Course Evaluation Evidence for Ukrainian Accreditation (NAQA)

In Ukraine, study-programme accreditation is run by the National Agency for Higher Education Quality Assurance (NAQA / Національне агентство із забезпечення якості вищої освіти). Since the external quality-assurance system launched in 2019, programme accreditation has been mandatory: a higher education institution can issue diplomas only for study programmes accredited by NAQA (or by a foreign QA agency recognised in Ukraine). NAQA aligns its work with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG 2015) and is a member of the QA community moving toward full EHEA integration.

Answer-first: NAQA does not accredit a programme on the strength of a survey score. What it looks for is evidence that you systematically gather student feedback, act on it, and can show the loop closing — woven through the ten accreditation criteria and, above all, Criterion 8 (internal quality assurance). This guide maps NAQA's requirements to the concrete evaluation outputs a modern tool such as Koji for Education can produce, and is honest about where a well-run manual process is enough.

How NAQA accreditation works, briefly

Every study programme is reviewed against a Statute on Accreditation of Educational Programmes built around ten criteria. An expert panel is appointed, the institution submits a self-assessment (self-evaluation) report with supporting evidence, and experts conduct a site visit during which they speak directly with students, teaching staff, administrators and, where relevant, employers. That direct student contact means your evaluation evidence has to survive scrutiny beyond the paperwork: what students tell the panel should be consistent with what your feedback system reports.

The ten criteria, in outline, are:

1. Design and goals of the study programme
2. Structure and content of the study programme
3. Access to the study programme and recognition of learning outcomes
4. Training and teaching
5. Assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes and academic integrity
6. Human resources
7. Educational environment and material resources
8. Internal quality assurance of the HEI
9. Transparency and publicity
10. Learning through research (relevant chiefly to PhD programmes)

Student course-evaluation evidence is most load-bearing under Criteria 4, 8 and 9, and it supports 1, 5 and 7. (Exact validity periods and decision types — accreditation, conditional/deferred accreditation, refusal, and the "exemplary/model" designation — are set out in NAQA's current Accreditation Regulations; confirm the terms in force directly, as they have been revised over time.)

Mapping NAQA requirements to evaluation outputs

The table below maps each requirement to the concrete evidence a programme team needs — and what a purpose-built evaluation platform produces automatically.

NAQA requirement	What the panel wants to see	Concrete evaluation output
Criterion 4 — Training & teaching	Student-centred teaching; students' voice informs how teaching is delivered	Per-course student feedback on teaching, with themes (not just scores) and evidence it shaped delivery
Criterion 5 — Assessment & evaluation	Students understand and can comment on assessment fairness and feedback	Targeted evaluation items and probes on assessment clarity, workload and feedback timeliness
Criterion 8 — Internal QA	A functioning cycle: collect feedback → analyse → act → review	Standardized longitudinal evaluation data plus documented actions taken in response
Criterion 9 — Transparency & publicity	Stakeholders can see that feedback is gathered and used	"You said, we did" summaries publishable to students and reviewers
Criterion 1 — Design & goals	Programme goals reflect stakeholder (incl. student) input	Feedback trends feeding programme-review and revalidation decisions
Criterion 7 — Educational environment	Students can comment on resources and learning environment	Environment/resource themes surfaced from open student responses

The single most important thing NAQA experts probe under Criterion 8 is whether the loop closes. Collecting feedback is the easy part; the evidence that persuades a panel is the documented chain from a student concern, to a decision, to a change, to the next cohort noticing the difference.

Where course-evaluation tools help — and where they do not

Be clear-eyed about this. A tool does not accredit your programme; your quality culture does. NAQA experts are explicitly instructed to talk to students and staff, and they can tell the difference between a genuine improvement cycle and a survey that is collected and filed. If your institution runs a disciplined manual process — student surveys each semester, minuted programme committees, action logs, and published outcomes — you can meet NAQA's expectations without any specialist platform. Many Ukrainian institutions do exactly this. Do not let a vendor tell you otherwise.

Where a modern platform earns its place is at scale and in the analysis burden. Three problems recur:

• Vague open-text. Traditional surveys yield short, ambiguous comments an overloaded quality office cannot code consistently. NAQA's Criterion 8 wants evidence of analysis, not a folder of raw comments.
• The action gap. Institutions collect diligently and then struggle to show what changed. This is precisely the "closing-the-loop" evidence panels ask about.
• Consistency across programmes. For institutional-level review, feedback gathered differently in every faculty is hard to compare or defend.

