NAAC: What about accreditation of accreditors?

The NAAC is in the news these days for reasons that must make the agency and the academic community shudder.

As the NAAC contemplated acting on the Radhakrishnan Committee’s report on reforming accreditation, it found itself embroiled in a graft scam. The chancellor of a university and a few officials were arrested for allegedly bribing the experts for higher grades than the institution deserved. Some of the concerned peer-team members were also booked for allegedly skimming favours in cash and kind.

The NAAC has acted speedily and taken more than 800 experts off its panel. How did it identify them so fast? Why did it wait for the taint to become public if the suspects were already known?

The NAAC would now be under pressure to effect select recommendations of the Radhakrishnan Committee. Accreditation will now be a two-step process: A mandatory binary accreditation followed by a voluntary maturity-based grading. The assessment parameters might be drastically diluted to make a much larger number of institutions qualify for accreditation. Peer assessment will likely go digital, eliminating the need for physical visits.

These measures may not necessarily help the NAAC fulfil its primary obligation of promoting quality and enhancing excellence in higher education so long as autonomy and empowerment continue to elude the agency.

The agency's foremost failing was the refusal of premier higher educational institutions, the Institutions of National Importance (INIs), to get themselves accredited by it for quality assurance. Even today, the IIMs, IITs, and similar institutions remain unaccredited.

Even if they did not intend to challenge the agency's competence and credibility, their decision and its acceptance by the NAAC, as well as the University Grants Commission and the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development – now the Union Ministry of Education – signaled just that. The global higher education fraternity often quipped: How come the only national accrediting agency does not accredit the best higher education institutions in India?

While the best institutions boycotted institutional accreditation by the NAAC, it must be credited for its magnanimity in involving its faculty members in the peer teams for assessment and accreditation of colleges and universities. Presently, the president of

the General Council, the chairman of the Executive Council, and the Director of NAAC all have an INI background. This, however, has yet to help the agency build its reputation.

The second undoing of the NAAC was its decision to not only accredit but also grade institutions. For most accreditation agencies across the globe, the process is a binary one. They set a specific quality benchmark regarding input, process, and output parameters, and those institutions that cross the threshold level are declared accredited. Those who cannot are hand-held and advised to improve their quality to meet the prescribed requirements.

The NAAC faced much flak on this. Their grading pattern was challenged and had to be revised several times since its inception in 1994. Grading is a different ball game and requires a nuanced approach and methodology to gain acceptability. Repeated modifications in the parameters, scoring, and weight assignment made the process confusing and cumbersome.

Its biggest folly was to succumb to the suggestion that it should deviate from the global practice of accrediting institutions based on their self-assessment verified by an independent peer-team review comprising competent faculty members known for their high moral character and impeccable integrity.

It became a game for what became known in common higher education parlance as the DVV (Data Verification and Validation). Carrying a weightage of 70%, the task was outsourced to external agencies with limited knowledge or understanding of the higher education system. The weightage of the peer team assessment was reduced to a mere 30%.

Agencies and people alien to the higher education system were, thus, given preference over faculty members. This sent a loud and clear message that teachers cannot be trusted to be objective and unbiased. Most self-respecting quality teachers quit quietly and withdrew from the accreditation process.

Finally, the propensity to data fudging, manipulation and malpractices has increased since the ideas of graded autonomy and performance-based funding were linked to accreditation grades and ranking. Accreditation works best when it is driven by a sincere desire to improve quality, but for that, even the most robust systems could become susceptible to scams and scandals.

Above all, the biggest undoing of the agency was its reluctance to address a key question: What about accreditation of accreditors?

(The writer, a former professor of management and advisor for education in the Planning Commission, is presently chief advisor to the chancellor at Integral University, Lucknow.)