Studies on the Assessment of Quality of Undergraduate Engineering Programmes in India

Student Name: K. G. Viswandhan

National Board of Accreditation (NBA), India a body affiliated to the All India Council of Techincal Eduction (AICTE) is responsible for accreditation of programmes in Engineering colleges in India. The accrediation process is done using a questionaire focusing on 8 dimensions with a totality of nearly 70 items divided between them. An expert committee usually provides some numerical marks for each of these items with a possible grand total of 1000. Confidential observations from these questionaires on 49 such programmes (32 accredited 17 non-accredited) were obtained. A factor analysis of the 8 dimension scores revealed only one significant factor. A logistic regression model for predicting the accreditation status using this factor score was built, which could predict the accreditation status with almost 70% accuracy. These results go to show that the current accreditation process, though attempts to consider various dimensions, essentially is unidimensional which heavily depends only on the overall management of the programme. Next a factor analysis of the items was carried out for each of the 8 dimensions. This revealed the presence of a total of 19 major variables instead of the original 70 odd. Since 19 variables are again too many, a second tier factor analysis of these 19 yielded the presence of 6 major factors which may be named as Leadership efficiency, Management effectiveness, Human resources, Other resources, Teaching learning process, and Supporting processes respectively. A step-wise regression model was then built for student performance score, provided by the NBA questionaire, which involves variables like palcement record, university examination performance, industry satisfaction etc. relating it to the 6 factors mentioned above. Interestingly teaching learning process did not seem to have any significant effect on student performance while supporting processes turned out to be the most important factor for predicting the student performance! Additionally how the different categories (autonomous, government, government-aided, and self-financing) of programmes fair in the 19 variables are also tested. It is found that these categories of programmes significantly differ from one another w.r.t. most of these 19 variables. In light of these findings, which are quite counter-intuitive, the current method of assessment of quality of engineering programmes as administered by the NBA is suggested to be modified. Towards this end first the variables that should be measured and the appropriate weightages that should be given for assessment of quality of engineering programmes is studied through the Analytical Hierarchical Process by involving experts from academia, industry, administration and social organizations. Based on the statistical and AHP studies three different approaches are suggested. In the first, instead of giving some marks for each item in the NBA questionaire, a Likart scale type rating is proposed for each item which is hoped to eliminate subjectivity. In the second it is suggested that the 19 factors be directly measured instead of the original 70. In the third a student competency model is proposed where it is suggested that an entirely different set of variables should be measured and looked into for assessing the quality.