On May 23-26 the 9th annual conference of the IREG Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence was held in Hasselt (Belgium). Jan Sadlak, President of IREG Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence, and Waldemar Siwinski, Vice President, opened the event with analytical reviews.

131 representatives of rating and accreditation agencies and leading universities from 35 countries participated in the conference.

The theme of the conference was «Ranking and Accreditation - Two Roads to the Same Goal?». Specialists on ranking and accreditation have met on one communication venue for the first time. During the last 20 years and up to the present moment these tools for evaluation of education quality have been exponentially developed but independently as different goals were set and different evaluation methods were used.

Judith S. Eaton, President, Council for Higher Education Accreditation CHEA (USA), Angela Yung-chi Hou, Executive Director of Higher Education Evaluation & Accreditation Council, Vice President of APQN (Taiwan), and representatives of accreditation agencies from the Netherlands, Portugal, India, and Pakistan spoke about the role of rankings and accreditation in improvement of education quality. Bernard Remaud, President, European Network for Engineering Accreditation "ENAEE" (France) and Dirk Bochar, Secretary General, European Federation of National Engineering Associations “FEANI” (Belgium) told about building of bridges between ranking and accreditation in engineering education.

New changes and propositions on rankings formation were suggested by leading rating agencies of the world:
- U.S. News & World Report (USA)
- Robert Morse, Director of Data Research,
- QS (Great Britain)
- Ben Sowter, Head of Division,
- U-Multirank (Germany)
- Caroline Friedhoff, Project Manager,
- ARWU (China)
- Rui Zhang, Director, Evaluation Center for World First Class Universities and Disciplines.

A new Moscow International University Ranking MosIUR «The Three University Missions» created at the initiative of the Association of Classic Universities was officially presented at the conference by the Russian Rating Agency «ExpertRA» (Director D. Grishankov).

Heads of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI, Higher School of Economics, Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod, Russian New University, and the National Centre for Public Accreditation represented the Russian Federation. The National Centre for Public Accreditation is the only accreditation agency in Russia which is a full member of IREG.

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