Research has found some don't even see their role as being to assure standards, and when they do, they come to very different judgments.
Following my lecture, the Commons' select committee on universities summoned the chief executive of the Quality Assurance Agency, Peter Williams, and his management team, and quizzed them about multiple failures in the mechanisms allegedly in place to assure standards in our universities.
These include the communication of probiotic use to appropriate stakeholders, ensuring that routine laboratories can identify and test the susceptibility of probiotic strains, assuring standards for preparation and administration, and ensuring surveillance designed to capture adverse events.
They found important differences in terms of what it means to be a teacher, attitudes to collaborative study, use of textbooks and libraries, access to research and methods of assuring standards, all of which impact on students' understandings of what it means to be a good student in these various systems.
Designed to assure standards of 'quality' care they contribute to bureaucratisation of care and may marginalise aspects of quality care which lie beyond their focus.
Much more needs to be done to assure a standard of ballot safety that does not vary depending on where you live.
In fact, we go out of our way to assure the standard bearers of radicalism that we'll never overlook their defense needs.
Participants stretched their hand with splayed fingers across a transparent glass surface, which was provided to assure the standard hand position.
Future engagement levels will be dependent on how seriously decision-makers wish to 'add value' to the appraisal process or, for example, in quality assuring the standard of significant event analyses undertaken as part of the general medical services contract with health authorities (which contains a financial inducement for this element).
The average number of people per latrine, where there are latrines is 411, with a total of 4,275 latrines are needed to assure minimum standards and 10,687 to assure Sphere standards.
