Self-evaluation within the ACTEA accreditation process may be defined briefly as a process of critical, corrective self-inquiry resulting in a comprehensive analytical report. Several aspects of this description merit further comment.

1. Self-evaluation is a process, not merely a document. Normally self-evaluation will take at least the better part of a year and will involve members of your institution in extensive collection of data, critical analysis, the formation of collective opinion and decision, active adjustments, and often further review and assessment. Your report at the end of this experience, as its final step, will be entirely dependent for its own validity and usefulness upon the thoroughness and reliability of the process which has preceded it.
2. Self-evaluation is a self-inquiry, an investigation carried out in the first instance by the institution itself rather than by an external body. The role of visiting teams and review panels is not to direct your institution’s evaluation but rather to respond to it, to provide informed external judgment on the detailed self-study which your institution has itself already carried out. In ACTEA accreditation procedures the institution, by means of its self-evaluation, is accorded the primary role in the evaluative process.
3. Self-evaluation is comprehensive, not merely a measurement of the institution against externally-set requirements. Your self-evaluation is meant to attend to all aspects of the institution and its programme, whether or not these are referenced in ACTEA’s standards, in order to achieve a comprehensive picture. In this respect the standards offer a guide and framework for your inquiry, but by no means its delimitations. The boundaries of the inquiry are to be the boundaries of the subject of inquiry, namely your institution itself and the totality of its programmes.
4. Self-evaluation is an analytical and evaluative process, not merely a descriptive undertaking. The process and the final report must both indeed evidence a sound perception 4 Revised 2011 of things as they are. But the whole significance of the undertaking is that you must couple this perception of things as they are with a deliberate, searching analysis and valuation of things as they ought to be.
5. Self-evaluation is a corrective process, not merely a reflective effort. As your inquiry gets underway, it will become apparent that various adjustments and improvements are called for to bring your institution and its programmes up to the standards of its own expectations, as well as up to those standards expected by ACTEA. Within the ACTEA accreditation procedures, you are to plan and implement such improvements as an integral feature of the evaluative process.
6. Self-evaluation is a critical process, not merely an exercise in self-justification. This deserves special comment. In so far as many theological institutions in Africa may exist in one respect or another in a state of continual precariousness (often as an unavoidable fact of life), a certain tendency can arise of putting the best face on weaknesses and deficiencies, of wariness about letting problems become exposed to view, of at times expressing as fact what is only plan or wish. All this is understandable; indeed some could be justified as appropriate public relations. But none of it belongs to the self-evaluation process. That process will become emptied of validity and of usefulness unless you deliberately pursue it with a willing spirit of total candour and honesty.