Вестник ВГУ ПРОБЛЕМЫ ВЫСШЕГО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ QUALITY ASSURANCE AND ACCREDITATION: A GLOSSARY OF BASIC TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Lazăr Vlăsceanu, Laura Grьnberg, and Dan Pвrlea Preface The present publication, Quality Assurance and Accreditation: Glossary of Basic Terms and Definitions, is the result of a UNESCO-CEPES initiative undertaken for the particular occasion of the Invitational Roundtable on “Indicators for Institutional and Programme Accreditation in Higher Education/ Tertiary Education” (Bucharest, Romania, 3-8 April 2003), that was organized in the framework of the UNESCO-CEPES project on Strategic Indicators for Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century1 The need to improve the quantitative assessment of higher education at system and institutional levels, the main objective of the project, has been complemented by this effort to gather and to organize the information and the mixtures of meanings surrounding the field of quality assurance and accreditation in higher education. <...> This glossary is, in a way, a compilation of a set of definitions associated with the various terms applied in the fields of quality assurance and accreditation. <...> It may be used as a reference tool to better understand the connotations of the terms in circulation and to compare existing models of quality assurance and accreditation, while also offering opportunities for an increased consistency of their conceptual framework. <...> This publication will also be made available on the UNESCO-CEPES Webpage, allowing it thus to be updated and supplemented with information, on a regular basis. <...> This project being the result of teamwork, I would like to thank all the UNESCO-CEPES staff members who have contributed to its realization, particularly, Lazăr Vlăsceanu, Laura Grьnberg, and Dan Pвrlea. <...> There has always been an individual and social need to improve the quality of life of people, including the quality of what they learn over many years of organized schooling, how they learn it, and why they learn it. <...> Over the years, various developments have taken place relative to the assessment, monitoring, and improvement of the quality of different components of higher education (its governance, its contents, its forms of pedagogy, the services offered, etc.). <...> What is new refers to those developments which are related to quality assurance and its management. <...> Such concepts as “quality assessment”, “quality evaluation”, and “quality assurance” are widely and regularly <...>