External Evaluation of the Department of Physics 2008

Recent legislation regarding the higher education in Greece, which was approved by the Greek Parliament in 2007, lead to the creation of a new independent Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) for Higher Education. The principal goal of this Agency is to organize and supervise the process of the academic evaluation of all Departments in Universities and Technical Educational Institutes in Greece.

The Department of Physics of the University of Crete, ever since its creation 30 years ago, was a proponent of the evaluation of its educational and research activities. Since the last evaluation of our Department, which took place almost a decade ago as a result of our own initiative, we were very interested to respond to the call of QAA and become one of the first departments in the country, which were evaluated at the end of 2008, using the new legislation.

The whole process commenced in January 2008 when the department formed a committee, whose goal was to collect all necessary material and prepare an internal evaluation report. This report was submitted to QAA in June 2008. QAA selected independently a committee of five well respected greek speaking physicists affiliated with academic institutions outside Greece, who studied the report and visited the Department for three days at end of November 2008. During their visit they discussed with faculty, research staff, support personnel and students and examined all academic and research infrastructures of the Department. Using all this information they prepared their evaluation report, which they submitted to QAA. This report was formally communicated to the Department Physics by QAA in January 2009.

All materials and reports which resulted from this process are available here:

• Internal Evaluation Report of the Department of Physics [PDF file]
• Appendixes of Internal Evaluation Report:
  - Brief CVs of all Faculty Members (in greek) [PDF file]
  - Refereed Publications of all Faculty for the Period 2002-2007 (in greek) [PDF file]
  - Program of Undergraduate Studies (in greek) [PDF file]
  - Program of Grgraduate Studies (in greek) [PDF file]
• Brief Presentation of Department of Physics - [PPT file]
• External Evaluation Report of QAA (in english) [PDF file]

It is evident from the evaluation report submitted to QAA, that the opinion of the external examiners about the education and research activities of the Department of Physics of the University of Crete is very positive. Our Department is very pleased with the whole process. We are committed to continue our tradition of excellence in all aspects of research and education, in order to maintain our leading role in Physics in Greece.

Heraklion, January 2009

The Chair of the Department of Physics
G. Tsironis, Professor