This week the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) drew a lot of flak for irregularities in the accreditation mechanism. While director of NAAC’s draft compliance response with regards to the accreditation grant is still being reviewed by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), the latter has proposed some modifications which are currently being integrated as a revised draft is being prepared, according to an official communique.
According to the accreditation agency, the selection of assessors as peer team members for qualitative assessment are based on four criteria namely types of HEIs to be accredited, types of programs and courses offered under each program by HEIs; the constitution of peer team panel generated by the coordinators in the system ensuring the relevance of specialisation of experts vis-à-vis HEIs and fourth – – acceptance of the invitation by the peer team experts. The NAAC claimed that it ensures that the peer team experts are not from the same state of HEIs. The NAAC further said to follow a due protocol for designating different portfolios of the peer team, that is, chairperson, member coordinator and members. The experts have to give in writing a declaration on code of conduct, ethical standards and no conflict of interest statement before proceeding on peer team visit.
As per NAAC the total active assessors in the database is 4,686, of which 3,075 assessors have accepted the peer team visit invitations, which is roughly around 67% of the database. The remaining 33% of not-utilised assessors fall under the categories of profile not completed, unavailable and dropout due to various reasons.
It is suggested that the affiliated college manual concerns the college’s compliance with the academic calendar, including the implementation of Continuous Internal Evaluation (CIE), which is a qualitative measure. During on-site visits, peer team members assessed this metric and assigned scores based on their collective expertise and the documentation provided by the Higher Education Institution (HEI), is subject to interpretation, it has been said.
Furthermore, NAAC claims to have implemented sufficient measures to involve all parties involved in higher education in the process of enhancing quality and collaborating in the goal and purpose of ‘Ensuring Quality through Quality Assessment’ in a responsible, transparent, and ethical manner. For almost three decades, NAAC has been the quality assurance agency that has been addressing the quality concerns.