Assessing quality of educational services at Zahedan university of medical sciences

Background: According to modern approaches to management, quality is described as
consumer’s requests. Thus, recognizing consumers’ perceptions of service quality is one of the first
basic steps in formulating any quality improvement program. The objective of this study is
assessing the consumers' perceptions of quality in Educational Services at Zahedan University of
Medical Sciences.
Methods and Materials: A sample of 386 students in five medical schools participated in this cross
sectional descriptive study which was done in 1383 .For this study stratified systematic random
sampling was applied. A questionnaire based on the SERVQUAL instrument, which proved to be
valid and reliable, was used for data collection. Five dimensions of educational services quality
were assessed by this questionnaire. For statistic analysis, descriptive statistic and Friedman and
Wilcoxon tests were applied.
Results: The findings indicated that only 17.6% respondents perceived quality of service good,
34.2% bad, and 48.2% moderate. The respondents’ choices clearly showed that the reliability
dimension of service quality was better and responsiveness dimension was worse. There was a
significant difference in quality between five dimensions.
Conclusions: Respondents’ perceptions of service quality in each statement of five dimensions
indicated that there were opportunities for quality improvement. In these faculties, thus, in order to
improve quality of educational services, considering what stated above, it is necessary to initiate
strategies and implement those strategies, since there is significant differences of quality in the five
dimension, when allocating resources, these differences must be taken into consideration.