NAAC to usher in new changes in evaluation of edu entities

The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) is coming up with new changes in entire process of evaluation of educational entities including capturing online the majority of data of varsities and colleges.
NAAC executive Council Chairman V S Chauhan today said the aim of the exercise is to reduce the "subjectivity" and "human interference" in the assessment process of universities, colleges and institutions.
"We have stopped accepting the applications of the varsities and colleges as on March 31 and the reason is that we are coming out with new changes in the entire process of evaluation of educational entities," Chuahan said.

He said the new system, which is mainly dependable on technology, will be operational from July this year and will be "dramatically different" from earlier system, wherein a physical committee used to go to the institute and questions and allegations used to be raised.
He was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the international conference on 'The Changing Landscape of Internationalisation of Higher Education', organised by the Symbiosis International University here.
"Since technology is available, we will capture a lot of data from the institutes online and with the use of technology, the chances of policing and subjectivity of humans will be minimum," Chauhan said.

He said that all they want is that colleges and universities should be "faithful and truthful while putting up the data digitally."

"Even if the major data of the education institute is captured online, a team of assessors will visit the institutions, however, the size of the team has been reduced and the number of visits of the team too have been shortened in the new changes," the executive council chairman said.
A meeting of all officials of NAAC will be held on this issue soon, where he will make it clear that the NAAC's role is not of doing investigation or policing but just to observe and get the feel of the institution.

"We have created an intelligent software to capture the data online and the system is tampered-free and cannot be accessed from outside. We are also working on the qualification of assessors," he said.
Chauhan said if any college or institution found to be giving wrong information, there are proposals of stringent punishment to such institutions.
"Penalty should be strong enough to deter such institutions from lying," he said.
Chuahan said, "We have had a lot of consultation with clients and we believe that the clientele, which is higher education institutions, will be very comfortable with changes because, subjectivity will be removed and hacking and monitoring or bending of the system from outside will be difficult."

He said that this is the first time that such major changes are taking place in the whole system of evaluation of educational institutions and that is the reason the NAAC is taking three more months to make sure to run the tests successfully.