Institutes that complete one year to get NAAC provisional accreditation: Report

NEW DELHI: The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has released new guidelines allowing colleges and universities that completed just one academic year to apply for provisional accreditation, reported the Indian Express.

Earlier, only those higher education institutions with two batches of graduated students, or which has completed six years of existence were eligible to apply for NAAC’s assessment and accreditation.

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According to the latest guidelines of NAAC, in order to get provisional accreditation for colleges (PAC), the institutes will have to be examined based on a qualitative and quantitative framework that includes factors such as student-teacher ratio, pass percentage of students, learning assessment criteria, use of technology in teaching, among others.

Through the new guidelines, NAAC aim to offer accreditation to more number of colleges as only a few colleges and universities in India has NAAC grading. The institutions that apply for the provisional accreditation will receive feedback that will cite the required improvements for achieving better quality, says the manual as per the IE report. It also says that the provisional accreditation will be valid for two years, which the institutions will not get more than two times.

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The NAAC is an autonomous body that is vested with the responsibility of assessing and accrediting higher educational institutions in India. According to the NAAC website, it evaluates colleges, universities and other education institutes based on its adherence to standards of quality such as “educational processes and outcomes, curriculum coverage, teaching-learning processes, faculty, research, infrastructure, learning resources, organisation, governance, financial well being and student services.”