The pathetic condition of reportedly shining India’s tertiary education system was cruelly exposed in mid-June when students who had barely finished celebrating their success in school-leaving board examinations, found themselves suffering admission blues after colleges of Delhi University (DU) released their first ‘cut-off’ lists to admit 54,000 new students in undergraduate courses for the 2011-12 academic year beginning July 21. Bizarrely, Urmi Uppal and Vishal Dewan, joint-toppers (average score; 97.6 percent) in the class XII exam of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) — the country’s largest pan-India school examinations board — were unable to secure admission into the college and study programmes of their choice. They are among hundreds of 95 percent plus students disappointed by absu-rdly high cut-offs demanded by DU’s most highly-rated under-grad colleges.
Under a complex admission system designed to preclude a flood of admission applications, each DU-affiliated college prescribes cut-off marks (the minimum required marks for admitting students to a particular course on the basis of class XII examination results of the current year). Colleges prescribe up to five cut-off lists, each stipulating lower percentage than the previous, to fill up the full number of seats available in their social studies, humanities, science and commerce faculties.
Inevitably given their market reputation, DU’s 10-15 colleges, which routinely top media league tables, attract a disproportionately high number of applicants relative to the number of seats available. To limit the number of admission applications they prescribe sky-high cut-offs. The real purpose of prescribing stratospheric cut-offs was revealed with brutal clarity when the Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) management prescribed a 100 percent cut-off for science stream Plus Two students applying for admission into the B.Com (Hons) programme. In short, they were not wanted in SRCC.
SRCC’s principal, P.C. Jain, defends the college’s decision to prescribe the perfect score as the admission criterion for non-commerce students aspiring for admission into SRCC. “We get the best students from across the country and getting a 100 percent average in four best scoring subjects is no longer impossible in school board exami-nations,” he says.
This observation is a clear reference to grades inflation by the two national boards — CBSE and CISCE — with many state boards also joining the bandwagon. M.S. Shreelakshmi, a student of a school affiliated with the Kerala state examination board was awarded 100 percent not only in the best four subjects, but all six.
Ashok Ganguly, the long-tenured (2000-08) former director of CBSE, believes the high cut-offs prescribed by DU colleges is the outcome of a decline in high-quality institutions of higher education in other cities. “Presidency College, Kolkata; Patna College; Benaras Hindu University and Allahabad University used to be much sought after academic hubs. But since the quality of higher education in these hubs and elsewhere has declined, pressure has mounted on DU and its affiliated colleges. The solution is to create more quality institutions of higher learning countrywide,” says Ganguly.
The attraction of DU’s heavily subsidised top colleges which prescr-ibed 95 percent plus cut-offs in the first instance is vindicated by the experience of St. Stephen’s College. After the first cut-off, the college had to choose from 21,000 applicants to fill up 420 seats.
Quite clearly there’s an urgent need to increase capacity in higher education without diluting standards. Comments Prof. R. Govinda, vice chancellor of the National University of Education Plann-ing & Administration (NUEPA), Delhi: “With capacity expanding gradually, universities should devise an equitable system of selecting students.”
Meanwhile Dr. C.N.R. Rao, chief scientific advisor to the prime minister has called upon the Union HRD ministry to constitute an expert group to prepare a “vision document” for higher education. “This document should provide a roadmap for the higher education sector. It is our (the Science Advisory Council) plea that the Union HRD ministry sets up a task force to prepare and finalise such a document within the next 12 months,” wrote Rao in a seminal column for Education- World last month (June).
But with Union HRD minister and legal eagle Kapil Sibal having emerged as the Congress-led UPA-II government’s chief crisis manager — currently he is in charge of the scandal-tainted Union telecom ministry and also the government’s prime representative on the government-civil society panel drafting the Jana Lok Pal Bill — this constructive proposal is likely to be considered later than sooner.
Payal Mahajan (Delhi)
Vaulting ambition
Atypical and peculiar characteristic of politicians, bureaucrats and establishment educationists who have combined to destroy “the beautiful tree” of post-independence India’s education system, is that their heads are so high in the clouds that they don’t see what’s happening on the ground beneath their feet. At its 58th meeting held in Delhi on June 7, Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) members spent an entire day discussing ways and means to extend the ambit of the Right to Free & Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act), which makes it mandatory for the State to provide free and compulsory education to all children between six-14 years of age (class I-VIII), to cover all secondary school children (class IX-X) countrywide.
Fifteen months after the RTE Act became law, only 15 of the country’s 35 states and Union territories have notified Rules which will operationalise the Act, within their jurisdictions even as a spate of writ petitions has been filed in the Supreme Court challenging the constitutional validity of s.12(1) (c) of the Act, which requires all private and aided schools to reserve 25 percent of capacity in pre-school and progressively in classes I-VIII for poor neighbourhood children. Moreover implementation of RTE, 2009 is hamstrung by an estimated shortage of 1.4 million teachers countrywide and budgetary constraints (only Rs.21,000 crore is available for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All)/RTE programme for 2011-12 as against the Rs.34,000 crore required). Given that implementation of the RTE Act, 2009 which became law on April 1, 2010 is far from complete, educationists and social activists in the national capital have been taken aback by CABE’s vaulting ambition.
“Given the central and state governments’ failure to implement RTE in its first year, it is somewhat premature to start planning the expansion of its reach and ambit. There’s much that’s lacking in the RTE Act in its present form. Currently RTE is not a justiciable right, with nobody in government being held accountable if a child’s right is not fulfilled. If this is the manner in which RTE is being implemented, there’s no harm in promising the right to education until Ph D,” says Dr. Parth Shah, president of Centre for Civil Society, a Delhi-based think tank.
Well-known educationist and RTE activist Dr. Anil Sadgopal is also of the opinion that the HRD ministry and CABE need to implement RTE in its current avatar before setting their sights higher. “According to DISE (District Information System of Education) data, 67 percent of India’s primary schools don’t have separate classrooms, 50 percent of middle schools don’t have headmasters, and children don’t get any form of education in extra curriculars like art, music, physical education etc. In primary schools, these are not even mentioned. All this neglect will generate a demand for private schools and government schools which account for 60 percent of school enrolment will face a bleak future,” says Sadgopal.
However, HRD minister Kapil Sibal’s logic at the CABE session was “the right to education needs to be extended up to the secondary level (class X) to provide avenues for children emerging from elementary education, as a natural corollary”. All CABE members obedi-ently endorsed this line of reasoning and undertook to constitute a CABE Committee comprising ministers, members of civil society as well as educationists to formulate draft legis-lation to extend the ambit of the RTE Act, within the next three months.
A clear recipe for spreading — rather than containing — chaos and confusion.
Autar Nehru (Delhi)