Accreditation

To be eligible for Institutional Accreditation, institutions must first be registered by the Grenada National Accreditation Board (GNAB). Registration is intended to safeguard learners and members of the public and prevent poor quality providers from operating in the local tertiary education sector. It also encourages institutions to continuously improve their quality. Registration establishes a formal relationship between GNAB and the institution. It is the first step towards Institutional Accreditation. In Grenada, institutions must become accredited or lose their legal authority to operate.

Institutional Accreditation is the status awarded to an institution that successfully undergoes GNAB’s evaluation process against the stated criteria of educational quality. The process is intended to assure the public of the educational quality provided by the institution and to assist the institution in strengthening its internal systems and processes which support continuous quality improvement. Institutional accreditation considers the holistic characteristics of the institution and evaluates the organisational capacity to deliver quality educational programmes at the tertiary level. Institutional accreditation does not analyse any specific programme individually. However, programmes are reviewed as a part of the consideration of the entire institution. Instead, it examines institutional characteristics such as governance, administrative strength, academic policies and procedures, quality of faculty, physical facilities and financial stability.

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A programme is regarded as an integrated package of courses and activities in an academic or professional field leading to a qualification. However, organizational arrangements in institutions differ and there are sometimes questions about what should be considered as a programme.
A programme includes all of the courses a student is required to take for a qualification, including courses that are required by an institution or a college, as well as those required by a department. This often includes general education courses as well as those in a professional or academic field. It may also include courses that may be offered as service courses.

A programme may have an early exit point, for example, it may be possible for students to complete two years of study and receive a diploma or to continue for several more years and complete a bachelor’s degree. If this is done, it is essential that the diploma be planned so that it provides a complete and useful qualification in its own right. For example, it might include significantly more practical and applied work in the field than students would normally undertake in the first two years of a bachelor’s degree programme. It is not acceptable for such an award to be granted simply because students fail or drop out after the early parts of a longer programme.

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A short course is defined as a period of study for which no more than 30 credits are assigned.
GNAB will accept a course for Short Course Accreditation if it meets the following eligibility requirements:
 The provider of the course is not a formal post-secondary and tertiary education institution delivering structured programmes to multiple students on an on-going basis (formal institutions must seek Institutional Registration and Accreditation)

 The course qualifies to be assigned between one (1) to thirty (30) credits where one (1) credit is the equivalent to about fifteen (15) contact hours of instruction.

 The course has at least one cohort of graduates

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