Bringing the premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) under the ambit of the unified accreditation process, moving to a binary accreditation system, making the exercise “outcome-centric”, setting up a new body for data validation and verification, use of crowdsourcing for verifying data, single-point data entry through use of APIs, penalty for wrong-submissions and mentoring of institutions falling below standards are some of the major recommendations made by the Overarching Committee set up by the Centre to suggest reforms in the assessment and accreditation system of higher education institutions (HEIs) in the country.
On May 9, News18 was the first to report some of the likely recommendations of the committee, including tweaks in software, data integrations through APIs, use of crowdsourcing and penalty for institutions submitting wrong data.
The committee, in its report released late on Friday evening, noted that only 30 per cent HEIs in the country, including affiliated colleges, are presently accredited. Noting that there was a long way to go, it emphasised on the need to simplify the process and synergise National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), National Board of Accreditation (NBA) and National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF).
The report comes after NAAC, an autonomous body that grades colleges and universities on set parameters, courted controversy over alleged “irregularities” in its functioning, prompting its executive committee head Bhushan Patwardhan, who had initially flagged issues with the accreditation procedure, to resign from his post on March 5 this year.
The committee set up last November is led by former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief K Radhakrishnan, who at present is the chairperson of the Board of Governors (BoG) at IIT-Kanpur and has officials and experts from various agencies and institutions, including University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), Indian Institute of Technology (IITs), National Institute of Technology (NITs), representatives from state governments and universities, educators and computers science engineers, among others.
The reforms are in line with the setting up of one single body for accreditation — National Accreditation Council (NAC) — which is underlined in the new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and will replace NAAC and NBA.
“These reforms have been proposed with a strategic intent of creating a credible, objective and rationalised system for approval, accreditation and ranking of HEIs, with a verifiable and secured centralised database; technology-driven modern systems that could replace/minimise manual involvements and; mentoring and incentivising schemes for raising their participation as well as accreditation levels, towards global acclaim,” the report said.
In a major change, for the first time, IITs — which currently follow their internal systems for periodic peer evaluation and assessment of programmes — have been recommended to be brought under the unified accreditation system for all HEIs.
“For bringing in all IITs under the ambit of the unified accreditation process and in-principle adoption of the National Credit Framework (NCrF), a presentation of the proposed reforms was made to the IITs Council in its 55th meeting held at IIT-Bhubaneswar on April 18, this year. Their acceptance in-principle was gained,” it said.
The report also recommends transitions from the present eight-point grading system of NAAC to an adapted Binary Accreditation System — a) ‘Accredited, (b) ‘Awaiting Accreditation’ (for those who are close to the threshold level); (c) ‘Not Accredited’ (for those who are far below the standards for accreditation).
It highlights mentoring of institutions falling ‘far below the standards for accreditation’ and simplifying the accreditation process, especially for the first cycle, and bringing down periodicity for re-accreditation to three years from the current six years.
The committee noted that multiple agencies such as AICTE, NAAC, NBA and NIRF asking institutions to submit data at different times in a year is the major cause of “inconsistencies” in data and suggests data integration to have one set of authentic data that can be used by all.
“There must be single point data entry by HEIs with provision for yearly updates, handling of collateral data and crowdsourcing for verification of input data and trust-enhancement measures (replacing the current manual verifications and minimising dependence on visit of personal teams), application programming interfaces (APIs) for pushing data from varied sources into the centralised database that is being developed under ‘One Nation One Data (ONOD)’ portal,” it said.
The ONOD platform provides a single-window access to the database of higher education institutes existing in the country with Open API integration to allow for sharing of only user consented and required information with entities.
The committee suggested developing a ‘Unified Elicitation Tool’ to collect the superset of data from HEIs with in-built design for collateral cross-checking for authenticity.
It also noted that the current Data Validation and Verification (DVV) exercise is connected with the third party and HEIs. “The role of NAAC is very limited and sometimes there is a lack of proper understanding of the data submitted by DVV partners,” it said.
It further said that at present, the composition of peer lacks balance, especially in the universities category. It is populated by members from public institutions with minimal private HEI representation.
“There is a need to address inherent biases, adequate access control and security features, ingestion of harmonised data (with due quality checks) into a single format (with the applicable essential variables), flexible and robust data management scheme and compatibility with the national digital framework,” it stated.
Transition to the new system of accreditation must be done by the respective agencies by December 31 this year, the report said.
Comments
0 comment