Students’ Opinion to be considered in NAAC Accreditation of Universities & Colleges

Taking the example of educational institutes abroad, NAAC Accreditation will now take into account the opinion of students’ regarding the university or college in question. NAAC has recently revised its education policy and will now be taking direct students’ feedback while accrediting institutes.

After being halted in March 2017, the revised NAAC evaluation process was resumed on July 5, 2017. Under the new norms, the council will be uploading a self-study report (SSR) for students to give their feedback.

According to a senior member of the council, student satisfaction will be taken into account through the feedback forms during the authentication of the report. The new norms have also digitised a huge part of the accreditation system and the aim of the council is to make it more computer adaptable and less human-driven.

PK Sahoo, Senior Professor at Allahabad University and a member of NAAC peer teams said that the aim of the Council is to raise the standards of accreditation up to the global standards in order to make the process more transparent, eliminate false and fraudulent data provided by colleges and universities regarding manpower, facilities and infrastructure.

He also added that the new norms should have been tested before implementing them directly on the educational institutes in the country. Involving the students in the feedback process is a good idea but only the feedback of the regular students must be considered, added Sahoo.

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Earlier this year, the HRD Ministry had directed NAAC to revamp its accreditation process in order to eliminate the corruption and subjectivity in the grading process of higher educational institutes.

The new methodology introduced by NAAC is more objective in nature and gives 20% weightage to the assessment done by peer team as compared to the 100% weightage that was earlier given to the peer team assessment.

In the new system, 20% weightage will be given to online student satisfaction survey (SSS) from 2017 onwards. Institutes being accredited by NAAC will have to provide the email IDs of students for the online survey.

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Institutions will also be responsible for preparing the self-study report and uploading it online. Validation of this report will be done with the help of the feedback given by students regarding this report. The details of the revised norms have been uploaded on the official website of NAAC along with the flowchart.