Slovenia follows the EU trends in quality assurance. By changing its legislation of Higher Education, two important steps were made. In 2004, it was established that higher education institutions would be allowed to renew their accreditation only upon external institutional evaluation, and according to that Standards for quality assurance in higher education institutions, study programmes, research, art, and professional work, written following ENQA guidelines, were developed and legally adopted. In the spirit of these changes, the Council for Higher Education in Slovenia was reformed, changing from an advising to an independent body engaged in quality assessment and assurance in the field.
In attempts to establish a national evaluation system in higher education, the first pilot external evaluations were carried out in 2006 at four higher education institutions in different fields of knowledge and different universities. These evaluations were supervised by independent researchers who afterwards expertly revised the methodology and outputs of pilot evaluations with a triangulation approach to the study. The aim of the study was to produce guidelines for the improvement of evaluation methodology in order to enhance the efficiency of future external institutional evaluations at the national level. The methods used in the study were comprised of: (a) analysis of independent observation of site visits reports, (b) methodological analysis of evaluation reports, and (c) content analysis of evaluation reports. One of the key implications of the study is that an evaluation or metaevaluationto each external evaluation process is essential to guarantee a superior quality of evaluations; independent supervision offers detailed and unbiased information not only on the evaluation process but also on institutional climate and culture.