The first thing you need to know is that while AICTE provides accreditation to a college, NBA accredits their technical courses or programs.  And this is where the great divide opens up, there are over 10,000 engineering and technical colleges approved by AICTE in India but only 2,075 courses accredited by NBA.

As an institution, you are already offering quality education to your students to give wings to their aspirations. It makes it even more important that if your technical courses do not yet have an NBA accreditation that your institution begin the process.

NBA accreditation meaning for education

The National Board of Accreditation (NBA) is an autonomous body within the AICTE. The NBA accreditation is a stamp of approval that says that an accredited program of an engineering or other technical college has been assessed by experts and has been found to have met high quality standards. Its emphasis on outcome-based education approach enhances the quality of education with continuous improvement.

How Technology helps in the NBA accreditation process

There are about 120 reports that need to be submitted under various categories for all NBA accredited engineering colleges. These reports need to bring together data from different sources. Sounds complicated and time-consuming? Yes, it is if you are trying to do it manually.

It is never easy for a university or college with thousands of students to prepare these reports. Faculty members have to take out time from their teaching assignment to gather this data.

Let us look how time consuming it can be just for one report – Student PO Attainment report. This report requires the 8 semester course outcomes to be consolidated for each student. The academics module in Edumate Education ERP can do this calculation in the back-end and display the average course outcomes in reports that are downloadable.

To better understand how complex these reports can be, the metrics that you have compiled must now be measured in terms of Course Outcomes (CO) and Program Outcomes (PO). This is necessary because the NBA accredits programs based on an outcome-based education model. To arrive at CO, you will need to combine the scores from internal assignments as well as university exams. PO reports will need to be collated at program level. The customized reports in your School managements system can be set up for this.

Also read: 7 Top Benefits of NBA Accreditation for Engineering Colleges

Process towards NBA Accreditation

Let’s have a closer look at all the pre-preparation and stepwise process that all NBA accredited colleges will journey through

1. Check if your programs are eligible for accreditation

If your institution has Diploma, Under-graduate and Postgraduate courses in the following areas, you can apply for accreditation by NBA

• Engineering & Technology;
• Computer Applications;
• Pharmacy
• Management
• Hotel Management and Catering Technology
• Architecture

NBA accredits programs of AICTE approved colleges, so you need to be an AICTE approved college.

For colleges offering other than Management programs, a minimum of two batches of students should have passed out of your college. For management programs, a minimum of three batches of students should have graduated from your college.

By the way, in case your Postgraduate engineering programs require accreditation, you need to make sure that the corresponding UG programs are also accredited.

1. Submitting an application to NBA

A registered college may apply online for accreditation of its programs. You may login into eNBA portal using login credentials obtained during the registration process.  You will need to select Discipline, Level and Programs from pull-down menus and generate the application format.

Your application for accreditation can be for up to 5 programs through a single application.

After submitting the application, you will need to submit information on pre-qualifiers under six sub-heads

1. Program specific information
2. Student admissions
3. Information on faculty
4. Student Faculty ratio
5. Placement ratio
6. Compliance status

Your preparation will be required to cover suitable responses to questions posed on each program

• What are the objectives of every course?
• What is the correlation between the course objective and evaluation?
• How do the objectives come out through evaluation?

Your institution has 30 days from the generation of the application to complete all pre-assessment steps.

So, your goal is to have your pre-qualifiers approved by submitting comprehensive details on the programs.

Also Read: Effectively Manage College Applications and Generate Short Lists and Merit Lists

2. Preparing Self Assessment Reports (SAR)

Your institution is required to prepare a Self Assessment Report (SAR) in the prescribed format for programs whose pre-qualifiers are approved. This means that your institution is basically self-assessing its programs on NBA specified criteria.

Accreditation software solutions with proven expertise in this field can help you prepare a comprehensive SAR for your programs.

3. Visit of Team of Experts from NBA for evaluating eligibility

Having got to this stage of your NBA accreditation process, your institution is then required to suggest suitable dates for an onsite visit. You will need to ensure that on such suggested dates, regular classes and academic activities of the program should be going on. NBA will then select a suitable set of dates and fix up the same for a visit in consultation with your institution.

On the scheduled dates, the Visiting Team of Experts visits your institution for a detailed evaluation of the program and typically the visit extends for about 3 days. They will be looking closely at the quality of teaching and students, infrastructure facilities, laboratory and library services and the vision, mission and objectives of your organization.

You are expected to keep about 22 program specific documents and about 17 institution specific documents ready for the Visiting Team as per the document list prescribed by NBA.

Also read: What Features Should Your Library Management System Have?

4. Submission of Report and consideration by EAC

On completion of the accreditation visit, the Visiting Team prepares and submits the evaluation report to the NBA.

The process of consideration by a Committee at this stage differs for UG Engineering programs and other programs.

For UG Engineering programs, the report is initially placed before the Moderation Committee. If necessary, the Moderation Committee then communicates its observations to the college for clarifications which are required to be responded to within 10 days. Both the observations of the Committee and the college’s response are placed to the EAC (Evaluation and Accreditation Committee).

In case of the programs of all other disciplines, the evaluation reports are placed directly to the respective EAC.

5. Academic Advisory Committee decision on accreditation

The recommendations of the EAC are then placed to the Academic Advisory Committee which takes a final decision on accreditation. The decision of the AAC is then communicated to the applying institution.  NBA Accreditation accorded to a program may be for 3 or 6 years.

In case of rejection, you can appeal against the decision within 30 days of receiving the communication from NBA.

Has your institution already been granted accreditation for a period of 3 years? You need to renew the same at least 6 months before the three-year period expires.

Edumate ERP is your one-stop solution with all the features to help you towards an outcome-based education. Edumate is a flagship product of iTech India and brings with it 16 years of experience in the education sector. The analytics and reports in our School Management System has been specially customized for the needs of Engineering institutions. Send us a message on our chat feature and our experts will contact you with a demo on how we can help you reach your NBA Accreditation target, be it a provisional accreditation for 2 years or a full-fledged accreditation for 5 years.