What is NBA Accreditation? NBA Process Explained

Indian education system is evolving and the National Board of Accreditation(NBA) is leading the transformation. It is by far the most important criteria to judge the efficacy of diploma, undergraduate and post-graduate programs taught in India. The government recognizes this and even AICTE has made getting NBA accredited for engineering and management programs by 2022 a mandate now checks out the complete NBA Accreditation Process below.

What is NBA Accreditation?

The National Board of Accreditation (NBA) is an independent accreditation agency that represents India in the Washington Accord (WA). It was established in 2010 to assess and ensure the quality, credibility, and relevance of Engineering and Technical institutions through a rigorous accreditation process based on the quality of education and facilities provided there. It has clearly outlined guidelines that serve as crucial parameters for certifying institutions. Any higher education institution (HEI) that wishes to apply for and receive accreditation from the NBA must ensure that all guidelines are strictly followed and that every document or information is authentic and must be submitted in a prescribed format.

Read more about NBA Accreditation here.

National Board of Accreditation

The National Board of Accreditation (NBA) is the major accreditation body for Engineering and Management Programs in India. It was established in 1994 by the AICTE and became autonomous in 2010.

NBA’s vision is to be an accreditation agency of international standards. Since 2014, it has been a member of the Washington Accords. Becoming a member of the Accords ensures substantial equivalency of programs that have been accredited by the other members.

However, an important point to note is that only the programs with Tier I institutions are eligible for this recognition.

Given the importance of getting the NBA accredited, it’s only fair that you would want to take a deeper look at the NBA. Go ahead and read our blog on Understanding NBA Accreditation to get some better insights on this subject.

NBA Accreditation Process

Having understood the importance, we now look at the process of getting your programs NBA accredited. These are the six steps of the supposedly cumbersome process:

Let’s go and deep dive into each of the steps to ensure that your institution is ready for its accreditation journey.

1. Checking Readiness for NBA and registering

The first thing that you should know is that the NBA is offered to programs and not to institutes. However before you can register for accreditation through NBA, you need to check your readiness through the following parameters:

• Does your institution fall under any of the below-mentioned categories? Because if it doesn’t then you are not eligible
  1. Hospitality & Tourism
  2. Computer Applications
  3. Architecture, Applied Arts and Crafts
  4. Pharmacy
  5. Engineering & Technology
  6. Management
• Are the programs that you are applying for approved by AICTE or relevant regulatory bodies?
• For option a to be mentioned in the first parameter, a minimum of 2 batches should have passed before the institute can apply for accreditation. For option f i.e. Management minimum of 3 batches should have passed. Do you meet this criterion?
• Part-time programs will not be considered for accreditation. Make sure that you are only applying for your full-time programs.
• Is your campus ready for on-site visits?
• If you are applying for Postgraduate engineering programs, you have to ensure that the corresponding Undergraduate programs are also accredited

Now that you have checked your readiness, follow these steps:

1. Go to the NBA portal, fill out the registration form and pay the registration fee.
2. Generate application, fill pre-qualifiers and pay 10% of the accreditation fee
3. If the program meets requirements, then proceed to the next step.
4. If the program doesn’t meet requirements, you would be communicated the reason and you to follow the previous steps again.

2. Preparation of Self Assessment Report

Self Assessment Report is perhaps the most important document for your NBA accreditation process. It is perhaps also the area where a lot of mistakes are committed. NBA expects SARs to be clear, concise, error-free, and with data for each criterion.

Each criteria carries a certain weightage which adds up to a total of 1000. Now, these weights vary depending on the type of institution. For reference, let’s have a look at the scoring pattern for Undergraduate engineering programs.

An important thing that you must remember while preparing SAR is that it shouldn’t be boastful. As stated by the NBA website, SAR is supposed to be based on self-introspection and facts.

While it is an extremely difficult task to ensure that you have been tracking all the criteria perfectly and with complete facts, you can always have an error-free accreditation management system to do the hard work for you.

3. Applying for NBA and submission of SAR

You have done the hard work of preparing your SAR. The next step is the timely and proper submission of the said report. Just carry out the following steps:

• Download the SAR and fill in the details in the defined format
• Login to eNBA portal and submit the SAR
• Pay 90% of the fee
• Provide 3 dates for NBAs site visit

4. NBA team visit and evaluation

As part of the next step, the NBA evaluation team visits the college to create an evaluation report. The team comprises one Chairperson and one or two Evaluators(depending on the number of programs).

The visit duration is generally a period of 2 to 3 days. The team is chosen by the NBA. The Chairperson is generally from the same program discipline while the evaluators could be serving or retired professionals.

The evaluation team is also given adequate training/orientation through seminars or workshops beforehand.

The institution is expected to keep about 22 program-specific documents and about 17 institution-specific documents ready. This document list is provided by the NBA and is also available on the NBA website.

The evaluation team completes their visit and creates the evaluation report.

