Educational certificates on digital platform now

The National Academic Depository (NAD) will be implemented through NSDL Database Management Limited (NDML), a wholly owned subsidiary of NSDL which is the largest depository of India. NAD is an initiative undertaken by MHRD for digital issuance, storage and access of all academic certificates issued by academic institutions in the country. 

NAD was launched by former President Pranab Mukherjee during  “National Conclave on Digital Initiatives in Higher Education” in New Delhi recently.

Under NAD every student will have a digital account and all certificates issued by various academic institutions will be credited in digital format to this account. Students will be identified uniquely by their Aadhaar number. NAD will eliminate paper, mitigate the risk of fake and forged certificates and enable online, electronic authentication of certificates by employers and higher education institutions.

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) became the first academic institution to join NAD through NDML. CBSE certificates for the academic year 2016-17 have been made available in NAD.

Global diagnostic assessment programme

Macmillan Education, recently launched the ICAS programme for the Indian subcontinent. Currently 14,500 schools in over 20 countries participate in ICAS and over 8.9 million students are being assessed under ICAS globally.

ICAS is an initiative by UNSW Global, a not-for-profit provider of education, assessment, and expertise services, wholly owned by The University of New South Wales, Australia, which ranks among the top 50 universities worldwide. It evaluates students across a wide spectrum of skills and is an annual benchmark of learning progress and a powerful diagnostic tool that breaks through the traditional rote-memory based markers of evaluation. Starting from Class II going up to Class XII, the language skills tested include, reading for meaning in factual and literary texts, syntax and vocabulary and in science, skills of observing and measuring, interpreting and analysing data and reasoning and problem solving. In mathematics, ICAS delves into evaluating areas of Algebra and patterns; chance and data; measurement and units, numbers and arithmetic; space and geometry. — TNS