The article tries to render policies, concept and practices problematic, as well as evaluation of high education that have been introduced in Brazil, especially from 1990 decades on. The different modalities and evaluation mechanisms mean significant changes in academic culture, in teaching, in institutions administration, in curricular definitions, and mainly in the structure of high education. The study has evaluated the policy and ethical meaning that support theorical-conceptual guidelines of evaluation that has been introduced in the country. It presumes that the appraised estimate proposal, in real qualitative outlook should make clear the answer to the nuclear question: "What is evaluation good for?" In this sense, it is argued that evaluation should perform the proposal for contributing to conceive well-turned judgement and to make decisions that will fall upon improvement of development process of the IES, that is, to follow a methodological way to allow changes in its construction process and even in the systematic institutional evolution itself, considering the quality of academic work and IES administration.
evaluation; quality; institutional development