Looks like Kochi may soon have Kerala's first deemed-to-be women's university. St Teresa's College, Ernakulam just became the first college in Kerala and the second in the country to get an A++ Grade in the Fourth cycle of the National Assessment and Accreditation by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) under the revised scheme. This has made the college eligible to become a deemed-to-be-university.
"We've been trying for this accreditation from 2016," says the college's principal Dr Sajimol Augustine M. "This cycle was due on April 2017, but that was when we got an extension depending on the highest accreditation that we had at that time. Now, we have all the requirements to be a deemed-to-be-university. We will proceed with the application soon," she says.
The college is also preparing for an international accreditation soon. " We have academic exchange programmes and MoUs with foreign universities. Right now, we have a few students from Sophia University, Japan on campus. Those students are visiting the villages that we've adopted and working to make them plastic-free," says Augustine.
The college got the autonomous status in 2014. After that, they had introduced 19 new programmes and constructed a new block. "All the courses are funded by the UGC. We also have a lot of extension activities. There's a multimedia lab and a business lab," says Augustine.
We also spoke to the college's IQAC Coordinator Dr Usha Nair and NAAC Coordinator Dr Latha Nair about the preparations that they had gone through to achieve this rank. "The revised NAAC accreditation process that was introduced in 2017 was actually a challenge for us. It has become very technical now and so, we had to actually start from scratch. We only had time to rework on the previous documentation. But thankfully, every single teacher contributed. It was a combined effort of teachers and students," says Usha Nair.
Latha Nair, on the other hand, talks to us about the other difficulties. "Did you know that even the nomenclature of programmes and seminars was very important?" she asks. "The greatest challenge for us was getting used to the new system. But in a way, everything fell in place at the right time for us," she says
