Representatives of the Independent Agency for Accreditation and Rating (IAAR) took part in the IREG-9 Conference “Ranking and Accreditation - two roads to the same goals?”, which took place at the Hasselt University of Belgium. The conference brought together representatives of quality assurance organizations, scientists and experts in the field of accreditation and ranking of higher education from more than one hundred countries, including the USA, France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, India, Qatar, China, Kazakhstan and others.

The content of the Conference is focused on discussing key issues of improving the quality of higher education at the national, regional and international levels, as well as the role of the rating and accreditation system in achieving planned educational outcomes and identifying further areas for improvement.

The Conference was opened with welcome address by President of IREG Jan Sadlak, who emphasized that accreditation and ranking are significant and independent mechanisms for high quality assurance of educational services worldwide, including in Kazakhstan.

The program of the Conference provides for the work of sessions:

- The role of rankings and accreditation in improving the quality of higher education

- American and European experience.

- Ranking and accreditation in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

- Accreditation and rankings in the strategic management of the university.

- Building bridges between ranking and accreditation in engineering education.

- Use of ranking as instruments for benchmarking.

- Recent Developments in Academic Rankings.