Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta (UMY) achieved ‘A’ accreditation in 2017 after having the visitation on 11-12 December 2017 by the assessor team of National Accreditation Agency for Higher Education (BAN-PT). Indeed, UMY attained the significant score increasing, 369, based on Online Higher Education Accreditation System (SAPTO) which was firstly followed by UMY. The accreditation score information was posted on an official account of SAPTO of BAN-PT.
In an interview on Thursday (4/1), Rector of UMY Dr. Ir. Gunawan Budiyanto stated that in 2012 UMY gained ‘A’ accreditation with a score of 363 through an offline accreditation system. “Afterwards, in 2017 UMY pursued an online accreditation system or SAPTO which demanding us to be more serious in managing a higher education institution,” he declared.
The SAPTO has been imposed since the middle of 017 and it is considered more competitive because the assessments comprise of several stages, namely a desk evaluation, the first validators, a visitation, the second validators, and a final meeting by BAN-PT. “These steps differentiate between an online and offline system. In the offline system, there are only two phases, the desk evaluation and a visitation. If we follow the SAPTO, the accreditation forms cannot be simply arranged to comply with the visitation requirements. Thus, everything should be well-prepared since the desk evaluation will bring huge impacts on the visitation and scores by the validators before going to the final meeting of BAN-PT,” explained Gunawan.
He also informed that UMY had prepared online accreditation forms for one and a half years, while the quality enhancement of departments, research, active cooperation with international institutions has been carried out for five recent years.
“First, the quality of undergraduate programs increased 45.5 percent that 10 departments are accredited ‘A’. 16 of 23 or 70 percent of 23 undergraduate programs obtained ‘A’ accreditation in 2017 and no department possesses ‘C’ accreditation. Besides, UMY has seven master’s degree programs and two doctoral programs, and two of them are accredited ‘A’, namely Master of Governmental Studies and Doctoral Program of Islamic Politics,” mentioned Gunawan.
Second, UMY has gained and used research funds of 21.67 billion rupiahs for three recent years. In 2014-2016, the number of publications of Scopus-indexed articles escalates each year, accounted 87.93 percent. “Third, UMY has cooperated with 94 overseas institutions or the cooperation increased 79.79 percent in 2013-2016. The other new achievement is that UMY is successfully engaged in Erasmus+ programs from the European Union facilitating the quality improvement and academic activities for lecturers and students,” added Gunawan.