5. Submission of evaluation report and recommendation by EAC

The evaluation report created in the previous step is then submitted by the Evaluation team to the EAC. The moderation team evaluates the report as well as the documents submitted by the institution.

The report of the evaluation completed by the moderation team is communicated to the institution to which the institution must respond within 10 days' time.

The report from the Evaluation team as well as the response from the institution is communicated to the Evaluation and Accreditation Committee (EAC).

The EAC then provides recommendations to the Academic Advisory Committee for the final step of the NBA accreditation process.

6. Accreditation decision by AAC

In the last step, the Academic Advisory Committee(AAC) reviews all the reports as well as the recommendations by the EAC. The AAC then takes the decision on awarding accreditation. Based on the committee’s decision, the following outcomes are possible:

• Accreditation for 6 years
• Accreditation for 3 years
• No accreditation

Should the outcome be unsatisfactory, you can appeal the decision within 30 days of receiving the communication. This appeal is then placed in front of the Appellate Committee (AC) who then gives recommendations to the AAC.

The final decision-making authority lies with the AAC who then communicates the decision to your institution.

The institutions which have received accreditation for a period of 3 years for their programs must submit a Compliance report at least 6 months prior to the expiry of validity for the accreditation.

While the process might seem cumbersome and error-prone, if your institution is able to follow the directions provided by NBA, you would be able to get the best possible outcomes.

Who can apply for the NBA Accreditation?

NBA certification is extremely important, especially for the institution’s reputation. Higher education institutions that fit into one of the following categories are eligible for NBA accreditation.

• Branches of Engineering and Technology
• Architecture and Hospitality
• Computer Applications
• Tourism and Administration
• Pharmacy
• Applied Arts and Crafts

The above category of institutions can apply for NBA if,

• your institution and the programs you offer are AICTE-approved
• at least three batches of students should have graduated from a Management program, and
• at least two batches of students should have graduated from the non-management program.

What are NBA accreditation criteria?

NBA includes a number of criteria and parameters that are consistent with international practices and are focused on the outcomes of educational programs. As part of its Self Assessment Report (SAR), NBA has two levels of criteria to assess the overall effectiveness of the institution's processes. Each criterion carries a certain weightage which adds up to a total of 1000.

• Program level (7)
• Institute level (3)

Based on the percentage of scores obtained institutions fall into one of the following conditions;

• If the program receives a minimum score of 900 points and receives a minimum qualifying 60% marks in each of the listed criteria, it will be given the status of "Accredited" for the following five years from the date the letter from the NBA was issued.
• The program will also receive the status of "Provisionally Accredited" for the subsequent two years starting from the date the NBA's letter is issued if it receives a minimum score of 720 points and achieves a minimum qualifying 45% mark in each of the listed criteria.
• The institution may submit an application to upgrade to "Full Accreditation" of the program after resolving any weaknesses or deficiencies.
• If the program receives a score of less than 720, it is given the status of "Not Accredited points.

How does Creatrix Accreditation Management System help in the NBA accreditation process?

With NBA comes a full five-year’ report that is absolutely time-consuming when done manually. There’s so much that Creatrix does to your NBA accreditation process and here are a few to mention;

• A fully customizable accreditation platform with the strategic planner to plan, assess, and analyze
• Complete automation of SAR report generation
• CQI tools at any given time to be in par with industry standards.
• Internal program review and benchmarking tools
• Initiate NBA team visits and make payments online
• Builtin templates to group standards and key indicators automatically clone to suit NBA accreditation standards.
• Proper delegation, follow-up, and tracking of work allocated.
• Easy creation of your own networks for better work process, smooth collaboration with all stakeholders with automated alerts.
• Survey and evaluation tools to conduct 360-degree audits & surveys.
• Personalized permission settings, based on the degree of privacy necessary
• Fair resource allocation and training and many more
• Intuitive BI dashboards with data visualizations
• Data integration across ERP systems
• PM tools to assign tasks, initiate meetings, create discussions and meetings, to collaborate effectively, so your team can hit deadlines, and achieve speedy results.
• Auto-generate highly accurate reports in various formats including Excel, PDFs, and links. Actionable insights using graphs and spider web interpretations of the attainment of the outcomes.
• Generates various reports including outcome management, attainment reports, student survey, faculty feedback, etc for hassle-free NBA accreditation management.
• We help institutions adhere to the time-to-time regulations made by the accreditation body as well.

Creatrix Accreditation software is a one-of-a-kind platform that helps the higher education institution to create, store, process, retrieve, govern, comply and submit, all under one roof. It rules out the possibilities of manual errors, outdated report templates, and gaps in disparate systems.

We help your team face challenges head-on, aligning mission/vision to specific goals and objectives. It is inbuilt to handle both quantitative and qualitative parameters, work on outcomes, and generate and export accreditation reports, all this without the intervention of the IT team.

Contact us for more information.