Two years after preparing a draft framework for the accreditation and rating of medical institutions in partnership with the Quality Control of India (QCI), the National Medical Commission (NMC) has developed another outline for evaluating them.
While the new version is primarily based on the old ranking structure issued two years ago, it excludes some of the key factors previously proposed for evaluating medical institutions. It no longer includes the proportion of full-time or regular professors in the overall faculty requirement as a criterion, reports Careers360.
Another criterion, financial entitlements such as stipends paid to interns and residents, has been dropped. Publication in top-quartile research journals has also been removed from the list of criteria.
Unlike general and technical educational institutions, which are examined and graded regularly by the National Accreditation and Assessment Council (NAAC) and the National Board of Accreditation (NBA), medical colleges do not have a comparable process for assessment.
The assessment under the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) is likewise problematic.
To fill this void, NMC's Medical Assessment and Rating Board (MARB) signed an agreement with QCI in July 2023 to assess medical colleges, with the stated objectives of ensuring quality education delivery, promoting excellence in medical education, and fostering continuous improvement in medical colleges. This resulted in the first draft framework for the accreditation and ranking of the regulated institutes.
While the regulatory body has kept the 11 broad evaluation categories proposed by QCI, it has eliminated or combined several of the minute parameters, introduced a few new ones, and changed others.
This reduced the overall number of factors from 92 (20 qualitative and 72 quantitative) to 78 (26 qualitative and 52 quantitative). The relative weightage allocated to some of the major categories has also been adjusted, resulting in a more uniform distribution of scores across the board.
While the “human resource and teaching-learning process” criterion still has the highest assigned score of 160, the number of parameters under the head has been reduced from 13 to 11.
Two factors, "Program-wise Number of Full Time/Regular Faculty vis-à-vis Total Faculty Required" and "No of resource persons from the relevant fields invited as Guest/Visiting Faculty for Lectures in the last two years," have been reduced.
The document, however, preserves another quantitative requirement "Programme wise number of recruited Faculty Staff vis-à-vis Regulatory specifications". This says in passing that all teachers must work full-time, but does not include the proportion of regular appointees in an independent assessment component.
Under the "Students' Admission & Attainment of Competence" broad category, a quantitative parameter "Provisions of Financial entitlements (Remunerated Posts/Stipendiary Positions)” generated by the college has been omitted.
The draft, on the other hand, continues to include additional qualifying indicators, such as incoming students' and graduates' NEET scores, performance in exit exams (the National Exit Test will be launched), and the number of graduates continuing higher education.
The yardsticks for measuring "research output and impact" have also been adjusted. While the previous version provided for computing the cumulative citation scores in just Q1 and Q2 (the top 50 per cent) research papers, the new draft analyses citations in all of the indexed journals. However, it only assigns half the score to citations in the bottom 50 per cent of Q3 and Q4 journals when compared to the top ones.
Among the additions, NMC offers a department-wise examination and review of students' performance in formative and internal assessments, as well as the college's subsequent corrective activities.
