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Government educational rankings to invite public inputs from this year.
The human resource development ministry has asked all participating institutions will have to publish relevant data, including number of teachers, infrastructure and students among others, on their website which would be scrutinised by the general public and other stakeholders.
The government is set to introduce further transparency in the way rankings are awarded to educational institutions. This government has made a provision to allow for general public to participate in the rankings procedure as it will help detect any inaccuracies in the data furnished by universities and colleges.
As per the new procedure mandated by the human resource development ministry, all participating institutions will have to publish relevant data, including number of teachers, infrastructure and students among others, on their website.
The data will be open to scrutiny by the general public and other stakeholders who will then be asked to submit their feedback to the National Accreditation Bureau in case of any discrepancy.
Last year, a number of cases were reported of institutions withholding information or providing incorrect data to secure a good ranking, sources said. It was mainly done by institutions as there is no system of physical checks being conducted by the ministry.
“All the institutions will be asked to provide relevant data in a particular format which will be available on the National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF). Also, the submitted data for the last 3 years will be uploaded on their own, publicly visible website in the interest of transparency,” said a senior HRD official.
Progressively, the ranking system is improving year-on-year and for the year 2017, colleges will also be ranked and the government will award a common overall rank to the institution irrespective of specialization or branch. This year more than 3,500 top higher educational institutions are under consideration for the ranking.
Explaining the procedure, a senior official said all candidate institutions, independent of their discipline or nature (university, engineering institution, law or medical institution) will be given a common overall rank. The parameters have been chosen in such a manner that they remain equally important for all kinds of educational institutions.
“The format will be designed to ensure that the diversity of disciplines and their separate needs or characters are suitably taken care of,” the official said.
Here is how institutions are going to be ranked. The ranking will be done on the basis of 5 criteria – teaching/learning resources, research, graduation outcomes, outreach/inclusivity and perception. The data for the first 4 parameters, which account for 90% of the weightage, was submitted by the institutions and verified by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), a body constituted by the HRD ministry last year to conduct annual surveys.
For the perception criterion, various stakeholders including parents, teachers, and alumni were engaged to give their feedback.