This paper discusses the graduate educational policy in the area of education, considering it, based on E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, to be incessant politization imbued with undecidability. Analyzing recent texts produced in the process of evaluating programs in the sphere of CAPES, it considers it possible to understand the provisional formation of consensuses around notions like quality of graduate courses seen as an empty signifier filled by hegemonic articulations. The authors, after a brief summary of the system based on the results of the 2004-2006 three-year evaluation, analyze two aspects that they feel are crucial for filling in the notion of quality: the articulation of the programs around the research lines and the production/ dissemination of knowledge. As for the articulation, they maintain that the lines can be seen as an expression of the way in which the programs are thinking the actual field of education, in an exercise that has involved interdisciplinarity and flexibility. As for the production/dissemination of knowledge, they disagree with the current theory that the evaluation of graduate courses has led the area to an unrestrained productivism, seeing it as restorative nostalgia.
graduate educational policy; evaluation; educational policy
