Associated blog post date: 29th June 2014, link: http://eklavyasai.blogspot.com/2014/06/gate-and-ugc-net-cs-it-exams-can-be.html , short link: http://bit.ly/gate-and
I made the following comment (slightly edited) to a recent post, How well does a college teach its students?, http://www.obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2014/06/how-well-does-college-teach-its-students.html (short link: http://bit.ly/2V942KE ), by Srinivasan Ramani, http://internethalloffame.org/inductees/srinivasan-ramani :
Interesting views. More transparency in Indian academic system in general will do wonders in giving students and parents some reasonable picture of the teaching and research quality of Indian academic institutions. As of now, most Indian academic institution websites do not carry significant information on course material related to courses taught by its faculty, though many carry the academic's research publication list. I think if the course material for courses taught by academics is put up on their website, students, parents and even employers will be able to get some idea of what is really taught in those courses. In great contrast to Indian academia, many US academic websites have detailed course material - Indian academia should follow their lead in this regard, IMHO.
Regarding standard exams that assess how well a college teaches its students, for engineering in India, we have the GATE exam, which is quite widely accepted by academia (for further education like M.Tech.) as well as government employers as the key measurement criteria for knowledge level of engineering graduates. Perhaps it would be a great idea to have its results available in the public domain but there may be moral and legal issues related to protection of privacy rights of students who got poor scores. The wiki page states, "The score cards are issued to only the qualified candidates."
As somebody who is interested in improving the practice of software development in Indian CS & IT academia, one issue I have with examinations like GATE, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Aptitude_Test_in_Engineering, is that they, I believe, focus on the theory part of the knowledge of the candidate, as that may be easier to assess. Even the National Eligibility Test for Lecturers (Asst. Professors) for UGC/AICTE regulated colleges, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Eligibility_Test, for the CS & IT field does not seem to have a practical component for the test! What is badly needed by youth in colleges nowadays is employability, and employability needs the right blend of theory and practical knowledge. Once our national examinations including GATE and UGC NET improve their assessment techniques to properly assess practical knowledge then they may become an important measure of the employability of engineering college graduates.
Associated blog post date: 20th April 2014, link: http://eklavyasai.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-hindus-higher-education-student.html , short link: http://bit.ly/the-hindus
A few days ago I saw an ad. in The Hindu newspaper about a sort-of student guidebook on higher education from The Hindu, thenxt.step, and decided to check with my town (Puttaparthi) Hindu vendor whether he had it. He did and gave it to me (for Rs. 250/-) but it turned out to be last year's issue! I decided to return it but later changed the decision as I felt I might learn something related to higher education in Computer Science and Information Technology (CS & IT) from the 2013 issue itself (which, I believe, happens to be the first issue of this sort-of student guidebook on higher education from The Hindu). My changed decision turned out to be the correct one.
I have learned a lot about Tamil Nadu higher education sector in the areas of Computer Science and Information Technology from thenxt.step 2013, (broken link) http://hindu.com/books/nxtstep/nxt13.htm. [Tamil Nadu is a southern state of India with Chennai (Madras) as its capital, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_Nadu.] I have tried to put down some points from that learning below:
Page 3 has a full page advertisement of Vellore Institute of Technology, http://www.vit.ac.in/, which, I understand, is one of the leading private deemed universities of South India with its Computer Science and Engineering programmes being accredited by ABET Inc., USA. This ad. lists the following programmes in CS & IT at its Vellore campus:
School of Computer Sciences and Engineering (SCSE)
School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE)
---- end advertisement info ----
Well, that's quite an array of CS & IT undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The programmes meant for a particular software company are quite noteworthy even if there may be strong arguments against having such programmes in a regular academic institution (as against an industry dedicated training institute which, however, may not be empowered to award bachelor or master degrees - at least during my programming learning days in the mid-80s they were not allowed to do so; they could simply provide some diploma certificates which were probably not recognized by the government then).
...
In an article by Dr. Hanifa Ghosh, principal CTTE College for Women, Chennai on Page 10, Dr. Ghosh warns parents against forcing children, who are not interested and/or do not have the aptitude for engineering, to take up engineering in colleges with poor or uncertain reputation due to availability of seats there. She writes that they may end up doing poorly paying jobs unrelated to their engineering degree. Opportunities provided by Arts and Science colleges may be more appropriate for such students, she writes....
