MEC ranks postgraduate courses; understand – 01/30/2024 – Education
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Students interested in pursuing a stricto sensu postgraduate course can consult the results of the quality assessment by Capes (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel), on the institution’s official website (gov.br/capes).
Linked to the Ministry of Education, Capes approves the creation of new postgraduate courses and supervises existing ones.
The entity carries out assessments every four years. In the last one, which runs from 2017 to 2020, 4,512 academic master’s, professional master’s and doctorate courses were evaluated.
Size and quality of scientific production, professors’ qualifications and social impact are some of the parameters for forming grades, which range from 1 to 7.
Some of the rules, such as the retroactive application of criteria in the middle of the evaluated period, were changed by an agreement signed with the MPF (Federal Public Ministry) in 2021.
The entity employed 1,808 consultants and 147 coordinators at last analysis. Technicians analyze data sent by educational institutions and issue an opinion, with suggested grades.
The analysis is assessed by the foundation’s CTC (Technical-Scientific Council for Higher Education), which approves or rejects the grade recommendation. Course coordinators have the right to appeal before definitive publication.
Schools often dispute the result as there are implications beyond reputation. Concepts 1 and 2 result in the revocation of the operating authorization, while higher grades help to guarantee financial resources.
Until the signing of the agreement with the MPF, Capes classified the best and worst courses based on a comparison between the programs.
In this method, the foundation established part of the criteria in the middle of the analyzed period, so that the courses did not know exactly how they would be evaluated.
“The association between the results of evaluations and the promotion of programs —[na forma de] support from funding agencies for the development of research and obtaining grants by students— weakens the potential of evaluation as an inductor of the quality of scientific production, naturalizing distortions and inequalities”, says Sandra Maria Zákia, retired professor from the Faculty of Education at USP.
Renato Janine Ribeiro, former Minister of Education and director of evaluation at Capes between 2004 and 2008, disagrees.
“The result of the evaluation is not the only parameter for allocating resources to programs”, he says. “Courses in São Paulo have fewer resources than they would if they were in the Northeast or North.”
In a note, the entity stated that it used the IDHM (Municipal Human Development Index) as a weighting factor, which would allow “to direct a greater number of scholarships to courses offered in municipalities with less human development”.
The agreement with the MPF obliges Capes to disclose the criteria in advance and maintain old grades for programs downgraded based on new parameters. Partially for this reason, the results for the 2017-2020 period were positive: 54% of courses maintained their grade, 34% had a higher grade and 4% were downgraded. Forty-five of them — 1% of the total — received grades 1 and 2.
In 2017, Brazil had 490 programs considered excellent (grades 6 and 7), a number that grew to 671 in 2020.
See some of the criteria taken into consideration in the latest Capes evaluation
| Questions | Criteria |
| Proposal | coherence and updating of research lines with the program proposal; interaction between different lines of research; adequate infrastructure for academic staff; infrastructure for teaching, research and administration |
| Faculty (teachers) | titration; professional experience; academic experience; teachers’ dedication to the program |
| Student body (students) | number of approved course completion works; number of articles published and awarded; applicability of the work produced |
| Intellectual production | articles published by teachers; technical and artistic production and registered patents; distribution of production among teachers |
| Social insertion | social impact; economic or cultural aspect of the program; agreements with universities and research centers |
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