Edu-leaders

The National Board of Accreditation (NBA) will soon roll out a comprehensive accrediting policy for management programmes. It will help management aspirants to have a better idea of the programmes they enrol for, said NBA Chairman BC Majumdar.

The new process will assess the quality of teachers and their leadership abilities. Currently, it would assess only business management courses.

The NBA has, for the first time, drafted different parameters to accredit management programmes across countries, which is at par with the international standards; Majumdar claimed. Earlier, the criteria for engineering institutes were binding for management courses as well.

The new accreditation policy will widely assess programmes on three aspects — input-process-output. Input would include the selection process of students, the quality of students enrolled for the programmes, faculty, expertise, research conducted and also the infrastructure.

In keeping with the best industry standards, factors such as faculty appraisals will be part of the second stage, and academic results and students’ placements will be the output of the process that will be assessed by the NBA.

Colleges are expected to prepare a self-assessment report and apply for accreditation. An expert committee will then visit the institute and send its observations to the NBA, where the executive council will finally decide whether to accredit the course or not.

The courses will be given accreditation on the basis of their grading scores. If a course is getting 60 percent, it will be accredited for two years, and for five if it gets 75 percent.