Jayaprakash Gandhi, a career consultant and analyst, writes in his article on Page 14 about it being better to choose a primary field (like mechanical engineering) instead of a secondary field (like automobile engineering) as the latter narrows down future career options at the initial stages itself. Further, he says, GATE exam (for entrance to IITs) are for primary fields and not secondary fields. Higher studies in India and abroad also may be easier to pursue for those who have studied primary fields.
[IITs are the elite technical education institutions of India with substantial, if not total, government funding, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology. "The Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) is an all-India examination that primarily tests the comprehensive understanding of various undergraduate subjects in engineering and science.", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Aptitude_Test_in_Engineering.]
Ravi: Perhaps the same primary field and secondary field argument applies to CS & IT fields. The Computer Science & Engineering field is a primary field with all the benefits of primary field mentioned above. In my browsing I have not come across definitive explanation of the Information Technology field in Indian academia and its difference from the Computer Science & Engineering field. Some years ago I had asked this question of a senior Indian academic who then was the head of the Information Technology department of an engineering college in South India. He told me that the subjects covered were almost the same (perhaps he actually said they were the same) as the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department of his college (they seemed to have that department too). The actual reason for having two programmes was related to some regulations which limited the no. of seats in one programme - having two separate programmes in CSE and IT was a workaround!
The B.C.A. and M.C.A. programmes being computer application programmes would probably be viewed as a secondary field with all the disadvantages mentioned above for secondary fields. However, the advantage of these programmes may be that they are less rigorous since they aim at imparting applications level skills rather than fundamental computer science skills, and so some students who cannot handle CSE programmes may be able to handle the computer applications programmes. And, very importantly, there may be industry demand for such computer applications skills which ensures jobs for BCA and MCA passed out students.
...
Pages 34, 36 & 37 carry a superb article titled, "Admissions demystified", by Prof. V. Rhymend Uthariaraj, secretary TNEA and professor and director of Ramanujan Computing Centre, Anna University, Chennai, which explains the single-window counselling (admission) process for the government seats of engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu. I strongly recommend that this article by read by anybody interested in understanding the engineering admission counselling process in India (other progressive Indian states would be following a somewhat similar procedure, I guess). The article states that Tamil Nadu’s engineering college admission process is used by more than 1.5 lakh (one hundred and fifty thousand) engineering student-aspirants to get enrolled in Tamil Nadu engineering colleges.
The concluding part of the article is interesting and idealistic sort-of advice in general but not necessarily perfect and verified-to-be-fully-truthful advice especially to youth desperately seeking higher education that will deliver them good paying jobs, IMHO. It advises society and parents to not force career choices on their wards which go against their natural interests, and warns against obsession towards engineering career choice. It urges society to advocate excellence (in any field) instead of a particular (engineering) field and opines that excellence is lucrative. [The associated blog post has the exact words.]
...
Pages 38 & 40 carry an excellent article titled, "New age varsities", by Dr. G. Viswanathan, founder and chancellor of Vellore Institute of Technology (the same educational institution whose advertisement on Page 3 is mentioned earlier), http://www.vit.ac.in/. I think the entire article is a kind-of must read for those interested in improving technical education in India (or knowing about it).
The associated blog post has three extracts from his article. Given below is a condensed and paraphrased account of those three extracts.
[Ravi: A deemed university in India is, as per my understanding, an autonomous educational institution recognized by the key national higher education regulators (UGC and/or AICTE) which may have a few campuses. Usually these deemed universities are privately owned and so have to manage their own finances with some limited project grant money from govt. agencies. This is in contrast to government universities which are, I believe, wholly funded by the government. I believe that some of the well recognized deemed universities like Vellore Institute of Technology whose founder is the author of this article, charge substantial amount of fees and other charges (e.g. air-conditioned student hostel rooms with premium charges) from its students. It must also be said that some deemed universities in India have earned a lot of disrepute due to very poor standards of education as well as alleged malpractices.]
Viswanathan talks of four options for students seeking to enroll in engineering education:
He then quotes a figure of 97 percent of students having to choose between options 3 and 4.
He points out academic advantages of deemed university (note that his university is a deemed university). One of them is the freedom to change, and frequently change, syllabi and curriculum to suit industry needs which he says is difficult to do in government controlled educational institutions. He specifically mentions computing sciences and electronics fields where industry needs change at rapid speed, needing change in syllabi every semester and which, he says, is possible only in deemed universities.
He mentions that industry needs employable graduates who are exposed to practical aspects of the theoretical knowledge (they learn). That needs well-equipped labs (with the lab. work) embedded for the theory subjects. He says that ensuring that students spend quality time in the labs as against the classrooms, helps them be industry-ready.
