Evaluation of higher education in Brazil: Analysis of the Course Index (IGC) in a quali/quantitative perspective

The text covers the Sistema Nacional de Avaliação do Ensino Superior - SINAES, instituted by Law 10,861, of 2004, guided by means of quality indicators: the Índice Geral dos Cursos - IGC, resulting from CPC - Conceito Preliminar de Curso, referring to graduation, and by the Capes Concept, an indicator of the quality of postgraduate courses. We analyzed, in a quantitative and qualitative way, if the IGC, when considering the distinct realities of the of academic formation, undergraduate and postgraduate, in a single indicator, does not further distort this measure, when used with the intention to represent how much quality an IES (Instituto de Ensino Superior) has? Answering this question constitutes the purpose of this article, that is, to investigate the representativeness of the IGC as an effective concept of the quality of the IES, analyzing, separately, how the results for graduate and postgraduate students behave as expressed in the mathematical model of that indicator. As a cut-off point, we decided to work only with the courses offered by the federal universities. Therefore, in this study, when we studying the IGC calculation, which incorporates master and doctorate data to indicate the quality of undergraduate courses at universities, we want to take a critical look at whether such measure actually reflects the quality of the courses of graduation.

Keywords:
Higher education. SINAES. Quality indicators; IGC.