How to learn less in 4 years than in 3 years? Ask UGC

On March 17 of this year, the University Grants Commission released a draft curriculum for a ‘Four-Year Undergraduate Programme’, or FYUGP, a key component of the National Education Policy. The FYUGP is a thorough transformation of the old system, and so it is vital that both academia and the general public take a close look at it and make their thoughts known. The curriculum demarcates three phases for the students’ progression. The first stage consists of three semesters and is devoted to basic courses labelled as Language, Common, Introductory and Vocational. In the Introductory portion, the student must take courses from each of Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities. At the end of this stage, students will be allotted their Major discipline based on their grades (and not their performance in entrance tests or school). During the second stage, in semesters four through six, students will complete their Major along with a significant portion of two Minors. At the end of the third year, the student can graduate with a plain Bachelor’s degree. Some students can stay for a fourth year, the final stage, and complete a Bachelor’s degree called Honours or Research. These students will be eligible for direct admission to PhD programmes in India. The current three-year Honours degree consists of 148 credits, of which 108 are assigned to the Major discipline. A student completing all four years of the FYUGP will complete 160 credits, of which 48 are for the Major and another 18 for Research. What is striking is how little is gained and how much is lost. Due to the proliferation of breadth requirements, the FYUGP students will study an extra year and yet emerge with much less knowledge of their main subject than preceding batches. One market for FYUGP is students hoping to go abroad for graduate studies, for whom it is useful to be able to show an extra year of study. However, this benefit will not accrue once foreign universities realise that the knowledge of the discipline has actually decreased! From the student’s viewpoint, the new curriculum is strange indeed. The first three semesters ignore achievements in school or any predilection towards a particular discipline. Someone wishing to major in Mathematics may be rejected due to poor performance in the common subjects, with no opportunity to demonstrate aptitude for Mathematics itself. Having stagnated or even regressed for three semesters, students will be asked to suddenly shift gears and complete the requirements for a standard Bachelor’s degree in just three semesters. This is a recipe for disaster. Instead of justifying these curious choices, the document provides long lists of imagined benefits, with no justification. We look for a unified vision, but instead we find confusion and contradiction. medium nocaption91321874 Consider the statement that while students may opt for a three-year degree, the four-year option is “a preferred option since it would allow the opportunity to experience the full range of holistic and multidisciplinary education”. However, the fourth year is only available to students whose CGPA is at least 7.5 and this will restrict its benefits to, at best, only a quarter of the student population. The rest will complete a mutilated three-year programme shorn of its most useful parts. I am a teacher whose career has occurred in the internet age. When students turn in an essay which is verbose and inconsistent, the most likely explanation is that they did not think through the theme and merely browsed websites with related content, finally copying the nicest-sounding parts. On exploring this possibility, I quickly discovered that a major part of the UGC document was directly copied from a webpage of the University of Michigan. I found another significant portion on a webpage of the University of Arizona. This plagiarism has revealed the inner workings of the committees that formulate the national policies and curricula. Today, these committees are faceless. A curriculum that will completely alter our higher education ought to be designed by the best minds in the country, yet it was issued with no mention of who was responsible for it. It has evidently been put together by a group that pooled their individual suggestions but did not try to harmonise them in a common cause. They probably delegated the actual writing of the document and did not even check whether the numbers entered in one section matched those in another. There are various models for introducing breadth in undergraduate education. A university adopts a particular model depending on the nature of its student intake and the goals of its undergraduate programme. A committee that wishes to choose a uniform and rigid model for all institutions of our country faces an impossible task. So how do you describe your vision, when you do not have one? You copy from others. The FYUGP draft makes many promises about vocational training, exposure to research practices, immersion in societal issues, unfettered pursuit of individual interests, and so on. However, as we have seen, this icing is only to obscure the fact that there is no cake under it. The writer is Professor of Mathematics at Shiv Nadar University Illustration by Chad Crowe