The National Medical Commission (NMC) has made key changes to the framework it uses for accrediting and ranking medical colleges, notably removing the provision of stipends to interns and resident doctors as an assessment parameter.
This was a significant metric in earlier drafts co-developed with the Quality Council of India (QCI) but is absent from the latest version released by the NMC’s Medical Assessment and Rating Board (MARB), as per a report by Medical Dialogues.
Stipend parameter removed
In the previous draft framework released in 2023, one of the parameters under the criterion “Students’ Admission & Attainment of Competence” was titled “Provisions of Financial Entitlements (Remunerated Posts/Stipendiary Positions) created by the college”. It explicitly required colleges to provide stipends to interns and residents and to report disbursed amounts for each over the past six months.
This parameter has now been completely omitted from the revised draft framework, which outlines 11 criteria and 78 parameters for assessing medical institutions.
What are the new assessment criteria?
The revised draft outlines the following 11 assessment categories:
Curriculum implementation and capacity building activities
Clinical exposure, clinical training, internship, and clinical facilities
Teaching-learning environment – Physical, psychological, and occupational
Students admission, attainment of competence, and progression
Human resource and teaching-learning process
Assessment policy (formative, internal & summative)
Research output and impact
Financial resources (recurring & non-recurring expenditures)
Community outreach programmes
Quality assessment systems
Feedback and stakeholder perception
Despite retaining the "Students' Admission & Attainment of Competence" criterion, the focus has shifted to other indicators such as NEET scores, student progression, and exit exam performance, with no mention of stipend payment accountability.
Other key changes
The updated framework also introduces several structural and metric-level changes:
1. Reduced parameters: The total number of evaluation parameters have reduced from 92 in 2023 to 78. Interestingly, while the overall number has gone down, the share of qualitative parameters has increased from 20 to 26, indicating a greater emphasis on more nuanced, context-driven evaluation.
Conversely, the number of quantitative parameters has been brought down from 72 to 52, suggesting a move away from purely numerical metrics towards a more balanced approach that considers both measurable outcomes and qualitative insights.
2. Faculty strength criteria removed: The proportion of full-time faculty to total staff, a metric used in the earlier draft, is now excluded.
3. Change in research metrics: While "Research Output and Impact" remains a criterion, the emphasis on publication in high-quartile journals (Q1 & Q2) has been diluted.
4. Revised weightage distribution: The 2025 draft framework has also revised the weightage assigned to several assessment criteria, altering how medical colleges will be scored out of a total of 1000 marks.
The NMC states that it intends to carry out the accreditation through an independent third-party agency, continuing its collaboration with the QCI, which facilitates objective assessments of institutional quality, added Medical Dialogues.
