NAAC Panel Suggests Awarding 10% Marks to Critical Thinking in College Exams

Sonam Rana updated Content Curator updated

Content Curator updated

New Delhi: The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) expert panel has proposed to award 10% marks to critical thinking in college-level examinations.

The expert panel of NAAC has recommended that the college-level examination papers must be redesigned so that at least 10 percent of marks are given based on the evaluation of “higher-order cognition.”

The notion had been proposed so as to encourage the development of critical thinking amongst the college students. The proposal is part of a white paper that was published on revising the assessment and accreditation process of higher educational institutions (HEI) across the country.

The proposal was co-authored by the chairman of NAAC executive committee Bhushan Patwardhan and former Indian Institute of Science Education and Research professor KP Mohanan.

The paper which has been reviewed and endorsed by the NAAC Academic Advisory Committee and the Executive Committee reveals that the weightage to such questions must be scaled up in phases to 20 percent and 40 percent in the future if the rollout is successful.

The paper states that the development of higher-order cognition among students is a primary key of the National Education Policy, (NEP 2020) proposal.

According to the paper, the NAAC suggests a plan of action to improve and enhance the quality of the design of exam questions, initially for the Bachelor’s courses in a few subjects, and subsequently to be expanded to cover all the bachelor’s courses.

The experts have illustrated higher-order literacy because of the ability to process and communicate academic knowledge through spoken and written forms of language and higher-order numeracy as the thinking that goes into making sense of numerically coded information.

Patwardhan, who was appointed as the chairman of NAAC EC, said that as many as 80 per cent of stakeholders of the NAAC suggested the need for reforms.

NAAC was set up three decades ago and since then the education ecosystem has changed significantly, as a result of which even the assessment and accreditation should be changed accordingly, he said.

Importantly, the NAAC committee has advised against the provisional accreditation system for colleges (PAC) announced earlier this year by the NAAC and the University Grants Commission (UGC).

The PAC allows newer institutions — the institutes with one academic year or more — to apply for provisional approval for a period of two years. So far, the colleges and universities are required to be at least six years old in order to apply.

Further, the paper reveals that the NAAC panel has proposed gradings for not just institutions as a whole, but as is the norm currently, but also for individual courses offered by them.

For instance, a higher educational institute (HEI) focusing on health sciences may be accredited depending on its overall performance, and additionally, specific courses such as MBBS, MD, MTech offered by that specific HEI can be graded separately.

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