The principle of ensuring a standard of quality for graduate education in Brazil by CAPES is implemented by annual follow-ups and triennial assessments of master’s and doctoral programs whose results are summarized on a Program Evaluation Sheet, in which those items that have jeopardized program quality can be identified. In order to establish priorities for quality improvement, we present a methodology based on Pareto analysis to determine the critical items that will leverage the best positioning of the Program or Course in the next evaluation. The method is exemplified with a real case and indicates the evaluation items for which solution efforts should be most intense. The method is sufficiently robust to insure that the solutions addressed do not fall into areas that are less relevant.