NAAC To Introduce Major Accreditation Reforms In Higher Education Institutes (Image: iimtindia)The Executive Committee of NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council) in its 104th meeting informed the implementation of Dr. K. Radhakrishnan Committee’s recommendations. The committee headed by Former Chairman of ISRO proposed transformative reforms to strengthen Assessment and Accreditation of higher education institutions in India.
After the public consultation on preliminary report, the final report has been accepted by the Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan. It set to transform the process of periodic approval, assessment & accreditation and ranking of ‘All HEIs’ of India in accordance with the vision of National Education Policy (NEP 2020).
The reforms involve a Binary Accreditation and Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation system to access the performance and for accreditation of educational institutions. Under the Binary Accreditation Institutions will be put in two categories, either accredited or not accredited. It does away with the grading system earlier to categories institutions and adopts the best practice followed from many leading countries in the world.
The Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation system institutions are expected to continuously improve from ‘Level 1’ to ‘Level 4’ as Institutions of National Excellence, and then to ‘Level 5’, Institutions of Global Excellence for Multi-Disciplinary Research and Education. Instead of only being input-centric, the metrics for both Binary and Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation must concentrate on Processes, Outcomes, and Impact across many HEI qualities.
A proposal for a One Nation One Data Platform has been made as part of the reform to guarantee the transparency and integrity of institutional data handling. The new platform will collect a subset of data from HEIs for a variety of uses (accreditation, rating, approval), and it will have built-in cross-checking capabilities for collateral to ensure data validity. Furthermore, the proposal of “Stakeholder validation” aims to enhance the validity and trustworthiness of the data by incorporating stakeholders into the certification and ranking process.
There will be two phases to the implementation of the suggested reforms. First, the Binary accreditation will be put into effect over the course of the next four months, after which no more applications will be accepted using the current process. By December 2024, the maturity-based graded levels will be in place. Institutions who have applied already or plan to apply within the next four months will be able to choose between using the current approach and the new binary accreditation system.
These reforms involve trust-based, credible, objective and rationalized system for approval, accreditation and ranking of HEIs, with a technology-driven modern system that could replace or minimize manual involvement to make the accreditation process to be transparent and integrate the inputs of the stakeholders.