The Directorate of College Education has sent out a letter to all colleges — government, aided and self-financing institutions, asking them to register with the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) and the National Assessment and Accreditation Council.
The exercise is part of the effort to come up with a rating framework for higher education institutions in the State. “We are preparing the data. It is not like earlier times when it was a paper and pen exercise. It is online and there is a particular time frame to apply for it,” said the principal of a college affiliated to Bharathidasan University.
The Higher Education department has asked all universities to provide subject-wise data on each department. The aim is to assess the strength of each university, say officials.
Of the 13 universities that come under the department, nine have applied for the NIFR, the deadline for which ended on December 15. While the Open University and the Teacher Education University do not fall under the ambit of ranking, Mother Teresa and Tiruvalluvar University could not apply as they have less than 1,000 students on campus.
The NIRF judges institutions on five broad parameters and there are 21 sub-classifications under these parameters.
NIRF algorithm
“We have asked all the universities to fill the NIRF forms even though they cannot apply for ranking. We want to develop a State-level rating framework. We will use the same algorithm as the NIRF. In addition, we have asked the universities to prepare department-wise data. It is basically a drilling down into the data,” said higher education secretary Sunil Paliwal.
Universities generally rate a department based on H index, a factor that is used to measure the productivity and citation impact that a scientist’s work has in that field of specialisation.
“This would help a Vice-Chancellor to understand how a department is performing. It will also help the VC and the department make decisions more easily when it comes to seeking grants for a department,” Mr. Paliwal said.
