Quality assurance plan: Excerpt from the Organizational and Operational Rules of the Doctoral School

Chapter IX. Quality Assurance of the Doctoral School

19. § Quality Assurance Goals

1. The 13. § of the university’s Organizational and Operational Rules of the Doctoral Schools contains the quality assurance goals, the quality assurance policy, and the model for self-assessment worked out by the Doctoral Council of the University of Miskolc. The Doctoral School of Literary Studies as well as the Council of the Doctoral School fully agree with these requirements, and recognize them as a policy to follow.
2. When determining the quality assurance policy and method of the doctoral programme and obtaining a doctoral degree, the Council of the Doctoral School considers the major goals of creating a quality assurance system to be: increasing and keeping a high level of standard of training, carrying out highly sophisticated and successful research, increasing operational efficiency and the satisfaction of students, teacher-researchers, university employees and other public figures (those employing the students graduated from the university or in any contact with the university, etc), and striving to meet the needs at the highest possible level.
3. Also, the Council considers the regulations to be taken into account when working out and operating a quality assurance system: the provisions of the Higher Education Act currently in force, resolutions of the Hungarian Accreditation Committee (HAC), the guidance of the Ministry of Education and Culture concerning the quality assurance of higher education, the Mission Statement of the university, the international recommendations regarding the quality assurance system with special regard to the European standards and directives on quality assurance in higher education (Bergen Declaration 2005).
4. The quality assurance policy of training and research assures that the goals are achieved at a high level. Thus, the university is the basis of researcher training. This is why we need to enforce policies and methods that can sufficiently guarantee that the doctoral candidates’ academic achievements should reach the level of those who have obtained a doctoral degree in the leading international research group of their discipline.

20. § Quality Assurance Policy

The quality assurance principles concerning doctoral programmes and obtaining a doctoral (PhD) degree are the following:

• Quality centred: the programme – regarding its professional content and as a service provision – should operate to the full satisfaction of the students’ and other stakeholders’ professional and other needs. Teachers and students should constantly strive for perfection in their academic work. This striving for perfection should be present in all respects.
• Documentation of processes: the processes of the doctoral programmes, from admission to obtaining a PhD degree, are monitored. Every single decision point concerning these processes shall be documented, while the administrative load on the teachers shall not increase as a result.
• Assessing student knowledge and skills development: should take place on a regular basis and following schedules.
• Assessment of teachers and programmes by students: naturally means several different kinds of assessment, such as teaching and research activities and assessment of the training.
• Measuring teachers’ further development: in order to assure a high level of teaching and research activities.
• Efficient support of knowledge: with considerations of the university resources available, the students involved in the doctoral program should be ensured well-equipped research units, backed up and supervised by teacher-researchers highly qualified in the given field. The instruments, technological means and the required conditions of teaching and research shall be provided. All this should be done in accordance with cost efficiency (constant monitoring of costs, cost-benefit analysis).
• Publicity: informing academic and professional circles, together with a planned and regular analysis of the feedback from the labour market.
• Information: all the information concerning the processes of the doctoral programmes (from admission to obtaining a PhD degree) are made available through different communication platforms.
• Benchmarking: monitoring the training and the performance of students in other doctoral schools with a similar profile.
• Feedback: ensuring feedback on the activities of those involved in the doctoral training.
• Individual responsibility – protection of intellectual property: clarifying individual tasks and responsibility in terms of training and research as well as striving to protect intellectual property.
• Academic ethical requirements: protecting the freedom of research and the ethics of academic public life.

21. § Self-assessment

1. The aim of self-assessment is to evaluate the existence and nature of quality assurance and institutional responsibility and to utilize information obtained from self-assessment for the sake of further development.
2. Self-assessment is essential to find out more about ourselves (management, colleagues), about the processes, the students, our partners and the society. Innovation and employee satisfaction can be improved by comparing present and previous results. This allows us to carry out general evaluation of operation and a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats).
3. The self-assessment model of doctoral schools is a version of the UNI-EFQM model adapted to PhD programs.

Principles and procedures for the practical application of quality assurance

In its training, the Doctoral School of Literary Studies puts a great emphasis on both teaching and research.

