About accreditation processes.Some similarities and disparities

Quality is nowadays an important issue to be applied to everything. The evaluation of the quality standards is sometimes an obsession extended to all the human activities. Sometimes these criteria could hide other secondary intentions avoiding certain competitiveness. The second half of the last century was characterized by the expansion of the teaching Institutions according to the demographic explosion in almost all the planet, especially in the emerging countries. The progressive urban concentration helped to the democratization of the education as an engine to ensure the progress of the several cultures. The final step of this process is arriving with the application of e-learning processes where problems of territorial motilities are avoided. After this proliferation, with different quality results, the responsible Institutions have decided to apply the quality criteria. High Education (HE) Institutions are affected by this crescent preoccupation. This paper tries to analyze some of the different processes developed by Official and Professional institutions in Europe and Eastern Mediterranean countries along the last two decades. The homogenization of these process is the main characteristic in Europe, because the Bologna process. Several experiences previously developed were harmonized and adapted for the Bologna grid. The initial intentions from the Professional Associations to control this process were forwarded to the respective National Agencies. The roles of the professional associations were progressively deactivated. In Eastern Mediterranean countries the experience is leaded by the British and USA Institutions. The work is about the evaluation of the Schools of Architecture and its comparative analysis cover different case studies in three southern European countries (Portugal, Spain and Italy) and Lebanon. The author tries to define the changes these processes have experimented. The conclusions must show the similarities and disparities and discuss about the rationality of these processes when applied to different cultures. It seems that the criteria for the evaluation must pay attention to the specificities, cultural and economic conditions of the different faculties to be evaluated. The globalization of some of these processes can be a trouble to respect the singularities of the different systems.