Bharathidasan University has been reaccredited with ‘A’ grade by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC).
The Chairman of University Grants Commission Ved Prakash handed over the certificate to K.Meena, Vice Chancellor, during the 6 NAAC accreditation award ceremony at Bangalore, in the presence of H. Ranganath, NAAC Director, and Dinesh Singh, Chairman, NAAC Executive Committee.
The process of accreditation was carried out by a NAAC peer team last September to validate the university’s self-study report. The team gave a score of 3.16 on a four-point scale to the university based on a set of seven parameters: curriculum, teaching-learning and evaluation, research consultancy and extension, infrastructure and learning resources, student activities, governance, and innovative practices. ‘A’ denotes very good, ‘B’ good, ‘C’ satisfactory and ‘D’ unsatisfactory.
The NAAC website states that the assessment and accreditation process has resulted in tremendous quality consciousness in institutions and has created awareness to deal with emerging challenges in higher education. Tamil Nadu accounts for the maximum number of accredited colleges and universities. Of the 233 colleges and 72 universities in the country that had gone through the accreditation and reaccreditation process until November 2012, 82 colleges and seven universities are in Tamil Nadu. Of the 82 colleges, 28 are run by the government and the rest are privately managed. Among the colleges, 32 were autonomous and the remaining 50 were affiliated ones.
Out of the 54 privately managed institutions, 47 were government aided colleges, and seven were unaided. Likewise, among the autonomous colleges, there were eight government autonomous colleges and 24 private autonomous institutions.
The NAAC’s finding was that private autonomous colleges fared better than the rest owing to academic freedom with which they could offer innovative courses, and initiate multi-disciplinary choice-based-credit system and modular courses.
NAAC experts could make out that the difference between autonomous and non-autonomous colleges was very significant among the government colleges.
