By Shalini S. Sharma
PAL for JEE
A recent digital initiative of IITs – PAL, short for professor-assisted learning which aims to provide digital resources to prepare for IIT entrance exams (called Joint Entrance Exam or JEE) to students in small towns, is the government’s latest attempt to offset the need for students to go to coaching centres and shell out huge sums of money.
Coaching and test preparatory is a big, multi-billion dollar industry in India. Big players in the field such as FIIT JEE, Aakash, T.I.M.E, Narayana, Career Launcher etc have all forayed into formal education now by tying up with schools or by setting up their own schools where children are put under heavy duty surveillance and learning from class VI onwards. Since these companies are driven by the passion of parents to see their children succeed in this competitive world and since parents are willing to spend any amount of money on this endeavor, there is virtually no stopping the test prep companies from functioning and coaching students even though they take the joy out of learning and turn children into fact-churning robots.
The government has watched them grow with frustration. The impregnability of its premier institutes such as IITs and NITs has so far meant that test prep players will only grow and not diminish. Time and again it has made a shot at curbing the influence of coaching centres because they lead to skewed admission numbers, but with inadequate results. Year after year, JEE sees more boys getting admitted into the system compared to girls because lesser number of girls are sent for coaching to distant cities by parents.
IIT-PAL is a welcome initiative given this backdrop. The ministry of HRD is in the process of refining it and has thrown open the challenge of improving its functionality and experience to students.
Vacant seats
Over-capacity and unfilled seats has for some time now been a regular phenomenon in engineering education. Several states have reported this trend of seats going vacant in engineering colleges because of issues of low quality of education and decrease in demand for hard-core engineering jobs, what with service sector contributing more than 60 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP). But the malaise of vacant seats is now spreading to medical colleges also with Kerala recently reporting more than 100 vacant seats in government-funded institutes after the current round of national-level counselling. This is surprising since the standard of education in Kerala is not low by any yardstick and the only issue that any student coming from a different part of the country can have is the remote location of some of the institutes. Apparently, the highest number of vacancies are in an institute in Alappuzha. Given that this particular city is renowned for its scenic beauty, may be the well-wishers of god’s own country need to undertake some marketing initiatives.
Research ≠ promotion
Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar
This is so because the scheme bars them from getting promoted from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor or from Associate Professor to Professor unless they earn the mandatory 10 to 40 points in a year for doing research (papers / publications; projects; guidance and conferences). This point system and this insistence on research for the sake of promotion has done more harm to the quality of research taking place in the country than anything else. There have been collateral beneficiaries of this system – mainly publishing companies and end-to-end service providers which have been converting ordinary conference proceedings into research papers and helping one get a score on that basis – but it is commendable that the HRD minister has finally put an end to this madness. This is not to say that research is not important. But doing it as a quid pro quo is not correct. Research which improves the understanding of the subject, which adds to the knowledge base and which benefits the society in some tangible manner is desirable but the research for promotion was not doing either.
Degree @ IIM
IIM Ahmedabad
A not-so-exciting news for non-IIMs is the latest approval by Parliament of the IIM Bill which means that IIMs will now be able to give management degrees to students instead of the post-graduate diploma in management (PGDM) which they have been giving so far. Degrees were till now the preserve of universities only. This is great news for IIMs even though they never had to face issues of lack of takers but in international comparisons this development will stand them in good stead. It will also solve various issues of grant of equivalence which the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) has had to tackle for those students who wish to go abroad for research after studying at IIMs. But this is a devastating news for all those stand-alone management institutes which give PGDM because a) as it is with increase in the number of IIMs, there are lesser takers for other institutes b) IIMs will give degrees which will be preferred over diplomas for anybody who is able to afford that c) the market value of PGDM will come down considerably because it will no longer be equivalent to what IIMs also do.
(The writer is a freelance journalist)
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