In a drastic reform, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has abolished the controversial grading system for India’s higher educational institutes.

The executive committee of NAAC in its Jan 27 meeting decided that the reforms will be implemented in two stages.  

“In the first stage, the binary accreditation will be implemented in the next four months, and no new applications will be accepted as per the present methodology thereafter,” the presser stated. 

“Institutions that have already applied and are applying in the next four months shall 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 Dec 2024,” it added.

As per the official release, ‘One Nation, One Data Platform’ has been proposed as part of the reform to ensure integrity and transparency in handling institutional data. The new platform shall capture a superset of data from higher educational institutions (HEIs) for varied purposes (approval, accreditation, ranking) with an in-built design for collateral cross-checking to check the authenticity of the data.

Currently, universities and colleges have been marked as per the 4 Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) systems, where the institutes have been accredited with different grades, including D, C, B, B+, B++, A, A+, and A++, in accordance with the CGPA.

But these grades have resulted in controversies among high- and low-graded institutes, and the high-graded institutes bag more admissions on the basis of their grades.

If not gradings then what?

To cover shortcomings of the grading system, the administration has recommended binary accreditation (either accredited or not accredited) rather than grades.

Alongside binary accreditation, NAAC has introduced maturity-based graded accreditation (Level 1 to 5) to encourage accredited institutions to raise their bar, continuously improve, and evolve in-depth or in-breadth in disciplines 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.

The levelled accreditation shall enable Indian institutions to significantly improve their quality and position themselves among the top global institutions.

What is NAAC accreditation?

The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) assesses and accredits higher educational institutions including colleges, universities, or other recognised institutions, to decide the ‘quality status’ of the institution.

NAAC evaluates standards of the institute on the basis of their educational processes and outcomes, curriculum coverage, teaching-learning processes, faculty, research, infrastructure, learning resources, organisation, governance, financial well-being, and student services.

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