In a first, Panjab University to seek all stakeholders’ feedback

In a first, Panjab University (PU) has decided to seek feedback about its functioning from all its stakeholders.

The move comes ahead of the National Assessment and Accreditation Council’s (NAAC’s) proposed visit in 2022. The feedback, which will be mainly related to perception of the university, will be sought from students, their parents, alumni and employees (both teaching and non-teaching) of the varsity. While PU has decided to take the feedback of other stakeholders for the first time, the process of seeking students’ views is not new.

The NAAC team had last visited PU in 2015 and gave accreditation to it till 2020. Later, the accreditation was extended till June 2022. The process of getting feedback about the university has been initiated by its internal quality assurance cell (IQAC). Its director, Ashish Jain, said, “IQAC has made draft questionnaires which will be distributed among all the stakeholders after approval from the varsity authorities.”

Meanwhile, a panel has been constituted by vice-chancellor Raj Kumar in this regard. Sources said the panel members would meet this week to give the final shape to the draft questionnaires following which they will be sent to the varsity administration for approval. Once the process is complete, the feedback forms will be sent to students and other stakeholders with the coordination of various varsity departments.

The aim of seeking the feedback is to interpret the data collected from the stakeholders, analyse it further and prepare a report about the same. Accordingly, necessary steps will be taken for quality improvement of PU. “It is not only an important requirement for NAAC but for other ranking agencies as well. For an inclusive growth, it becomes important for a varsity to collect and analyse the feedback from all its stakeholders,” Jain said.

According to NAAC’s guidelines, making arrangements for collecting feedback from students, parents and other stakeholders on the quality of institutional processes is one of the prime functions of a university’s IQAC. All universities accredited to NAAC submit an annual quality assessment report (AQAR) to the council, however, PU has not submitted it since 2015.

As per the draft questionnaires, the feedback will be sought about the location, environment, ambience and fee structure of PU. It also includes parameters such as quality of teaching, examination system, student amenities and lab facilities. “Perception is an important parameter in the accreditation of various rankings. While we cannot do much about the perception of our university internationally, we can surely make it better at national level,” a university official said.