In the Name of Education
Written on May 6th, 2018 by {"login"=>"jcbitshyd", "email"=>"journal@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in", "display_name"=>"Journal Club, BPHC", "first_name"=>"", "last_name"=>""}An opinion editorial by Sharad Hotha, who talks about the state of academics on campus
Come this semester, we saw yet another exodus of faculty from our campus to universities elsewhere. This has become so frequent a phenomenon that we have started to get surprised why the remaining good professors haven't done so yet. We have begun coming to terms with the fact that we might not be a great college after all. This internalization of mediocrity is more concerning than the actual exodus. The recent NIRF ranking, where BITS-Pilani has been ranked below IITH and even VIT at 26 (overall), should be our wakeup call for students, faculty, and the administration, lest all be lost.
Regardless of questions of NIRF’s accuracy and objectivity, there are a lot of concerns that the institute faces.
A Biography of Lecture Slides
Being knowledgeable might make one a good conversationalist. Having passion for a subject might make one a good researcher. Being a good orator might make one a good opinion influencer. But none of these makes one a good teacher. Teaching is an art in itself and it requires you to be a good storyteller and a dramatist. This one very important trait is missing in most of the faculty on our campus. It is a tragedy that we take pride in being students of a premier college and we learn more things of substance from online resources than we do in our classrooms.
It’s not that the students are faultless. There is a degree of blame that falls on the them also, in their exploitative use of zero attendance and what not. But that is not to say that the faculty is amazing, for students to be motivated to attend class.
Let’s takes the slides, for instance. Most of them are a photocopy of the textbook and are so chaotic that even the faculty try to figure out the stuff in them while teaching. And the ones that are made for the class, forget being comprehensive, are not even intelligible. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong in teaching without slides. In fact, I would rather prefer it. In which case, making incomprehensible and platitude-filled slides is a wasteful exercise. Why bother wasting time on something that serves no purpose?
Then comes the teaching itself. Expecting the faculty to have an in-depth knowledge aside, the least that is now expected is an enthusiasm to teach, to entertain questions and understand them, and to confess ignorance if one is unable to address them. None of these happen most of the time. Teaching has been reduced to defining terms and solving trivial examples from the textbook. We have moved from rote-learning of the definition to rote-learning of the example. Accomplishment identified!
It feels like I am listening to an audiobook. It feels like I am learning for the grade or a job interview. Where is the catering to the curiosity of the student? Where is the push to be creative? Where is the attempt to treat the students as not just seekers but as fellow deliberators on the subject?
One doesn’t have to invest in physical props to arouse enthusiasm. Rather, investing in preparing for the class and relating the course content with real-life phenomena or scenarios would do it. After all, what we learn here goes beyond writing exams to applying in real world. All that is required is an intent to make students comprehend. What is seen in BITS, however, is the lazy approach of continuing the same old thing, with the justification that there are textbooks and online resources anyway. And then comes the practice of studying-this-much-is-enough-for-the-exam signals. This has vexed people to the extent that profound questions don’t get asked. And, even when asked, are either brushed aside or addressed with wrong answer.
The Examination System
Come exams, ctrl+c questions from from Mac Technological Institute, New University, Watermellon University and other universities and ctrl+v to Question Paper. So much for deducting marks on grounds of plagiarism. Firstly, it is unfair to students who don’t know that questions come from such-and-such professor abroad. Worse, in an attempt to not give the ditto questions, some numbers are tweaked, sometimes making the question itself wrong and contradictory. Then, during the exam, comes a wrong correction of that mistake, then right correction and finally another wrong correction. Apt way of ruining the whole paper for the student. More interesting, however, are the original questions. Framed in such bad English and so ambiguous, you’d have to write everything there is in the textbook, and hope that you answered the question.
And there is evaluation. Very relevant things like neatness, attendance, and acquaintance with the instructor are seen to be correlating with good score (could be spurious). Same answer to the same question by different people fetches different marks many a times. And the amount of marks you can get increased during revaluation depends on how much you can pester the instructor and how the instructor ‘objectively’ judges (on the day of paper distribution, that is) whether you know stuff or not. I no longer know why we have exams.
