NAAC to automate process to assign verification agencies to colleges

MUMBAI: The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has now decided to automate the process by which external agencies are assigned colleges for data verification. This process of validating and verifying information submitted by colleges recently came under a cloud—the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) rapped the assessment body for the “arbitrary” way in which colleges were assigned to various DVV (data validation and verification) partners.In a course correction, the NAAC’s executive committee chairman has decided that only an automated system will pick a DVV agency.
The CAG pointed out that from 2019-22, the NAAC did not follow a prescribed method to pick DVV partners. The auditor said it should have used the round-robin, an arrangement of choosing all agencies equally in a rational order, usually from the top of the list to the bottom and then starting again at the top and moving downwards, till the list is exhausted.
This anomaly was exposed by the internal committee of the NAAC too, which was headed by JP Singh Joorel, director, Inflibnet. It said names of third-party agencies that validate data submitted by institutes are sometimes rejected, suggesting a kind of manual intervention. Despite the fact that “there are no logs of rejects by DVV partners...there are variations in the number of HEIs allotted to different DVV partners,” it said.
Chairman of NAAC’s executive committee, Anil Sahasrabudhe, said DVV agencies will now be picked without manual intervention.
“The choice of DVV and experts will be only by the software. We are implementing that change in the software. The change may require about 15 days. Meanwhile, we are also on-boarding new DVVs—central and state government institutions and training them such that they can verify and validate the data submitted by HEIs,” added Sahasrabudhe.
Currently, NAAC has five DVV agencies, all private entities. The CAG had found that while 907 institutes’ data had to be verified, and each agency ought to have been assigned 181 colleges, one received 32% more institutes than the others. The next year the same agency received 92% more institutes than the others. And in 2022-23, it received 66% more institutes to check.
According to the Joorel committee report, institutes had provided false information in several instances, but the DVV failed to catch the error. When coordinators noticed the errors and requested that another agency vet the data, the co-ordinator was changed.
Subsequently, the institute was awarded an A+ “despite mistakes/gaps resulting in potentially biased evaluation”.