The 2021-22 NAAC Cohort Faces Re-accreditation: Why Digital Evaluation Evidence Is Now Central

A Large Cohort Faces a Changed Framework

When NAAC accredited several hundred colleges and universities between 2021 and 2022 under the Revised Accreditation Framework (RAF), those institutions received certificates valid for five years. In 2026-27, that cohort begins entering the renewal window. The timing creates a specific pressure: they are re-entering a process that has been fundamentally redesigned.

NAAC's December 2025 public notice confirmed the framework change. The Revised Accreditation Framework — which used letter grades (A++, A+, A, B++, and so on) and weightages across seven criteria — has been replaced by a Binary Accreditation model. Under the new system, institutions are first assessed against minimum benchmark thresholds. Those that meet the benchmarks receive Accredited status, followed by a Maturity-Based Graded Level (MBGL) on a five-level scale. Those that do not meet benchmarks receive a Provisionally Accredited or Not Accredited outcome.

The December 2025 notice gave institutions whose accreditation under the old framework expired between January 27, 2024 and the MBGL launch date a validity extension of up to three months post-launch, giving them time to apply under the new system. For institutions accredited in 2021-22, their five-year cycle aligns with the 2026-27 renewal window, placing them directly in the first cohort to go through re-accreditation under the new binary framework.

What Changed in the Evidence Requirements

The transition from RAF to binary-plus-MBGL is not simply a relabelling exercise. The Documentation and Verification for Validation (DVV) process — NAAC's mechanism for independently verifying the data institutions report in their Self-Study Reports — has been tightened. Under the old framework, institutions that submitted marginal or partially supported evidence for a criterion could still accumulate enough points across other criteria to offset the weakness. Under the binary model, minimum benchmarks must be met across all assessed dimensions; a weak performance in one area cannot be compensated by strength in another.

Criterion 2 — Teaching-Learning and Evaluation — covers what happens in classrooms, laboratories, and examination halls. It includes, under sub-criterion 2.5, the institution's assessment and evaluation practices. NAAC's DVV validation under the new framework asks for demonstrable, verifiable data on evaluation processes, not narrative descriptions. Institutions are expected to show:

These are not new requirements in principle. They are new in the weight given to evidence quality. A narrative that says "our university has a three-tier valuation system" no longer satisfies DVV unless the institution can produce corroborating records: logs showing which scripts were sent for second valuation, how many moderation interventions occurred, the timeline from examination to results, and how student grievances about evaluation were resolved.

How Digital Evaluation Systems Generate DVV-Ready Evidence

An on-screen marking or digital evaluation system generates precisely these records as a natural byproduct of its operation. Every session of a digital evaluation deployment creates a data layer that maps directly to NAAC's verification needs.

Evaluation logs. When an evaluator marks a question on screen, the system records the mark awarded, the time of marking, the evaluator's identity, and the question number. At the end of the evaluation cycle, the system can produce a question-wise mark distribution report, an evaluator performance summary (showing average marks awarded per question, outliers, and speed patterns), and a complete audit trail. This data answers NAAC's questions about evaluation mechanisms directly.

Double valuation records. In a digital evaluation system, second valuation is triggered automatically when the difference between the first and second evaluator's totals exceeds a defined threshold. The system records every instance, the original marks, the second valuation marks, and the outcome. This is a ready-made evidence set for demonstrating that the institution applies double valuation systematically rather than selectively.

Result declaration timelines. The system timestamps every stage of the evaluation workflow: scan-in, evaluator assignment, evaluation completion, moderation, and mark upload. An institution can produce a timeline report showing, for example, that 94 percent of answer books for a given examination were evaluated within 12 days of the examination date. This directly addresses NAAC's interest in result declaration consistency.

Student grievance resolution. When a student applies for re-evaluation in a digital system, the process — receipt of application, retrieval of scanned answer book, fresh evaluation, result — is timestamped throughout. The institution can show how many re-evaluation requests it received, the average turnaround time, and the proportion that resulted in mark changes. This is the kind of operational transparency that NAAC's binary framework is designed to reward.

The IQAC as the Bridge Between Evaluation and Accreditation

NAAC expects every accredited institution to maintain an Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC) that continuously documents quality-related data. For examination and evaluation, the IQAC's role is to ensure that the records generated by the examination process are captured, organised, and preserved in a form usable for accreditation evidence.