This is where an AI-native evaluation approach differs from a static questionnaire. Koji conducts an AI-moderated interview with each student — probing why an answer was given rather than stopping at a rating — then runs automatic thematic analysis across every transcript, so the "analysis" Criterion 8 expects is produced consistently and at scale. It applies the same standardized moderation to every student in every programme, which supports the comparability institutional reviewers want. And it tracks the actions a programme commits to against each theme, generating the closing-the-loop trail directly. The same conversational-research engine powers the main Koji platform (koji.so) used for customer and user research; the education product applies it to student voice.

Building a NAQA-ready evidence file

A practical sequence for a programme approaching accreditation:

1. Standardize collection. Run consistent course evaluation every cycle across the programme's courses, so trends are comparable over time — the longitudinal picture Criterion 8 rewards.
2. Analyse, do not just archive. Produce thematic summaries (top themes, prevalence, representative quotes), not a dump of raw comments. This is the difference between "we collect feedback" and "we have an internal QA system."
3. Document the actions. For each significant theme, record the decision taken, by whom, and when — the programme-committee minute plus the change made.
4. Show the loop closing. Demonstrate the next cohort's feedback on the same issue, so the panel sees improvement, not just intention.
5. Publish for transparency (Criterion 9). Make "you said, we did" summaries visible to students; being able to point experts to a published summary is strong evidence.
6. Reconcile with what students will say on-site. Because NAQA experts interview students directly, ensure your reported themes match lived experience — inconsistency is a red flag.

When a manual approach is the better choice

If your programmes are small, your quality office already codes open text reliably, and your committees keep clean action logs, a well-run manual process is not just acceptable to NAQA — it is exactly what the ESG intends. A platform is worth it when volume, the analysis burden, or the need for cross-programme comparability outgrows what people can do by hand, or when the action gap keeps surfacing in reviews. Buy the tool to solve a real bottleneck, not to impress a panel.

Related Resources

• Turning Student Feedback into ESG / ENQA Accreditation Evidence — the European framework NAQA aligns to
• Programme Review & Revalidation: Turning Course Evaluation into Accreditation Evidence
• The Self-Evaluation Report (SER): Turning Course Evaluation Evidence into Accreditation-Ready Documentation
• Course Evaluation Evidence for Central European Accreditation: Czech NAÚ, Hungarian MAB & Slovak SAAVŠ
• Course Evaluation Evidence for Baltic Accreditation: HAKA, AIKA & SKVC

Next step: see how standardized, closing-the-loop evaluation evidence comes together in Koji for Education, or talk to our team about NAQA-ready reporting.

Common pitfalls NAQA panels flag

Several recurring weaknesses show up in accreditation reviews, and each is avoidable. The first is collection without analysis — a large archive of raw student comments with no thematic synthesis, which reads to a panel as data rather than a quality system. The second is the silent action gap: feedback is gathered and discussed, but there is no documented record of what changed, so the institution cannot demonstrate Criterion 8's improvement cycle. The third is inconsistency between the report and the site visit — the self-evaluation claims a healthy feedback culture, but students interviewed on site describe surveys they never see the results of. The fourth is low, unrepresentative response rates treated as if they spoke for the whole cohort. Address these by synthesising feedback into themes, keeping an action log per theme, publishing "you said, we did" summaries so students recognise the loop, and being candid in the self-evaluation about response rates and how you interpret them.

What good looks like: an example evidence trail

Concretely, a strong Criterion 8 exhibit for a single programme might read: "In the 2024 autumn evaluation, 38% of interviewed students on the second-year module raised late assessment feedback as a concern (theme prevalence and representative quotes attached). The programme committee (minutes, 12 December 2024) agreed a two-week marking turnaround and a revised submission calendar. In the 2025 autumn evaluation, the same theme fell to 9%, and students interviewed by the panel confirmed feedback now arrives before the next assessment." That single trail — concern, decision, change, measured improvement, corroborated by students — is exactly what NAQA experts are looking for, and it is far more persuasive than any average score. A platform that captures themes, prevalence and actions in one place makes assembling this kind of exhibit routine rather than a scramble before the site visit.