• Quality, according to the Oxford Dictionary is "the standard of goodness".
• Quality Assessment, the mechanism or procedures used to determine the extent to which quality exists.
• Quality Assurance can be defined as "the use of a monitoring system to measure performance against quality standard".

• Standards based: Does institution/program meet specified external expectations?
• Supports consistency & comparability
• Fitness for purpose: Is what the institution/program is doing appropriate to its own stated objectives?
• Supports diversity

A systematic and independent examination to determine whether activities and related results comply with planned arrangements and whether these arrangements are implemented effectively and are suitable to achieve objectives." (Aust/NZ Standard 1994: the underlined is AUQA emphasis)

A systematic, independent determination whether:

• An organisation’s planned arrangements are suitable to achieve its goals (i.e. check the overall approach).
• Actual practice conforms to the planned arrangements (i.e. the deployment).
• The arrangements achieve the desired results.
• The organisation is learning and improving from its self-evaluation of its approach, deployment and results.