Patna: National Assessment and Accreditation Council (Naac) is likely to start its assessment of higher educational institutions under its new binary system from July. State’s higher education director and Naac’s nodal officer N K Agrawal told the newspaper that the council is likely to open its portal next month. In the last one year since Naac closed its portal for fresh assessment, only those institutions, which had submitted their self-study report by the end of June 2024, were being accredited as per the old system, he said.Agrawal added that more than 200 universities and colleges of the state are in queue for their assessment and accreditation. Under the new system, there will be no grading of institutions from C to A++. The institution will only be awarded a certificate of ‘Accredited’ or ‘Not accredited’ by the Naac following its assessment. There are altogether 13 conventional universities and 272 constituent colleges in the state. Of them, only two universities, Lalit Narayan Mithila University in Darbhanga and Bihar Agricultural University, and 64 colleges are accredited by the Naac at present. One private university (Sandip University) has also been accredited recently. Patna University (PU), which was earlier accredited with B+ grade, completed its five-year-period of accreditation last year and presently it has been functioning under an extension granted by the Naac. The university’s Internal Quality Assurance Cell director, Birendra Prasad, said that PU will now volunteer for maturity-based graded accreditation system, in which institutions are graded under levels one to five. Institutions are encouraged to raise their bar to achieve the highest level of five, which is ‘Institutions of Global Excellence for Multi-disciplinary Research and Education’.“As part of the assessment under the new accreditation system, peer teams will not physically visit the institutions, albeit they will take the help of technology. The accreditation fee has also been reduced. The proposed tentative framework of the new system has 10 attributes, besides 59 metrics for universities, 56 for autonomous colleges and 46 for affiliated colleges,” Prasad said.
