaluations into NVAO Accreditation Evidence (Netherlands & Flanders)
• Turning Student Feedback into ESG / ENQA Accreditation Evidence
• Course Evaluation Evidence for the UK TEF and QAA Quality Review
• Does Closing the Feedback Loop Actually Matter? The Evidence
• Course Evaluation Evidence for German Accreditation

Ready to build YÖKAK-ready evidence from your next evaluation cycle? See how Koji works for course evaluation and produce the Check-and-Improve dossier automatically.