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Accreditation agencies and their relative merits
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Name
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Purpose
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Benefits
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AACSB
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Institutions that earn accreditation confirm their commitment to quality and continuous improvement through a rigorous and comprehensive peer review. It considers whether schools are providing excellent professors, best of research, opportunities to work with professionals, high-quality classmates and classes that challenge their ideals
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It is the most difficult certification to achieve and granted to colleges and not to individual courses. If your institution has it, you can rest assured that there would be substantial value addition. The certification also enables you to get credit transfers, advanced standing, international migration etc. Institutes cite membership of AACSB as an achievement. No institute that just pays the fee can become a member
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AMBA
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AMBA accredits programmes. It evaluates programmes in terms of major criteria like faculty, students, curriculum, delivery, assessment and duration. Each factor has major themes that the assessment team evaluates. For example, if the school says an MBA must have analytical skills, then AMBA would demand sufficient proof of deliverables within the course that makes the student capable of analysis and the assessment criterion includes tools to assess the same
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Remember there are no AMBA certified schools. There are only AMBA certified programmes. What the certification means to you is that there is a constant scrutiny of what is being taught as well as why it is being taught. So you will invariably get value for money.
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EQUIS
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An independent European system which again accredits institutions rather than programmes. It places lot of emphasis on the mission, goals and objectives of the institution. Internationalisation is also a core area of validation for Equis.
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It still has not caught up the way AACSB has done, at least in India.
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ISO
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This is an international standard for assuring the user that the institution has a documented way of doing its business and give proof that it does so on consistent basis.
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It does not assure quality. It only assures that the school has a documented way of delivering a certain service. It can deliver that service at any level of quality. Only the delivery has to be consistent. This is meaningless for a B-School. So don’t get carried away by this certification
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NAAC
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NAAC accredits institutions. It
assesses a college or a university in terms of curriculum process, learning systems, governances, research development, student support, governance and innovative perspectives
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Both the processes are very
perspective and is designed from an input orientation. The outcomes are not given prime place in their scheme of things. In terms of value for students, its presence does not make much difference. The fact that even accredited institutions have been now placed under scrutiny shows either the accreditation process is inadequate or the scrutiny itself is wrong. Until we have an outcome-based evaluation process, one would not get the right assessment
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NBA
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The much maligned AICTE’s own accreditation mechanism. It again accredits programmes of a school. Crudely one could call it the Indian version of AMBA, though NBA accredits all forms of technical education, both at graduate and undergraduate levels
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