NAAC suspends application process for grading of institutions

The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has suspended the processing of applications for grading of higher educational institutions and will conduct the exercise under a revised framework.

The grading process is expected to resume from July.

The council will start giving final shape to the new methodology and criteria for grading after a national consultative on April 25. Over 200 educationists and experts are expected to attend the meeting, which will be chaired by Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar.

The draft of the revised accreditation framework proposes the assessment of quality and standards of higher educational institutions under three distinct categories — universities, autonomous colleges and constituent colleges.

The criteria proposed for grading seek to assess the institutions on various parameters, including physical infrastructure and facilities available to students; curriculum planning, implementation and their periodic revision; teaching-learning methods, their outcomes and evaluation of students’ performance.

Human values
A special emphasis has been given to the assessment of the institutions’ efforts towards promotion of human values and professional ethics among their students, faculties and other staff.

According to the draft, institutions will get points for making code of conduct handbooks available to each of their students, teachers and support staff; display of core values on the campus and on their respective websites; and for the number of activities conducted for promotion of national integration and communal harmony.

Gender equity would be another area of focus for the assessment of the institutions, with the NAAC proposing to give them points based on the percentage of women appointed in teaching positions, percentage of women appointed in non-teaching positions and the number of gender sensitisation programmes organised by the institutions in five years.

Whether an institution shows gender sensitivity or not will be assessed from the status of facilities made available to the women students, teachers and other staff, such as social securities, counselling and common room.

The draft of the revised accreditation framework lays greater emphasis on determining the institutions’ output in research and innovations, industry linkage and faculty development programmes.

Learning outcome of the students and their employability after the completion of their programmes will be equally important areas for assessing quality and standards of an institution.

Under the revised framework, the NAAC will no longer depend on its teams to make on-site assessment of the institutions.

The peer team’s assessment will be given just 20% weightage in the grading of an institution, while the remaining 80% weightage will be given to the assessment made through analysis of the data that will be collected online.