Students satisfaction will have a greater say in accreditation for education institutions with the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) revising its accreditation framework.
As per the revised guidelines, NAAC will take direct feedback from students on the information submitted by educational institutions seeking accreditation. This change which is on the lines of foreign education institutions is more feedback driven and outcome based.
At a recent event in Delhi University, HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar had also stressed upon the importance of taking student feedback and said that the government is making it mandatory.
"The revised accreditation framework which became operational in July this year, is ICT enabled, objective, transparent, scalable and robust. The new framework is a subtle combination of System Generated Scores (SGS) with a combination of online evaluation (70 per cent) and Peer evaluation (30 per cent) which would usher in high level of transparency," read a statement from NAAC.
Under the new evaluation process, the institutions will prepare a self-study report (SSR) and upload it online for response and feedback from students. "The report which is submitted by students will be validated with the help of a student satisfaction survey by NAAC," said a senior official at the Council.
This reform was introduced after the ministry of human resource development asked the council to carry out a complete overhaul of the accreditation process. "Questions were being raised on the accreditation process being riddled with corruption as it was being done by physical inspections. By taking the feedback online, the process will be completely transparent and hence any chance of corruption affecting the process would be ruled out," the official added.
NAAC is an autonomous body established by the University Grants Commission in 1994. It undertakes periodic assessment and accreditation of institutions of higher education and its units across the country.
The council came up with revised framework after several rounds of interactions with stakeholders and workshops at the national level. The draft framework was pilot tested on select Higher Education Institutions across the country, before being finalised.
