During the biennial 1996/1997 the Co-ordinating Body for the Improvement of Postgraduate Studies in Higher Education (CAPES) introduced new paradigms for the assessment of postgraduate programmes in Brazil. These paradigms became firmly established in the following triennials (1998-2000 and 2001-2003) with profound effects on the conception and direction of policies of assessment for this level of study. The present article aims to examine some of the principal occurrences of this process. First of all, it focuses on the assessment of postgraduate programmes in education. It then centres analysis on how the broad area of human sciences found ways of resisting and confronting the supremacy of the hegemonic sciences in CAPES. The article proposes to contribute to a better understanding of assessment procedures so that postgraduate programmes in education can take a more critical and informed stance with relation to them.
assessment; postgraduate programmes; CAPES
