St Xavier’s College (autonomous) Kolkata has become the first institute in the city to bag the ISO certification. Aware of the need for quality assurance in higher education institutes and being keen to upgrade the standard to cater to a wider pool of students drove the authorities to seek the coveted tag.
“Thus, from the perspective of self-evaluation, after much research and introspection, we had gone for ISO certification, which made us go through the audit of different processes that are being carried out,” said principal Fr Dominic Savio.
The benefits are multiple. Implementing a quality management system will help the college assess the overall context of the organisation to identify the stakeholders and assess their expectations. “We want to meet the requirements of our students and understand their needs, keeping in mind our social responsibility of providing inclusive and equitable quality education to all. It will also help us develop consistent processes and evaluation tool to increase effectiveness and efficiency. The credibility of the organization too will be enhanced,” added Savio.
The institute insisted for an industry like quality of the college. The process involved extensive evaluation on the imparting of quality education. “The administration, faculty, students and then the stakeholders and guardians were involved. Quality research, endowment lecturers, doctoral programs and bagging of scholarship funds will become easier with the ISO 9001:2015 certification for providing higher education,” pointed out Fr Savarimuthu Xavier, vice-principal of the morning section (BCom). The validity of the certificate is from July 3 this year to 2022.
The aspects which were taken into account for auditing were infrastructure, student placement history, student and teacher ratio, availability of tutorials for weaker students and awarding the meritorious students’ performance.
“Among infrastructure, the team visited and rated the libraries, laboratories, central research facility as well as the social work department. They took into account syllabi upgrade and the intervals at which they were revamped. They also judged if the syllabus caters to the need of the industry and has been accordingly modified,” Xavier explained.
According to Ayan Chandra, member secretary of the academic council, the team also considered the graduating numbers, first generation learners, the national and international placements offered by the college.
Source: Times of India
