This paper focuses on the analysis of conceptions from Higher Education professors about the first 15 years of performance of SINAES in regard to the reliability of the model and its ability to certificate to the educational quality. The research has an exploratory purpose, by adopting a quantitative and qualitative nature, from answers of 280 Higher Education professors, managers and educational researchers, distributed in all regions of Brazil. Through the ATLAS.ti tool, a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the participants' profile and their interpretations were performed. It was possible to notice significant divergences between the original proposal of SINAES and its current instrumentalization, as well as a greater direction for the regulatory context and the existence of corrupting pressures that can weaken the reliability of the perception of quality measured by the model.