Lingnan University welcomes the Audit Report by the Quality Assurance Council (QAC) of the University Grants Committee (UGC) today, 27 June. The Audit Panel praises Lingnan’s robust governance and quality management systems for managing academic standards and academic quality, and commends their proactive approach to digital innovation as reflected in the Strategic Plan since the appointment of the President, Prof S. Joe Qin. A typical example of this is the School of Data Science (SDS), which opened in May 2024 to develop teaching and research in related areas.

Prof S. Joe Qin, President and Wai Kee Kau Chair Professor of Data Science of Lingnan University thanked the Audit Panel for their constructive feedback, which aligns fully with Lingnan’s steadfast commitment, as outlined in the Strategic Plan 2022-28, to “provide a world-class liberal arts education in the digital era.”

He added “Lingnan University is accelerating its strategic development in digital innovation to become a leading liberal arts research university comprehensive in arts and sciences in the digital era. In addition to setting up the School of Data Science and the Lingnan University Institute for Advanced Study last year, Lingnan provides free access to ChatGPT and DeepSeek models for all students, faculty, and staff. Additionally, the University has organised a High-Performance Computing Data Centre, ‘Lingnan HPC NexT’, which has greatly sped up research results by reducing computation time for AI research projects from several months to just a few hours. Lingnan is also reinforcing our unique liberal arts education philosophy, by fostering the whole-person development of students, close teacher-student relationships, and increasing collaboration and engagement with institutions in the Greater Bay Area in order to contribute to the development of Hong Kong as an international education hub.”

The Audit Report agrees that Lingnan has comprehensive assurance and enhancement processes, and identifies numerous Features of Good Practice:

Lingnan has a comprehensive set of policies and procedures for programme and curriculum development, approval, and programme and course monitoring with clearly defined data-driven review schedules. Its strong assurance mechanisms include the Annual Programme Report (APR) and the Five-year Programme Review for continuous improvement through data analysis. An additional feature of good practice, implemented by a small group since 2019-20, scrutinises APRs for Taught Postgraduate (TPg) programmes, while the Registry checks the Undergraduate (UG) programmes.

The University has deployed a range of evaluation metrics to both inform and improve quality, and notes that Lingnan’s teaching and learning strategies show its dedication to quality education, and are aligned with “Optimising Liberal Arts Education in the Digital Era”. The Panel stresses that Lingnan’s strong teacher-student relationship is an example of quality education.

Lingnan has also demonstrated a strong commitment to the fair, transparent, and effective assessment of student learning, and uses external academic industry advisors and benchmarking exercises to assess academic standards rigorously. The Audit Panel acknowledges that with students’ feedback Lingnan currently develops and embraces diverse forms and formats for assessment. The Audit Report appreciates the fairness and innovation of Lingnan's assessment practices, including integrating generative artificial intelligence to optimise assessment practices.

Furthermore, the University provides comprehensive and effective student support. The Panel mentions that the out-of-classroom learning offered by Lingnan aligns with Graduate Attributes (GA), and the University provides practical student support systems and proactive academic support, including the Early Alert System (EAS), a feature of good practice, to identify students with learning difficulties at an early stage.