In institutions running digital evaluation, the IQAC's task is considerably simpler. Evaluation logs, double valuation records, moderation reports, and re-evaluation resolution data are already in a structured digital format. The examination controller or university's digital evaluation platform administrator can export these records on demand. The IQAC does not need to reconstruct evidence from physical files or rely on faculty recollections.

For institutions still operating on paper, IQAC coordinators preparing accreditation documentation face a different situation. They must request records from multiple evaluation centres, compile them manually, and hope that physical files from a 2023 or 2024 evaluation cycle are intact and accessible. The evidence may exist, but accessing and presenting it takes effort proportional to the disorganisation of the physical archive.

The practical recommendation for institutions in the 2021-22 renewal cohort that have not yet moved to digital evaluation is to begin the transition before they enter the active SSR preparation phase. An institution that adopts digital evaluation in the 2026-27 academic year will have at least one full evaluation cycle's worth of structured data available by the time it submits its Self-Study Report.

Criterion 2.5 in Detail: The Three Indicators That Matter Most

Under NAAC's Assessment and Accreditation (A&A) framework, Criterion 2.5 — "Examination reforms and transparency" — encompasses three indicators particularly relevant to digital evaluation:

2.5.1: Mechanism of internal assessment. NAAC looks for evidence of a structured, transparent system for internal marks. An institution running digital evaluation for internal assessments — unit tests, assignments, mid-semester examinations — can produce digital records showing how internal marks were calculated, reviewed, and communicated to students.

2.5.2: Number of grievances related to evaluation. This indicator tracks how many students raised evaluation-related complaints and how those complaints were resolved. Institutions with digital evaluation typically report lower absolute numbers of grievances (because evaluation errors are fewer) and faster resolution times (because re-evaluation is faster). Both outcomes contribute positively to this indicator's score.

2.5.3: IT integration in evaluation. This explicitly rewards institutions that have integrated technology into their examination and evaluation processes. For institutions running on-screen marking, digital answer script management, or student-accessible result portals, this indicator is directly fulfilled by the infrastructure they have already deployed.

The Window Is Narrowing

For institutions in the 2021-22 accreditation cohort, the re-accreditation application process under the new binary framework begins now. NAAC typically expects institutions to complete their IQAC Annual Quality Assurance Report (AQAR) submissions for the intervening years, prepare a fresh Self-Study Report, and submit the Institutional Information for Quality Assessment (IIQA) before requesting a peer team visit.

The data for the SSR comes from the institution's recent operational history — which, for a 2026-27 applicant, means the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years. An institution that adopted digital evaluation in 2024 has two full cycles of evaluation data available. One that is still on paper has records that are harder to organise, harder to verify, and likely less complete.

This is not an abstract efficiency argument. It is a concrete observation about what the DVV process will encounter when it queries these institutions' evaluation practices. DVV partners ask for specific, structured evidence. The institutions best positioned to supply it quickly and cleanly are those whose evaluation systems generate it automatically.

What Decision-Makers Should Do Now

For registrars, exam controllers, and IQAC coordinators at institutions in this renewal cohort, October 2026 is not too early to begin preparation. The practical steps are sequential:

First, confirm your institution's accreditation expiry date and the expected re-accreditation application window under the new binary framework. NAAC's December 2025 notice and subsequent communications from NAAC or the institution's affiliating university will have this information.

Second, audit your current examination data holdings. Identify which evaluation cycles you have well-documented records for, in what format, and how accessible they are. The gaps in this audit will tell you where digital evaluation infrastructure adds the most value in your specific context.

Third, if your institution has not yet evaluated any examination cycle digitally, identify which upcoming examination — a supplementary examination, an internal assessment cycle, or a minor subject's semester examination — could serve as a pilot. A single successful digital evaluation cycle will generate the infrastructure, trained staff, and process documentation that all subsequent cycles can build on.

The institutions that will find the 2026-27 NAAC renewal process most manageable are those that have been building their digital evidence base over the past two years. For those that have not yet started, the window to do so — before the SSR preparation becomes the immediate priority — is still open, but not for much longer.

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