When No One Is Watching

During an accreditation field assessment for a Master of Information Technology programme in Tangerang, I recalled a senior assessor’s profound observation: ‘If you want to see the quality culture of a campus, look at its toilets.’ This simple statement highlights that true quality is reflected in the unpolished, everyday spaces, not just the prepared ones. Accreditation, with its rigorous verification of documents, data, and practices, is fundamentally built on the assumption that claims must be proven. This stands in stark contrast to daily life in the Netherlands, where supermarket self-checkouts and Belgian trams operate on a system of trust, assuming customers will pay correctly without constant surveillance. This trust is not instant but built through long-term societal consistency. The same principle applies to academia, where the relationship between student and supervisor should ideally be based on trust that research is conducted honestly. In the era of artificial intelligence, this dimension becomes more complex; the system trusts that students use AI responsibly and can genuinely account for the work as their own. Ultimately, the best accreditation is not the one with the strictest oversight, but the one that successfully fosters an internal culture of quality, as supervision can compel compliance, but only trust can breed integrity.