In its continuing efforts to strengthen quality assurance in higher education, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) will put in place a plagiarism detection mechanism to check increasing instances of self study reports (SSR) being plagiarised.
The decision comes at a time when NAAC expert teams found higher education institutions indulging in plagiarisation of the SSRs, which briefly prefaces the purpose of seeking accreditation, the institution’s academic strengths, credits and other details.
The SSR is a preliminary document that is required to be submitted to NAAC, on the receipt of which a NAAC expert team visits the institution. The quality assurance body has issued a warning note on its website. “The executive committee of NAAC has resolved that any institution indulging in unfair practices in the preparation of SSRs will be debarred from applying for accreditation,” NAAC has warned.
“Of the four recent cases of plagiarism of SSRs, we have suspended two and are enquiring the remaining. For now, we rely on manual comparison of SSRs to detect plagiarism. A plagiarism detection software will supplement our manual efforts. The process of calling tenders for the software will begin soon,” NAAC Director Prof H A Ranganath said.
“There have been no reported instances of SSR plagiarism from any higher education institution in Karnataka,” he said.
Under the new assessment and accreditation methodology effective from April last year, NAAC has asked colleges to upload the SSRs on its website to ensure transparency.