This paper analyses the assessment policy the Department of Education (MEC) implemented in Brazil since 1995. Such policies comprise the Exame Nacional de Cursos (Brazilian Examination of Courses) and the Avaliação das Condições de Oferta dos Cursos de Graduação (Assessment of Adequacy of Conditions for Undergraduate Course Provision). It argues that an assessment policy should not merely be characterised by the contributions it can offer to understand specific evaluation procedures. It should, above all, distinguish itself by contributing to critically understand the impacts and uses of assessment and its outcomes as an instrument of power to stimulate competition within the education field. It is also argued that an assessment policy always maintains strategic links to the organisation of teaching system and its functional dynamic as well as to the main purposes of the political project for the field of education aimed by the group in power. This is the case of the current assessment policy for higher education in Brazil, which, on the one hand, performs a central role in the organisational and functioning logic of the higher education system and, on the other, has already become the most effective instrument used by the government to promote both massification of higher education via private funding and the development of a modern market of higher education in Brazil.
Education policy; Evaluation; Higher education; Massification; Co-ordination and control