1. The programme of the training course is regulated by the Regulations of Doctoral Training and Obtaining Doctoral (PhD) Degree of the University of Miskolc, the Organizational and Operational Regulations of the Doctoral School, and the Framework of Requirements for Students of the University of Miskolc (FRS). In accordance with the basic documents of the training, the programme of the training course and its professional standards are based on the training and research programme developed for the topic areas, together with the principles and rules of quality assurance.

The doctoral programme includes the accomplishment of the requirements specified in the credit system of the doctoral training, the acquisition of the credit points stipulated, but does not require a comprehensive doctoral examination. On meeting the requirements specified in the FRS, the candidate acquires a document certifying completion of studies and completes the coursework.

The programme is organized by the Dean’s Office of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Miskolc, supervised by the Doctoral School, whose tasks include advertising courses, managing educational matters, paying grants and also dealing with issues concerning fees and keeping records. The processes of the doctoral programme, from admission to obtaining a doctoral degree, are monitored. Every single decision point concerning these processes is to be documented.

2. Advertising dissertation subjects: The Council of the Doctoral School (CDS) partly – in accordance with disciplinary and training specialities – requests that the teachers of the Doctoral School outline subjects, and partly assesses all the subject proposals outlined by the teachers and advertises only those in the cases of which the intellectual and infrastructural basis of research can be provided, as well as in those cases it considers it possible that a dissertation can be completed within a reasonable time.

Emphasised requirement for the teachers who outline a subject is active research activity: in the preceding five years they publication rate should significantly exceed the publication requirements the Doctoral School sets for obtaining a PhD degree. By assessing their previous supervisions it should be avoided that the students are guided by teachers providing unsuccessful supervision.

The teacher who outlined a subject becomes a supervisor when the student applying for their subject gets admission to and enrols in the Doctoral School.

3. Admission to the doctoral training: the student can take part in the entrance examination only if the supervisor-to-be have previously provided a written statement of their willingness to admit the student (the application form of the entrance examination contains a column for the supervisor’s opinion).

The formal requirements of taking the entrance examination are to have a degree graded at least good, together with a certificate of the language knowledge necessary for a research in literary studies and more specifically in the subject chosen. The rules and framework regarding the foreign language requirements for obtaining a PhD degree prescribed in the Organizational and Operational Rules of the Doctoral School are to be taken into consideration as early as the admission of the student.

4. The doctoral training: The Council of the Doctoral School decides on the evolving of the programs’ courses, on adding new courses to the training, as well as on renewing the syllabuses of the courses. Every syllabus is to be reviewed in at least every third year.

Only those teachers and researchers with academic degree can be teachers of the Doctoral School who are found competent and are asked by the Council of the Doctoral School to lead courses in a given period. Teachers of the Doctoral School appear in the database of the Hungarian Doctoral Council. In case a teacher is teaching in more than one doctoral school they declare on their data sheet what percent they belong to each school.

Public and regularly updated information on the current training plan, as well as on the courses and teachers can be found on the Doctoral School’s website.

5. Research work: The programme should offer the students a number of possibilities to “try themselves out”. A university conference called the Doctoral Students’ Forum is organised every year on the Day of Science, when the students can demonstrate their preparedness in their own sections. The presentations heard at the conference also appear in publications. If there is a possibility we also publish the doctoral students’ essays in thematic publications; we also produce publications where students and their supervisors as co-authors publish essays. All of our publications are open to the public without any restriction, namely we publish them and make them downloadable in PDF form on the website of the Institute of Hungarian Linguistics and Literature (IHLL) with the same content as in the printed publication.

There are research seminar reports organized regularly as a closing event of the semester, when students share their results obtained during the given semester with fellow students, teachers, and supervisors. The oral report is built upon a previously presented written summary which has a strict framework regarding genre, content, form and wordage.

The students are encouraged to take part in conferences organized and publish their works in publications edited by other institutes as well. Financial support is provided to students taking part in conferences abroad and other international events like the International Conference of PhD Students.

We provide high quality infrastructure for research work. A doctoral students’ office has been arranged next to the Administrative Office of the Doctoral School. In 2012 we also equipped a computer room with software appropriate for textological training and research, and computerized the doctoral students’ office. Together we have 16 new computerized workstations with a number of printers and scanners. There is an access to projectors, audiovisual tools, and the Internet.

