BENGALURU: The National Accreditation and Assessment Council (NAAC) on Saturday decided to bring in major reforms in its accreditation to higher educational institutions (HEIs) like colleges, universities and recognised academic institutions.
The council has decided to give ‘binary accreditation’ to institutions, which means they will either be accredited or not accredited; and those accredited, will be given levels from 1 to 5 for excellence in research and education.The binary accreditation will replace the process of giving grades to encourage all the institutions to get on board in the accreditation process.
The other reform — to introduce levels — set to take place is the Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation (Levels 1 to 5).’ From Level 1 to Level 4, the HEIs will be marked as “National Excellence”, and for Level 5, they will be given the tag of “Global Excellence” for multi-disciplinary research and education based on different parameters.
“The levelled accreditation shall enable Indian institutions to significantly improve their quality and position themselves among global top institutions,” said the executive committee of NAAC, which conducts assessment and accreditation of HEIs to derive an understanding of the quality status of the institutions.
The metrics for both binary and maturity-based graded accreditation will focus on processes, outcomes and impact across different attributes of HEIs. The new process will also consider the heterogeneity of HEIs and categorize them based on their vision and legacy. Based on these, the institutions will be allocated categories rather than a one-size-fits-all model, said the release.
“One Nation One Data Platform” will also be implemented to ensure integrity and transparency in handling institutional data. The system will improve the validity and reliability of the data through stakeholder validation for the ranking process. Though the technology-driven modern system will require minimal visits to institutions for verification, heavy penalties will be charged for wrong submissions, the release said.
The final report, incorporating several feedback received from stakeholders, was accepted by the Ministry of Education on January 16. NAAC will implement the report titled “Transformative Reforms for Strengthening Periodic Assessment and Accreditation of All HEIs in India’ in two stages. In the first stage, the binary accreditation will be implemented in the next four months and no new applications will be accepted as per the present methodology.
“Institutions that have already applied and are applying in the next four months shall have the option to either go by the present process or by the new methodology of binary accreditation. The maturity-based graded levels will be implemented by December 2024,” said the release.
The reforms are said to be in line with suggestions by the overarching committee headed by K Radhakrishnan, former chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and chairperson, standing committee of Indian Institutes of Technology ( IIT) Council, constituted in November 2022.