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NAAC New Methodology Aimed at grading institutions’ internal quality Accreditation The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) will be launching a new methodology for assessing and grading educational institutions on April 1, 2012. NAAC Director Prof HA Ranganath announced this at the fourth NAAC Accreditation Awards ceremony held recently in Bengaluru. “NAAC’s new methodology has come after a gap of five years. Accreditation has become an important aspect in the growth of higher education in India. We, at NAAC have worked hard to improve the quality of education,” said Prof Ranganath. Elucidating the new methodology, Prof Goverdhan Mehta, Chairperson, Executive Committee of NAAC, said that the guiding principle is to pay attention to the feedback that NAAC r e c e i v e d i n t h e l a s t fi v e y e a r s . “NAAC has visited close to 2,000 institu-
tions in the last five years. The process of framing the new methodology began six months ago with a core group and an external expert group.” NAAC wants to identify intangible qualities in institutions and the new parameters have been set keeping this objective in mind. “The number of books in a library, students, faculty—these are measurQuality-bound: NAAC’s new methodology comes able. Now, we will look at after five years, says its Director, Prof HA Ranganath whether the programmes a commitment towards quality,” he said. are gender neutral and how environ“The main thrust will be on research. We mentally-friendly the campuses are,” he want to emphasise the importance of explained. “The new methodology is research and innovation in institutions. meant to inculcate internal quality. We While in colleges, we want a broader do not want institutions to impress us educational experience for students.” during our visits. We want them to make
Harvard is World’s No. 1 University in 2012 too Rankings Asian universities challenge US-UK domination of rankings; Harvard is No. 1 again; while UK’s leading universities have dropped several places since 2011. All the leading Asian universities have gained higher rankings than in 2011. China’s universities too show an improvement. Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge held on to the second and third place in the list. Stanford University leapfrogged the University of California, Berkeley and is at the fourth position while the latter dropped to the fifth. Oxford University has secured the sixth slot again. In its second year, the Times ranking gauged the world’s universities on academic reputation only, based on about 17,554 responses spanning 149 countries. Most of those surveyed were academics themselves. They were asked to rank the quality of teaching and the global impact of research. The list threw up a widening gap between the top six “global super elite” and all the others.
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17,554
Number of responses that determined the rankings
149
Number of countries that the World Reputation Ranking survey spanned
April 2012 EduTech
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