IntroductionReduction of variation, continuous improvement of products and services to meet customers' needs, costs of quality or costs of poor quality, breakthrough projects, zero defects, cross functional management, systematic approach to quality, and strategic focus to quality with respect to customer satisfaction, competitiveness, profitability, quality planning, and organization-wide commitment are the major concepts that are introduced by the quality gurus like Deming, Juran, Crosby, Feigenbaum, Ishikawa and Garvin. The advancement of these concepts over a period of time covering the latter part of the twentieth century paved the way for the evolutionary development of quality management, namely, from inspection, to statistical quality control, to quality assurance, to total quality control and finally to total or strategic quality management.Successful implementation of strategic quality management is not an easy task. As Deming stated, "Everyone doing his best is not the answer. It is necessary that people know what to do. Drastic changes are required. The responsibility for changes rests on management"[1]. Thus, Deming put the responsibility for continuous improvement of products and services to meet customer needs and to stay ahead of competition squarely on management. In fact, the major emphasis of Deming's philosophy on quality management is that top management must orient themselves to innovate and commit resources constantly to support innovation and continuous improvement [2]. Building

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Abstract. Constructing an evaluation index system of practical teaching quality (PTQ) is regarded as one of the keys in the evaluation of practical teaching quality (PTQ) in civil engineering major and the realization of the cultivation objective of this major. Based on the characteristics of higher vocational education (HVE), this research presents the basic principle of establishing an index system of assessing PTQ in HVE and proposes an evaluation index system and evaluation criterion which are proven to be more scientific and reasonable. The system is expected to be applied in a certain extent.

The authors would like to express their thanks to Termbray Industries, Hong Kong for allowing them to use its experiences of ISO 9002 registration process in developing this paper. They would also like to thank Dr Richard Whitfield of Manufacturing Engineering Department, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong for his helpful comments. This paper is developed based on the M.Sc. Engineering Manufacturing dissertation of Mr C.L. Tang, which was submitted to the manufacturing Engineering Department, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong.

Based on the professional ability of civil engineering majors, this research investigates the issues concerning the construction of systems for evaluating practical teaching quality by performing exploratory factor analysis. This study is conducted based on the principles of being scientific, systematic, feasible, and diverse. Besides, the authors construct an index system for evaluating the practical teaching quality, which has been proven to be applicable to higher vocational colleges (HVCs). The system involves the assessments of the background, input, process, and achievements of practical teaching. It aims to provide a basis for the supervision of the practical teaching quality in HVCs.