Digitalization and Documentation in NAAC Assessment: Analyzing the Role of IQAC in Streamlining Accreditation

Abstract

Background: Accreditation by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has become the principal quality signal in Indian higher education, and it is also one of the most document-intensive regulatory processes that institutions encounter. Since 2024 the Council has moved towards binary accreditation, maturity-based graded levels, online verification and a single national data platform. These changes shift the centre of gravity of accreditation from the peer-team visit to the digital evidence trail, and they place the Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC) at the operational heart of the process.

Objective: To analyse how documentation and digitalization are reshaping NAAC assessment, to evaluate what the IQAC can and cannot do to streamline accreditation, and to expose the gap between the declared and the practised logic of evidence-based quality assurance.

Methods: A scoping review guided by PRISMA 2020 and PRISMA-ScR was conducted on a defined corpus of 117 records supplied by the author, restricted to 2023 and 2024 and to NAAC-relevant content, and supplemented by policy documents, national statistics and the wider quality-assurance literature. Evidence was synthesised thematically and through a comparative analysis of the legacy, binary and maturity-based frameworks.

Results: Eight NAAC-focused studies and two integrity-related studies met the criteria. Four themes emerged: documentation as strategic capability, evidence-to-outcome alignment, the documentary burden of research and student-learning claims, and data integrity as the unresolved problem. Comparative arithmetic shows that the basic accreditation benchmark uses roughly 39 to 56 per cent fewer parameters than the legacy model, removes the 30 per cent peer-visit component, and must be delivered at a scale of roughly 6,500 additional college accreditations a year if the 90 per cent coverage target is to be met.

Conclusions: Digitalization reduces transaction costs but relocates, rather than removes, the risk of misrepresentation. The IQAC is most effective when it operates as a continuous evidence-governance unit, not as a pre-visit document factory. A five-stage IQAC Digital Evidence Maturity Model and five testable propositions are offered.