LAHORE: The Government College University (GCU) has launched a self-assessment initiative for all its postgraduate programmes for policy reforms and to ensure the highest quality standards.

GCU Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Asghar Zaidi constituted various assessment teams comprising senior professors from different universities to review the implementation of 31 standards of the self-assessment programme under the Higher Education Commission (HEC) guidelines.

A separate team has been constituted for quality assessment of every department of the university.

`The assessments will also contribute towards ranking of the departments and the top ranked one will be awarded cash prize and certificates for the faculty members.

Prof Zaidi visited the botany department, along with the assessment team, and reviewed laboratory equipment, library resources and other research facilities made available to the students, besides faculty-to-student ratio, the standards ofresearch and teaching,trainingoffered to support staff in previous years, curriculum design and improvement etc.

The VC said the basic objective of the self-assessment initlative was to identify areas where further improvement could be made by identifying weaknesses in each department of the university. He said a plan would be chalked out to bring continuous improvements and convert the weaknesses identified by the teams into strengths to set an example for other universities.

He said self-assessment was a technical and systematic process of gathering and reviewing important quantitative and qualitative data and information from multiple and diverse sources about educational programmes.

He also said senior academicians from other varsities had also been included in the self-assessment teams to ensure impartiality.

He appreciated the staff and faculty of the GCU`s botany department for extending cooperation to the assessment team.