The National Accreditation and Assessment Council (NAAC) has completed its assessment of NLSIU Bangalore, awarding it an A grade but a lower composite score than Nalsar Hyderabad, NLU Delhi, RGNUL Patiala and NLUO Cuttack, while Jindal Global University scored a 3.26.
NAAC assigned a rating of 3.06 out of 4 to the oldest national law university (NLU), whereas RGNUL and NLUO obtained 3.32. NLU Delhi stood at 3.59 and Nalsar has previously obtained the highest score, with 3.6.
NLSIU vice chancellor (VC) Prof Venkata Rao told us that the lower score might be the result of the new NAAC scheme, under which NLSIU is the only law school to have applied so far, whereas the other law schools had still been assessed under the old scheme.
He said that NLSIU would file an appeal with NAAC challenging these scores.
NLSIU coordinator of accreditations Ashok Patil told us that under the old scheme of applying for accreditation, evaluation was based entirely on the observations of the NAAC team visiting campuses. Under the new scheme, under which NLSIU is the first law school to have applied under, only 30% of the score was accrued to the on campus visit, said Patil.
The remaining assessment was done on the basis of submissions made online.
NLS had been recognised in April 2018 as the best among 71 law schools in India by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) , but just by a negligible margin above NLU Delhi.
As we had reported in August, one minor report in the NAAC paper submissions from NLSIU had been in-part plagiarised but later corrected.
NLS had missed out on the first wave of NAAC accreditations, having applied later than others, and lost out earlier this year on a possible grant of full autonomy by the NAAC - a status that had been granted to Nalsar and NLU Delhi in March.
Comments
It will be good if a neutral third party can a ranking based on the following criteria, which can all be quantitatively measured:
Student criteria (40% weightage):
1. Which NLUs have the highest average salary?
2. Which NLUs have the highest percentage of students placed?
3. Which NLU grads are receiving the most LLM scholarships at the top 100 law schools of the world?
4. Which NLU grads are achieving the most UPSC ranks every year?
5. Which NLU had the best moot performance (maybe the Legally India MPL can be used).
Faculty criteria (40% weightage):
1. Which NLU profs are publishing the most in the leading Indian and international journals (only journals indexed in Hein Online, JSTOR and SCOPUS should be considered).
2. Which NLU has the most faculty with PhDs?
3. Which NLU has the most faculty with BALLB degrees from NLUs?
4. Which NLU has the most faculty with degrees from the top 100 law schools of the world?
5. Which NLU has the best student:faculty ratio?
Infrastructure criteria (20% weightage):
1. Which NLU has the biggest campus?
2. Which NLU has the best hostel room:student ratio?
3. Which NLU has the most money in their bank accounts and savings deposits?
4. Which NLU is closest to the city centre (which can be the kilometre distance from a landmark like the Raj Bhavan or the main commercial street of the city).
5. Which NLU is closest to a major hospital and police station?
We can have a combined ranking on these three factors, as well as separate rankings for each.
1) nalsar
2) nlud
3) nlsiu
4) nujs
5) nluj/nliu/jindal
Not having a shot at just you. Just pointing out that almost invariably someone or the other is discontented with the observations of one or the other study and have to give their armchair opinion on how things should be done with trying to do them yourself.
Sorry, but not sorry.
For all of its flaws, Law School at least got this right. Not to say that 2 years for the process is ideal - of course, it should have been faster. But, within the snail's-pace that usually inflicts most scenarios like this, it's not too bad that this was achieved within a at a public institution.