Nowadays, evaluation by competences is one of the challenges most of the teachers must deal with. Evaluation by competences consists in overcoming traditional patterns of evaluation, based on accumulation of content, and proposing evaluation by competences as a new vision on the academic context. Inspired on this paradigm, our project aims to identify the current practices and beliefs of the university professors in the European Higher Education Area.

The objectives are to describe evaluation practices and to identify the preferred evaluation model and its implementation at Catalonian Universities.

This paper focuses on the general scenario of students’ evaluation at Catalonian universities. Data analyzed proceed from an oral questionnaire applied to a representative sample of university teachers from a variety of institutions and departments.

Based on a literature review we identified some of the main topics of our work, which have been reinforced as well with the experience of our research group during the last years. Some assumptions were established in the study’s design phases: 

•The assessment is situated in the didactic "crossroads". In Miller's words, the evaluation orientates the curriculum and can generate, therefore, a real change in the learning processes. Allen (2000), Brown and Glassner (2003) consider that evaluation cannot be limited to the qualification; it cannot be centered on collection and repetition of information and that it cannot be limited to tests of "pencil and paper". More diverse and complex strategies of evaluation are needed. 

•Evaluation has to represent a learning opportunity to be used in promoting students competences. This formative dimension formulated by Scriven has been approached widely in the last years by Hall (2003) and Kaftan (2006).

•Evaluation by competences forces us to use many instruments and to improve different agents. In this respect, authors like McDonald et al. (2000), Stepehn and Smith (2003), Gijbels & Gerard (2005),  have carried out an analysis of the meaning of the designs for competences and about what the evaluation for competences implies. 

•Evaluation has to be coherent with the rest of elements of formative design and has to integrate it. The works of Segers (2001) or from Gijbels (2005) have turned out to be very illustrative in this respect. 

•Evaluation has to make the students more conscious of their level of competences, the way they solve tasks, what strong points they must promote and what weak points they must correct in order to face future situations of learning. This process of self-regulation, pointed by Boekaerts, Printich and Zeidner (2000) will be essential to continue Life Long Learning and, constitutes, itself, a key competence.

We consider that a good evaluative activity has to be performed and based on objectives, content, methodology; should be diverse (because it collects information about different contents and uses different instruments); should group a variety of people (including self evaluative and equal evaluation activities) and should highlight the importance of auto-regulative procedures.

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