The Roles Accreditation and Quality Assurance Play in Higher Education Institutions

Accreditation is a process of controlling and evaluating the progress of an institution's program based on pre-determined and standard criteria. A correlation exists between quality assurance plus accreditation and the goals in higher education institutions. Quality assurance and accreditation standards are the suitable tools for measuring the quality of educational services. In the present paper, the Persian and English articles indexed in scientific databases including ISI, SID, PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus and Web of Science have been reviewed and evaluated by using the following keywords: "Accreditation," "Quality Assurance," and "Accreditation Indices."

The results showed that quality assurance and accreditation are very important in higher education institutions because, through them, universities can meet the needs of customers (students, parents or organizations) in propounding quality education while achieving short and long-term goals. The use of quality assurance and accreditation systems paves the path to the success of most higher education institutions worldwide. The reviews done to fulfil the present research also indicated that quality assurance is an excellent mechanism for predicting deficiencies and diagnosing difficulties before they occur during the implementation of the project in educational institutions. Accredited international certifications can be a positive incentive to achieve excellence and improve performance.