The National Board of Accreditation (NBA) is working towards joining the Washington Accord, which will enable Indian engineering graduates to take up the profession in Western countries.
At present, while they can work in the West, Indian graduates are not allowed to practise engineering as the degree courses here are not recognised by many countries, according to the Member Secretary of NBA, D. K. Paliwal.
Signed in 1989, the Washington Accord is an international agreement among bodies responsible for accrediting engineering degree programmes. It recognises substantial equivalency of programmes accredited by those bodies and recommends that graduates of programmes accredited by any of the signatory bodies be recognised by other bodies as having met the academic requirements for entry to the practice of engineering.
The NBA was established by All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) as an autonomous body for periodic evaluations of technical institutions and programmes.
Addressing a special workshop on new accreditation process in undergraduate engineering programme organised by the NBA at Thiagarajar College of Engineering (TCE) here on Thursday, he said that this would require a 120 degree change in the direction of present education system.
Delivering a presentation on ‘outcome based accreditation,’ he said that the new system would assess a programme on the basis of the acceptance of the graduates passing out and whether they possessed the skills and knowledge sought by the industry.
Educational institutions should identify the modules of their programmes based on the desired outcome.
This focus, Dr. Paliwal said, would ensure an increase in the yield of the education system. Many countries had shifted to such a system of assessment.
He also sought to explain the difference between the accreditation issued by National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), an established autonomous body that focused mostly on the physical infrastructure – and the recognition granted by the NBA that focussed on the programme and course content.
Speaking earlier, V. Abhaikumar, TCE Principal, said that knowledge was the vital commodity that drove a nation’s prosperity in this era of globalisation and educational institutions were looked at as facilitators to citizens getting knowledge.
V. Ramamurthy, NBA Mentor, made a presentation on ‘How to capture PO, PEO and SLO and to evaluate SAR.’
