Management courses to get national accreditation

Very soon, management aspirants will have a better idea about the programmes they are enrolling for.

A complete, comprehensive and transparent accreditation process for management courses is on the anvil.

The National Board of Accreditation has for the first time drafted different parameters to accredit management programmes across countries.

Though there are other ranking agencies in the country, NBA claims that theirs would be at par with international standards.

 Not just the quality of teachers, but their leadership abilities will also be assessed through the new process, claimed the chairman of NBA, BC Majumdar at the two-day conference at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Powai. The preliminary draft was presented on Saturday to take views from stakeholders.

“It is for the first time that the NBA has devised an accrediting policy for management programmes. Earlier, the criteria for engineering institutes were binding for management courses as well. However, currently we are looking at assessing only business management courses and not others,” said Dinesh Paliwal, member secretary of the NBA. The board was recently converted into an autonomous body.

 Presenting the draft of the accreditation policy, MA Khan, one of the committee members who drafted the new process, said, “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.

 Paliwal added that the draft will also be shown to industry experts. “Opinions will be sought from the industry to ensure that our guidelines also meet their criteria. Our students will finally be absorbed by the industry, so knowing their point of view is of utmost importance,” said Paliwal.

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