Major reforms in NAAC accreditation

The reforms have been recommended by the Ministry of Education Committee headed by Dr. K Radhakrishnan, Former Chairman ISRO and Chairperson, Standing Committee IIT Council

Hyderabad: Doing away with its present system, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) undertook major reforms in the accreditation process introducing Binary Accreditation and Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation for the Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) in the country.

As for the binary accreditation, the Council will be declaring whether the HEI is accredited or unaccredited without awarding a score and grade as is being done now. As part of the Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation, the HEIs will be categorized under leveled accreditation from Level 1 to 5.

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This, according to NAAC, is to encourage accredited institutions to raise their bar from ‘Level 1’ to ‘Level 4’ as Institutions of National Excellence, and then to ‘Level-5’ i.e.

Institutions of Global Excellence for Multi-Disciplinary Research and Education.

These reforms have been recommended by the Ministry of Education Committee headed by Dr. K Radhakrishnan, Former Chairman ISRO and Chairperson, Standing Committee IIT Council.

The metrics for both the Binary and Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation will focus on processes, outcomes and impact across different attributes of HEIs instead of mere input-centric.

Further, the One Nation One Data Platform has been proposed as part of the reform to ensure integrity and transparency in handling institutional data.

The reforms will be implemented in two stages with Binary accreditation coming into force in the next four months and no new applications will be accepted as per the present methodology thereafter.

Institutions that have already applied and are applying in the next four months will have the option to either go by the present process or by the new methodology of binary accreditation. The Maturity-based Graded levels will be implemented by December 2024.