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Mahesh

06/02/25 09:36 AM IST

NAAC bribery case

In News
  • The CBI recently arrested ten people, including members and chairperson of a National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) inspection team and office-bearers of Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation (KLEF), a deemed-to-be university in Andhra Pradesh, in a case of bribery for a favourable NAAC rating.
NAAC grading process
  • NAAC is a body set up in 1994 under the University Grants Commission (UGC) — the UGC chief heads its governing council — with the purpose of evaluating the performance of higher education institutions, and providing accreditation.
  • NAAC grades are widely regarded as a marker of quality, with institutions prominently displaying them.
  • According to UGC regulations, this is meant to “enable students and other stakeholders to make informed choices”.
  • UGC regulations of 2012 made it mandatory for higher education institutions to get accredited after six years of functioning, or after two batches have graduated.
  • This means that for funds from the UGC, a higher education institution needs to be accredited.
  • These grades also specifically matter in certain scenarios — for instance, to apply for autonomy, a college needs to be accredited with a minimum NAAC grade of ‘A’.
  • Institutions are assessed on parameters including infrastructure, teaching and evaluation, governance, and research.
  • The process of assessment involves the institute itself submitting a ‘self-study’ report, a ‘student satisfaction survey’ conducted by NAAC, and a ‘peer team visit’.
  • To constitute these peer teams, NAAC invites registrations from professors across different domains of expertise.
  • NAAC officials said that from this database of experts from across the country, a computerised system selects members, depending on their expertise, who will form the team that will visit, and inspect the institution and submit its report.
  • The system is meant to function in such a way that teams do not comprise members who are from the State where the institution is located
NAAC Accreditation process
  • It ends with a NAAC grade and accreditation — certification of quality provided by NAAC for a period of five years or seven years in the case of institutions that have had an ‘A’ grade or higher in previous cycles, after which they need to apply again.
  • KLEF first secured a grade A in 2013, and an A++ in 2018. It applied again in February 2024, and was scheduled for a peer team visit in January this year.
  • Based on the parameters they are assessed on, the institution is given a cumulative grade point average (CGPA) corresponding to grades – an eight-point grading system ranging from the highest A++ to the lowest D. Anything from A++ to C means that the institute is accredited, while a D means it is not.
  • KLEF was allegedly seeking an A++ grade, according to the CBI FIR.
Changes as per NEP 2020
  • The National Education Policy 2020 envisions that “in the long run, accreditation will become a binary process, as per the extant global practice”.
  • A committee headed by former ISRO chief K Radhakrishnan was constituted by the Ministry of Education in November 2022, to recommend measures to strengthen the accreditation system.
  • It suggested that the present eight-point grading system transition into a binary accreditation system — the institution will be identified as ‘accredited’, ‘awaiting accreditation’, or ‘not accredited.’
  • It also suggests that accredited institutions be “encouraged” to “raise their bar…from ‘Level 1’ to ‘Level 4’ Institutions of National Excellence, and then to ‘Level-5’ i.e. Institutions of Global Excellence for Multi-Disciplinary Research and Education.”
  • In 2024, NAAC announced reforms in the accreditation process in line with the committee’s recommendations — binary accreditation instead of grades, along with a “maturity-based graded accreditation” (levels 1 to 5) for accredited institutions “to improve their quality”.
  • Institutions can evolve from Levels 1 to 4 as “institutions of national excellence”, and progress to Level 5 as “Institutions of Global Excellence for Multi-Disciplinary Research and Education”.
  • The binary system is expected to do away with the push among institutions to get an A+ and advertise it.
  • To minimise dependence on physical visits by the expert team, the committee had suggested “stakeholder-crowdsourcing…as a methodology for validation of data submitted by the institute” — feedback of stakeholders and crowdsourcing as a way of collecting data with participation of faculty, students, alumni, parents, and peer groups.
Source- Indian Express

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