Teacher Assessment: The Gap between Formal Regulations, Organizational Objectives and Students’ Expectations

Student Centered Learning is a very popular principle amongst European educational policies and Higher Education organizational regulation, but is there really a question risen on which are the students’ interest or educational desires? According to recent studies, students often expect to understand issues related to real life problems, they expect teachers who will help them learn and have a positive impact on their way of thinking and feeling about themselves and the world. Also, in the European economical context, students expect from their university social and professional opportunities and guidance in finding a job and building a career. The problem is that taking a closer look to formal regulations, and there are plenty of them (quality assurance regulations, internal evaluation regulations, international assessments), we might notice a gap between normative objectives and students expectations. In this paper I will focus on regulations and students expectations regarding teachers’ assessment in the Romanian Higher Education System. After analyzing the coherence of the regulatory system regarding teachers’ assessment and studies about students’ expectations, I applied a survey to 52 students from 17 Romanian universities in order to find out which are their educational needs and desires and how important the items required by the regulations are, from this point of view.