CO-PO attainment calculator for NBA OBE files.

The method

How CO and PO attainment is calculated

Outcome-Based Education (OBE) is the framework the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) expects every accredited programme to run. It defines Course Outcomes (COs) for each subject and Programme Outcomes (POs) for the degree, then measures how well students achieve them. The chain is layered: assessment scores become CO attainment, the CO-PO mapping turns CO attainment into PO attainment, and those values become the primary evidence in the Self-Assessment Report (SAR).

Writing COs with Bloom's Taxonomy

Each Course Outcome is phrased with a Bloom's Taxonomy action verb — Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyse, Evaluate, Create — that signals the cognitive level being targeted. The Bloom's level also shapes how strongly a CO can legitimately map to a Programme Outcome, which matters when you fill the correlation matrix below.

Direct CO attainment: blending CIE and SEE

Direct attainment comes from real student performance. Each CO is tagged to assessment items in both Continuous Internal Evaluation (CIE) and the Semester End Examination (SEE), and the attainment of each is the share of students who met the CO target — expressed on a 0–3 level. The two are then blended at the proportion in your academic regulations:

Common CIE:SEE splits are 20:80, 25:75 and 30:70 — all valid, depending on the regulations in force. The tool lets you set whichever your programme uses.

Adding indirect attainment (the 80:20 rule)

Indirect attainment captures student perception, gathered from course-end and exit surveys. Because it reflects opinion rather than measured performance, it carries a smaller weight. NBA's widely used default combines them as 80% direct and 20% indirect:

Institutions may document other ratios such as 70:30 or 90:10, and NBA accepts them when justified — so this weight is editable too.

From CO to PO: the mapping matrix

Every CO is mapped to the POs and Programme-Specific Outcomes (PSOs) it genuinely supports, using a 1–3 correlation strength (1 low, 3 high). A Programme Outcome's attainment is the strength-weighted average of the attainment of the COs that map to it:

Because both the CO levels and the mapping strengths sit on bounded scales, the resulting PO attainment also falls between 0 and 3. A value around 2.2 or higher is generally read as strong alignment, though the actual target is set by your department in consultation with its advisory board.

Closing the quality loop

Attainment is not the end of the exercise. Where a PO falls below target, NBA expects an action plan — revised assessments, more practice on weak units, or a raised target the next time the course runs — and evidence that the gap narrowed. That continuous loop, from outcomes to assessment to attainment to improvement, is exactly what assessors look for in the SAR and during a visit.