School of Management and Engineering Vaud

Basic information

National External Quality Assurance Requirements

  • Programme accreditation
    voluntary, except for medical and health professions according to public health regulations
  • Institutional accreditation
    Institutional accreditation according to Swiss law, with a decision by the Swiss Accreditation Council, is mandatory for all public higher education institutions of the tertiary sector and for private higher education institutions using a protected denomination (“University”, “University of Applied Sciences”, “ University of Teacher Education“). Successful accreditation has no legal impact beyond the right to use one of the protected denominations but is a testimony to a quality assurance systems covering all processes and suited to support the higher education institution to achieve its goals.
  • Further information on external quality assurance in Switzerland

External Quality Assurance Reports and Decisions

Institutional level

Part of the obligatory external QA system Decision: positive with conditions or restrictions
Institutional accreditation, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland

Programme level

Decision: positive
Bachelor Arts in Music and Movement (BAMM) delivered by the Haute École de Musique, Genève-Neuchâtel (HEM GE) (first cycle degree)
Decision: positive
Bachelor of Arts in Music (BAM) delivered by the Haute École de Musique, Genève-Neuchâtel (HEM GE) and the Haute École de Musique, Vaud-Valais-Fribourg (HEMU) (first cycle degree)
Decision: positive with conditions or restrictions
BSc HES-SO en Architecture du paysage (first cycle degree)
BSc HES-SO en Chimie (first cycle degree)
BSc HES-SO en Génie mécanique (first cycle degree)
BSc HES-SO en Technique des bâtiments (first cycle degree)
BSc HES-SO in Systems Engineering (first cycle degree)

Verifiable Credentials

A Verifiable Credential (VC) is a digitally-signed and thus tamper-evident document containing information on a subject (e.g. personal information, entitlements of an individual, degrees held by an individual or accreditation of a higher education institution). Quality assurance results recorded in DEQAR can be downloaded as W3C-compatible Verifiable Credentials.

Currently, two types of credentials can be issued:

EBSI Verifiable Accreditations (VA) can be used by a higher education institution in the context of the EBSI Early Adopters programme.

  • The VA allows the institution to prove its external quality assurance on the Trusted Issuer Registry (TIR). EBSI VAs are only issued for external quality assurance results with an official status in a national system (“part of obligatory EQA system”).
  • At present, the higher education institution’s EBSI DID needs to be communicated to EQAR and recorded in DEQAR manually at the moment. If you are a higher education institution participating in EBSI, please contact us to register your DID.
  • EBSI VAs are issued by EQAR under its DID did:ebsi:zk4bhCepWSYp9RhZkRPiwUL.

DEQAR Format Verifiable Credentials primarily serve as a proof of concept and public demonstrator currently.

  • DEQAR Format VCs are based on the plain W3C Recommendation and our own data model. While they closely follow the EBSI Schema, no EBSI-specific or EU-specific elements or data types are used.
  • The higher education institution is identified by its DEQAR URI in this case.
  • DEQAR Format VCs are issued by EQAR under its DID did:web:data.deqar.eu.

Please note: this is an experimental feature.