He mentions that new, innovative industry-oriented programmes can be seen only in deemed universities. He also mentions funding challenges for developmental activities (of labs/courses, one presumes) in government run universities.
But not all deemed universities are good. He says (that the student/parent has) to be careful in selection. He writes, “A candidate has to visit the university, check for the details, talk to the outgoing / passed out students and ascertain the quality before joining.”
...
Pages 41 & 42 have an interesting practical advice article, "Choose right", by Dr. Brijesh Nair, Professor and Programme Chair (Civil Engineering) at Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, http://www.vit.ac.in/. He starts the article by mentioning that many engineering seats remain vacant in South India every year. So if a student wants to pursue engineering no matter what the reputation of the college, getting one of these vacant seats will be possible. But then he raises the job factor. He goes on to make a rather sweeping statement that if one is looking for just "any job" then any engineering programme in a college with 95 % (or more) campus placement track record should be fine. He also mentions that most students do not have a preference for any branch of engineering but simply want to get a job that pays them well. He writes that the trend observed in campus placements is that students from civil engineering or mechanical engineering (or other fields unrelated to software development) take up software company jobs.
[I thank The Hindu thenxt.step, and have presumed that they will not have any objections to me sharing the above short extracts from, and many references to, their magazine, in this book, whose ebook is freely downloadable/viewable by all, and whose paperback book is not-for-profit for me (author). This book does not have any financial profit motive whatsoever for the author.]
Associated blog post date: 4th Feb. 2014, link: http://eklavyasai.blogspot.com/2014/02/2014-national-india-employability.html, short link: http://bit.ly/2014-nat
A few days ago, The Hindu had this article, A.P. fares poorly in employability of engineers, http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/ap-fares-poorly-in-employability-of-engineers/article5639970.ece.
I sent the following comment to the letters email of The Hindu (for the print edition):
I am very happy to see the persistent work done by Aspiring Minds to draw attention to the pathetic employability situation for engineering graduates from Indian, especially South Indian, colleges and universities.
I think its CEO, Himanshu Aggarwal, captures the situation perfectly when he says, “States like A.P. and Tamil Nadu, which have the highest number of engineering colleges, continue to have lowest employability. States need to be conscious towards better education quality rather than building more capacity”.
Hopefully the higher education policy makers/regulators and administrators will be able to step in and ensure that suitable career growth incentives are provided to academics who provide good education to students instead of such career growth incentives being focused only on research publications and research projects (with large amount of tax payer grant money). I am not against academic research but the way most academic administrators and regulators seem to focus on research and ignore educating students to become employable is deeply shocking to me. In my humble opinion, the first and foremost duty of an academic should be to teach and teach well - research should be secondary, no matter how much grant money or fame is involved.
--- end comment ---
The above comment did not get accepted for publication in the print edition of The Hindu. However, a shorter version of the above comment (due to the limitation of web page comment size to 1000 characters) on the web page of the article (link given above) was accepted by the moderator and is now shown on it (under my name - Ravi S. Iyer).
Yesterday the "Education Plus" supplement of The Hindu carried an article on similar lines, Engg. graduates lack domain skills, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-educationplus/engg-graduates-lack-domain-skills/article5646438.ece. I found the following extract in it to be quite significant:
“It is a fact that majority (of) colleges have totally neglected teaching quality. Some blame shortage of good teachers while others genuinely want to hire good teachers but fail to do so due to their non-availability,” agrees N.V. Ramana Rao, Registrar, JNTU Hyderabad.
--- end small extract ---
The Registrar of JNTU Hyderabad (an important technical university of Andhra Pradesh) openly acknowledging that majority of (engineering) colleges have totally neglected teaching quality is a vital acknowledgement of a serious teaching crisis in engineering colleges of Andhra Pradesh. Now who can fix the problem? I don't claim to have all the answers for this tough problem. But a no-brainer suggestion to help solve the problem would be to provide career-growth incentive to those academics who are good teachers instead of focusing only on providing career-growth to those who acquire significant project grant money and publish research papers. For this, the UGC/AICTE regulations for promotion of academics must be changed to introduce some measures of teaching quality, even if they are not perfect, and provide career-growth incentive for those academics who achieve appropriate measure of teaching quality even if they do not have research publications. Let us face it, there is a conflict of interest between teaching and research in Indian academia today, and the poor students face the negative effect of this conflict of interest.