Evaluating Evaluators: An Evaluation of Education in Germany

How do evaluators of higher education go about their work? How are groups of evaluators put together? How do they reach consensus on the criteria of quality in the discipline or degree programme under examination? What problems do evaluators encounter and how do they resolve them? Susan Harris-Huemmert investigates these questions in this detailed case study of an evaluation commission that inspected education departments in the German state of Baden-Württemberg (universities and teacher-training colleges) during 2003/2004. This work takes up not only topics of interest to evaluators of higher education, but also illustrates the politics and contextual issues surrounding the discipline of education in Germany during the first decade of the 21st century.