Responsible unit: Office of the President

Contact person: Sophia Gustavsson Capkova

To read the document, please open the attached file below.

Introduction

Stockholm University has general degree-awarding powers for all qualifications, with the exception of professional qualifications and qualification in the fine, applied and performing arts, for which separate applications must be made to the Swedish Higher Education Authority (UKÄ), the authority tasked with appraising applications for degree-awarding powers.  

At present, the University has degree-awarding powers for several professional qualifications (see 0Applications to UKÄ for degree-awarding powers for professional qualifications). The University does not have degree-awarding powers for any qualification in the fine, applied and performing arts.

General degree-awarding powers for the qualifications Higher Education Diploma, Degree of Bachelor, Degree of Master, Degree of Licentiate and Degree of Doctor mean that the University itself determines in which fields of knowledge it is capable of offering courses and programmes at a high academic level and awarding qualifications. In practice, this determination involves internal quality assurance when establishing main fields of study in the first and second cycle and third-cycle subject areas. The focus of this quality assurance is to determine whether the preconditions exist for students or doctoral students to achieve the qualitative targets for the qualifications the programmes are to lead to. Quality assurance also takes place when courses in a main field of study included in programmes that leads to a qualification are established and revised. Our internal quality assurance also covers the legally binding documents that govern programmes, such as course and programme syllabuses, local qualification descriptors and general syllabuses for third-cycle programmes.

Main fields of study, third-cycle subject areas, courses and programmes may also need to be discontinued for various reasons, including quality concerns. Regardless of the reason, the discontinuation process must be quality assured, most importantly to ensure the rights of students.  
Pursuant to the University’s Decision-making and Delegation Regulations, drafting and decision-making processes related to education are delegated to academic area boards. The fact that the two academic area boards’ preparation and decision-making processes for education differ somewhat reflects the different organisational conditions within the university in that the Science Academic Area has a single faculty while the Human Science Academic Area has three. For more details, please refer to the decision-making and delegation rules for each academic area. The focus of this governing document is therefore the decision-making basis and administration once a decision has been reached that is required to quality assure general decisions related to programmes leading to the award of a qualification. Ensuring legal certainty for students is one important reason to assure quality.

Purpose

This purpose of this document is to describe how quality is to be assured when establishing a course or programme leading to the award of a qualification, and how courses and programmes are to be discontinued in a manner that guarantees legal certainty for students and doctoral students, regardless of which body prepares and makes these decisions.