Universidad Pedagógica Nacional recognizes self-assessment processes as a required introspective look, which becomes an opportunity for institutional analysis and reflection thus enabling to qualify the training work in order to enhance the ethical-political and academic project from the assessment of the constructions of the University and the recognition of the possibilities to be improved. Therefore, since 2002 the University has been arranging and regulating the processes of self-assessment in each of the academic programs and at the institutional level.
At December 2015, the University received the report of the peer evaluators who considered that University has fully met the conditions to get the institutional accreditation even with a higher grade than the one assigned by the University itself in the self-assessment process. The result of this external evaluation was endorsed by the CNA and concluded by Resolution No. 16715 of August 17, 2016 by Ministry of National Education –MEN–, thus granting the High Quality Institutional Accreditation, an acknowledgement of who we are, the University that over 60 years has led the training of quality teachers.
Then a new challenge has been added to the other challenges regarding the institutional accreditation. Following the Act 1753 of 2015 by which the National Development Plan 2015-2018 was issued, and the regulations resulted in 2016, which set the mandatory accreditation for the country’s undergraduate programs, the University submitted for the first time to the National Accreditation Council six of its undergraduate programs in the process of accreditation. By September 2016, following the regulations, the registered programs submitted their self-assessment report, which was verified in an external assessment visit by the academic peers delegated by the CNA between November and December in the same year. These self-assessment processes, which would normally require at least two years to be carried out had to be implemented in less than a year due to a change in the MEN’s regulations. That is in addition to the reform that this regulation establishes for the degree programs, mainly regarding the adjustments of the curriculum, a situation that meant a major challenge for the University, specifically because for that year 16 of the academic programs should renew their Qualified Records.