This text seeks to retrieve references that have imposed themselves in the Brazilian debate and practice of assessment of higher education and underpin a process that, since it necessarily refers to the assessment of merit and value, is far from obtaining the enthusiastic adhesion of institutions and of their main agents. These orienting landmarks, the legislation and its application are conceived of as speeches, texts or utterances, whose meaning is fixed in the context of articulation practices that involve social agents contending for the hegemony of society projects, in given social-political spaces. To the light of the tension between conceptions of assessment and of support to regulation, especially those contained in the SINAES (Brazilian System to Assess Higher Education) law, we point out some conquests that have had a positive impact on the quality of the training offered at this level of teaching and the impasses that can lead to the prevalence of a vision of assessment privileging the individual performance of students, courses and institutions. We also list aspects that could help reduce the social differences that characterize Brazilian higher education.
University crisis; Assessment of higher education; SINAES law