With quality of education being a cause of concern for the students and their parents at large, a majority of the private universities in the city do not have accreditation by National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC).
Getting accredited by NAAC ensures that the university or institute has met certain quality standards across its operations. Going through the NAAC accreditation process puts the university in a good stead and has numerous benefits for the students as well as the university since it consists of a thorough assessment of the university.
Obtaining the NAAC accreditation helps the university in understanding its own strengths and weaknesses through the review process. The NAAC committee review the institutes in various parameters and accordingly accord them with grades such as A++, A+, A, B++, B+, B , C and D .
The universities also get to know where they lack and the fields where they need to improve. Further, it also boosts the employment opportunity for students as the companies which come for placements often choose NAAC accredited universities and colleges. It also promotes modern method of teachings and innovation.
In Guwahati, however, many private universities do not have NAAC accreditation raising concern over the quality of education in these universities.
Vice-chancellor of Assam Down Town University Amarjyoti Choudhury informed G Plus that the university has not applied for accreditation by NAAC till now. However, he added that the university is planning to apply for it soon.
“We are preparing to apply to NAAC to obtain the accreditation and will apply for it within this month,” said Choudhury.
Recently a cash-for-marks scam was also unearthed at the university in which police found involvement of examination department officials with the deputy controller of examination being arrested recently.
Police authorities informed that during the investigation of the case, they have observed anomalies and discrepancies in the conduct of examinations as well as the declaration of results at the university. Before this, the police had apprehended one former student of the university as well as a teacher in connection with the case. They first identified students who were academically weak and then lured them into paying them by assuring passing marks in their examinations in various subjects.
Further, authorities at the University of Science and Technology (USTM) told G Plus that they have applied for NAAC and are waiting for the team to visit.
Alpana Choudhury, director student affairs at the USTM said, “We are now waiting for the visit by their official team to conduct their assessment, we are expecting them soon and hoping that they visit by the end of this year and.”
On the other hand, Royal Global University is waiting for two of terms to be completed before they become eligible to apply for the accreditation.
As per the NAAC rules, the institutions are eligible to apply for NAAC accreditation if they have a record of at least two batches of students graduated or been in existence for six years, whichever is earlier. Apart from this, the institutes need to fulfil other criteria, too.
“We are a university since 2017 and the condition to apply is only after two batches pass out. So, we are eligible to apply for it in 2020,” said registrar of the university Angira Mimani.
However, prior to becoming a university in 2017, the RGU was running as an institute for the past few years and was known as Royal Group of Institutions.
For pvt universities, education a means to make money, allege students
A current student at a private university in the city told G Plus that her university is merely concerned with making money and does not provide quality education at par with the government universities in the state.
“Earlier, we had good faculty members, but many of them left over the past years and now the quality of education is not satisfactory. Instead of focussing on the academics and related aspects, the authorities are more concerned about providing external facilities to students, which is not going to help us build our future at the end of the day,” said the student on condition of anonymity.
Further, a professor at the Gauhati University informed that many private universities have come up in the past few years. However they, too, will have to apply for NAAC accreditation at some point of time.
“Institutions have their own priorities and they also have to make themselves ready to be able to go through the NAAC mechanism since it is an exhaustive one. Till they don’t do it, all stakeholders will be concerned about the quality of education,” he said.
Gauhati University gets ‘A’ grade by NAAC
Gauhati University (GU) was scored 3.04 CGPA and was granted the ‘A’ grade accreditation by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). This will be valid for the next five years.
“NAAC has revised their methodology wherein a lot of information related to the university needs to be submitted to them prior to the inspection of the team which constitutes 70% of the weightage and is called the quantitative metric. On the other hand, the qualitative metric is determined by the team of officials who visit the institute for assessment,” said Amit Choudhury, director of GU’s Institute of Distance and Open Learning (IDOL).
He added that the entire process is very exhaustive and there are seven broad criteria on which the institutes are marked including teaching learning, infrastructure and student feedback mechanism among others.
“It is a huge exercise which involves all the teachers in some form or the other including a major part of the administration. All faculty members are very happy with this feat as we could not achieve the A grade during the last accreditation in 2010,” informed Choudhury.