NAAC panel recommends awarding 10% marks to critical thinking in college exams

The proposal is part of a white paper, that was published on revising the assessment and accreditation process of higher educational institutions in the country. It is co-authored by the chairman of NAAC executive committee Bhushan Patwardhan and former Indian Institute of Science Education and Research professor KP Mohanan.

NAAC panel recommends 10% marks to critical thinking in college exams

The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) expert panel has recommended that college-level examination papers be redesigned so that at least 10 per cent of marks are awarded on the evaluation of higher-order cognition to encourage the development of critical thinking.

The proposal is part of a white paper, that was published on revising the assessment and accreditation process of higher educational institutions in the country. It is co-authored by the chairman of NAAC executive committee Bhushan Patwardhan and former Indian Institute of Science Education and Research professor KP Mohanan.

As per the paper, that has been reviewed and endorsed by the NAAC Academic Advisory Committee and the Executive Committee, the weightage to such questions may be scaled up in phases to 20 per cent and 40 per cent in the future if the rollout is successful, the Indian Express reported.

The development of higher-order cognition among students is a key National Education Policy, 2020 proposal. “NAAC recommends the plan of action to improve the quality of the design of examination questions, initially for the Bachelor’s programs in a few subjects, and subsequently to be expanded to cover all Bachelor’s programs,” states the paper.

The experts have defined higher-order literacy as the ability to process and communicate academic knowledge through spoken and written forms of language and higher-order numeracy as the thinking that goes into making sense of numerically coded information.

The NAAC panel has also recommended gradings for not just institutions as a whole, as is the norm currently, but also for individual programmes offered by them. For instance, an higher educational institute focusing on health sciences may be accredited based on its overall performance, and in addition, specific courses such as MBBS, MD, MTech offered by it can be separately graded.

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