Then there is TAship. They are there to help in making slides, help students in tutorials, clearing doubts, assignments and what not. Aaand, Voila! They are utilized… for mark entry. TAs are supposed to get a good grade in that subject so that they can enter marks and evaluate MCQ exams? Students think TAship is a free 12k, and in some courses this is true.
A three credit course for learning how to apply matrices in Physics? A three credit course to learn that NMR exists and forgetting it later? Two credit courses to wear coats and waste 2 hours a week in lab? A five credit course to waste a summer in the name of exposure to industry for the sake of those who got good stations? Seriously? If it’s about giving a free 10, how about just giving a free 10 without wasting faculty and student time?
The above is just a diagnosis. I don’t have means to go into what causes these phenomena. But it is a sad state of affairs. Research and teaching are related but different professions. Teaching requires the action, the timbre, the care, the caution and the immersion of an actor playing in a theatre and a mother telling her child a story. Students need inspiration and active mentorship. That is how a better breed of professionals, entrepreneurs, and researchers are nurtured.
Of course, not all of this doesn’t apply to all the faculty. There are as many good teachers as there aren’t, though nowhere near enough in numbers. But even those that we have many a times face the constraint of dearth of student enthusiasm. Which is what can be thought of as...
A Stable Equilibrium at Lite
God said, “Let there be Light.” And there were BITSians. “No, no. Light. ARGHHH!”
Somewhere along our journey here, we as a campus (or even as a university) might have realized that we may not be able to compete with those tall elephants of IITs, and probably have sought to discover a competitive advantage in being entrepreneurial or being the managers or being, in some sense, the cultural crowd. And it is important to explore that too, to be able to build the brand, which we have been fairly successful in through fests, startups and the rest of it. But at what cost?
The faculty exodus has been happening primarily because they do not see a future for their own research on the campus. Good faculty don’t look to students as those who are just to be herded from the beginning of the sem to the end by giving lectures to impartus cameras, by marking lousy answer sheets, by entertaining ridiculous arguments during revaluation and by re-designing assignments because students cannot do them. They look for potential collaborators in students, they look forward to students knocking on their chamber doors and asking them for projects to do, for proposing new ideas, and for deliberating on those ideas. And what do they get? Applications for projects that are done to finish the credit requirements without ruining the grades. Projects are a joke for us. It’s only natural that they leave our campus.
It is disheartening that we have, knowingly or unknowingly, started to celebrate academic mediocrity. Smaller syllabus, easier assignments, simpler projects, and tutorial numericals’ models in exams are worshipped. Whether the instructor gives grades leniently is the most important factor in selecting a course. We abhor reading journal papers for coursework. We complain whenever the coursework is heavy. We do not respond to initiatives by SU and the Administration in proportion to the numbers we are in. So much for being a technical college.
We shouldn’t forget that we are a university. Academics are important. And that doesn’t mean studying half-baked concepts with no idea as to what they mean and running a riot to get marks increased and feeling elated or depressed according to what grade one gets, but being actually serious about a chosen area of study or research. What percentage of us publish a decent research paper through our stay at college? What percentage of us have actually founded startup ventures? What percentage of us pursue something because we love it and not because we get placed or get a PS? What percentage of us actually gain enough competence in the domain we love to be employable? These aren’t rhetorical questions but those that require a closer look and actual quantification. Our stated objective should be our identity, not that of the herd we follow.
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PS: Of course, I do not take a personal moral high-ground in any regard. I see myself as guilty as any. And concerned we all should be, as I.
PPS: The intent is not to take dig at anyone or any collective (faculty or students) but to initiate a debate. In this attempt, I might have taken liberties on facts that I am not aware of. Apologies if misrepresentations did seep in.
Op-Ed article by Sharad Hotha. Edited by Rohit Dwivedula. Published 6th May, 2018.