The challenge of developing and implementing a democratic process of institutional evaluation at UNESP (São Paulo State University), a multi-campus university, was threefold: to guarantee the involvement of representative reference groups in the process of evaluation; to empower and assign responsibility in the evaluative process to each academic and administrative sector and; to create a culture of self-evaluation and reflection which would enable critical and informed debates and self-management of academic projects. Based on references and objectives established by the community, a self-regulative and quali-quantitative oriented democratic and investigative evaluation methodology was developed. Based on three theoretical evaluation approaches: decision making, democratic and critical, the process involved three roles: diagnostic, formative reflexive and critical revision. To this moment, the use of the evaluation results to enlighten policies and academic decisions, especially in undergraduate programs, shows improvement in the process of internalizing a democratic and self-regulative culture of evaluation.
formative institutional evaluation; democratic evaluation; autonomy; self-regulative culture; evaluation studies group