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| Wednesday, Sep 24, 2008
Choice Based Credit System facing practical difficulties
Chennai: The Choice Based Credit System is just three months
old in Tamil Nadu universities, but many colleges are already
discovering that choice is tough to provide.
“In many cases, there is very little choice being offered
to students,” admitted Higher Education secretary K. Ganesan
after a meeting of State Vice-Chancellors chaired by Higher
Education Minister K. Ponmudy. A review of CBCS implementation
revealed that few colleges have the resources to offer a wide
range of innovative courses.
“We offer some skill-based courses under the CBCS system,
but there is no inter-disciplinary option. All students in a
department must opt for the same ‘elective’. We
cannot afford to offer any real choice – we don’t
have the faculty or infrastructure,” says a professor
of a government college in Chennai. “At the most, we can
offer industrial chemistry for chemistry students or industrial
statistics for statistics students…The government does
not understand the strain on faculty workload,” he complained.
The situation is even worse in rural colleges, said Vice-Chancellors
at the meeting.
The government had suggested a college cluster system, whereby
students could take advantage of the choice provided at a neighbouring
college. However, Mr. Ganesan admitted that this plan was mired
in revenue-sharing wrangles. “If a government college
student wants to take a course at a self-financing college,
who will pay? And how much will be paid? This needs to be discussed
and sorted out,” he said.
Government colleges said the effort to accommodate outside students
and offer a more flexible timetable in a cluster college system
would be more trouble than it was worth.
A further meeting of principals of all arts and science and
engineering colleges, as well as polytechnics, will be held
on October 19 to discuss these practical difficulties. They
will also consider how best to expand the vocational certificate
programme. The Directorate of Technical Education has been asked
to compile information on the polytechnics which would collaborate
with colleges for this scheme. The Vice-Chancellors will also
meet again on October 18 to discuss the implementation of the
academic audit proposal. The uniform syllabus proposal, the
status of MoUs with foreign universities, and the implementation
of various government grant schemes will also be discussed further.
Courtesy: The Hindu
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