Satisfactory infrastructure. The Institute of Hungarian Linguistics and Literature (IHLL) of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Miskolc houses five seminar rooms used exclusively by students majoring in Hungarian; on request, these rooms can be used for the seminars of postgraduate students, as well. The majority of seminars in the doctoral school take place in small groups, often in teachers’ offices. The teachers’ offices and the seminar rooms are well-equipped, having been modernized in 2008. There is an access to projectors, audiovisual tools, and the Internet.

The IHLL has its own department library established in 2002 which offers appropriate storing and reading facilities and several Internet work stations. Its approximately 50,000 volumes, procured with great care, serve the goals of literary training and are of course available for the students of the doctoral school as well. This department library’s holdings are completed by the teachers’ reference libraries in the building of the Institute.

The Central Library of the University of Miskolc (the legal successor of the library of the Academy of Selmecbánya of 1735) has a nationwide scope of activities and is a public and research library, which can extensively satisfy the needs of arts and social science programmes. The reading room with a capacity of 400 people provides a of number journals and open-shelf volumes together with 45 computers and a multimedia room. It has holdings over a million volumes, and it is growing yearly by about 12–15,000 books and other documents. The number of periodicals is nearly 1,000, with a significant ratio of foreign language scholarly literature and electronic data carriers. The Selmec Museum Library is an individual collection of the Central Library. We encourage the students of the Classical textology program to acquire an appropriate routine in using this valuable collection as well as the archives of the university.

Several major Hungarian and foreign scholarly literature databases (EISZ, EBSCO, etc.) are available through the computers of the university with Internet access. The databases mostly contain the bibliographic details of articles in professional publications, but there are many full texts as well (from journal publishers like Elsevier, Springer, etc.). The University of Miskolc orders over 500 foreign journals in print. The complete text of many of these are already accessible online. We seek to extend the range of accessible databases that are suitable for research in the field of humanities as well. It is due to the financing of the Doctoral School of Literary Studies that the rich collection of JSTOR (Arts and Sciences Collection 2) is available on the computers of the university with Internet access.

6. Publication requirements of obtaining a PhD degree: To obtain a PhD degree the candidate must meet the publication requirements set in accordance with the particularities of the given field. The Organizational and Operational Rules of the Doctoral School of Literary Studies also includes the publication requirements one must meet to become a doctoral candidate, and after that to hold the public defence of their dissertation. To identify the prestigious publications unequivocally and with absolute certainty we refer to the current state of the table of academic and peer reviewed journals presented by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ (HAS) I. Section of Linguistics and Literary Scholarship on the website of HAS. In addition, we expect our doctoral students to have an MTMT (Database of Hungarian Academic Publications) profile since the publication of their very first paper and to keep an up-to-date and of high standard record of their publication and occurrent citation data.

7. The process of obtaining a PhD degree: As regards the procedures of defending dissertations, our major goal is to enforce stricter quality assurance principles. The formal requirements for academic standards are available on our website. Full text or the dissertations already defended are available in the repository of the university. For every item in the repository a link can be found on the website of the Doctoral School.

Before submitting a dissertation it must be subject for a preliminary debate. We seek to have the future opponents of the dissertation present at the preliminary debate in order to be able to take part in shaping up the final text of the dissertation. The process of the debate with special regard to the opinions and observations about the alterations to be made in the dissertation are recorded. In case the dissertation needs significant altering, a second preliminary debate is to be held. The final text of the dissertation cannot be submitted within 30 days after the debate.

After the dissertation is submitted, the members of the dissertation committee receive the dissertation and the dissertation summary in both electronic and printed form. They receive the opponents statement after both of them is submitted, and they receive the candidate’s answers at least one week prior to the public defence in both electronic and printed form. When the public defence – organized by the Hungarian Doctoral Council – is proclaimed the dissertation and the dissertation summary become public in the repository of the University of Miskolc. A link can be found on the website of the Doctoral School to the proclamation of the Hungarian Doctoral Council.

The dissertation cannot be altered after being submitted to the opponents. In case the dissertation committee objects to certain incorrect statements of the dissertation or rejects certain parts of it, parts of the record relating thereto are to be attached to the dissertation (both in its electronic and printed form), and the defended dissertation becomes public in the repository with this supplement. 

The continuous self-assessment of the doctoral school promotes the standards of teaching, research, publications, dissertations and their defence. The text of the current self-assessment is available on the website of the doctoral school.