The University Grants Commission (UGC), in its January 9, 2015 circular, communicated to vice-chancellors/directors of Indian universities, ‘guidelines’ on adoption of a Choice-Based Credit System (CBCS). These guidelines advocate standardised programmes of study to be implemented across the entire university system at both the undergraduate (UG) and the post-graduate (PG) levels.
These standardised programmes are to consist of three kinds of courses/papers: (a) core courses that are compulsory, (b) elective courses, chosen from a ‘pool of papers’, and (c) foundation courses that have both a compulsory and an elective component.
On April 10, the UGC followed this up with minimum course guidelines for the UG courses, having a detailed outline of the three types of courses under the CBCS. The compulsory foundation courses are now termed ability enhancing courses (AECs), and the elective component renamed as skill enhancement courses (SECs).
The elective courses consist of discipline-specific and generic courses (DSECs and GECs). The latter will also include a ‘research’ component in the form of dissertations/projects that will have a relatively larger number of credits, and can supplant DSECs.
The detailed guidelines also include draft syllabi for most of the BA/BSc Honours programmes that, presently, focus predominantly on a single discipline, and the multi-disciplinary BA/BSc programmes. These syllabi state explicitly, for the first time, the weights for the three different types of courses, thus enabling an evaluation of the impact that the CBCS will have on the existing academic content of the UG programmes across the country.
Impact on universities: The impact of the CBCS on the UG Honours programme of the University of Delhi (DU) is presented in detail for one discipline viz. Economics. The Honours programme under the CBCS consists of 14 core-disciplines and four DSE courses, along with two AECs, a minimum of two SECs, and four GECs. Out of the total of 26 courses, core-discipline papers viz. the core papers (14) and DSECs (4), account for a total of only 18. This proportion gets reduced further as the dissertation/project (of 6 credits) takes away further one-and-a-half papers from the DSECs.
The BA (Honours) Economics programme of DU, before the introduction of semesterisation a couple of years ago, consisted of a total of 34 papers, of which there were 26 core-discipline papers. The introduction of the CBCS in DU will, therefore, reduce economics papers by 8 – a reduction of nearly one-third in the discipline-centred knowledge base of the Honours students.
There will be comparable severe truncation in core-discipline content across all the Honours programmes of DU. The university’s PG programmes will face similar outcomes as well, with the foundation courses (AECs and SECs) and the GECs constricting the core-discipline courses.
Cost of standardisation
As a result of the introduction of the CBCS, all universities currently teaching core discipline at levels higher than prescribed by the UGC will have to lower their standards of teaching of that discipline. This attempt to ‘standardise’ higher education will, therefore, result in standardisation of the nation’s entire knowledge creation/diffusion process at levels far lower than those existing currently.
As of now, the primary selection mechanism for teacher recruitment within the country is the UGC-conducted National Eligibility Test (NET), whose minimum eligibility is 55 per cent in the ‘relevant discipline’ at the PG level. With the introduction of the CBCS resulting in dilution of the levels of core-discipline teaching/learning across the university system, teacher-candidates from every discipline appearing in the NET will have lower levels of knowledge of those very disciplines in which they will be appointed as teachers.
This reduction in the discipline-centred knowledge base of the entire pool of teacher-candidates will have a deleterious cascading impact on the quality of the teachers inducted into the country’s higher education institutions (and the school system as well). There will also be severe adverse effects on the quality of research across the entire higher education system. The CBCS has serious implications for the academic standards of the country’s universities.
The UGC Act stipulates that “It shall be the general duty of the Commission to take... all such steps for the...determination and maintenance of standards of teaching, examination and research in Universities...”
However, its preference for the ‘skill’ and ‘ability’ enhancement papers – at the cost of core-discipline courses – indicates that the UGC is more concerned with the corporate sector’s demand for ‘highly employable’ graduates than with its mandate to maintain academic standards within the country’s university system.
(The writer teaches at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi. Views are personal)