Costly haste

In its hurry to switch to the semester system, the administration of the University of Delhi precludes any possibility of a debate over the issue.

VIEWED from the perspective of laymen, there is little substantive difference between the semester system and the annual system except that the former has examinations every six months and the latter once a year. In practice, however, the two systems have historically evolved in fundamentally different ways. Their approaches towards pedagogy, evaluation, interdisciplinarity, the teaching-learning process and, indeed, the very idea and purpose of education are considerably different. It is for this reason that whenever an educational institution decides to switch from the annual mode to the semester mode (or for that matter the other way round in rare cases), it invariably goes through a process of deliberation stretched over several years. The University of Edinburgh, for example, started the process in 2001 and was able to semesterise partially by 2005. Heriot-Watt University started the process of consultation for probable semesterisation of its undergraduate and postgraduate courses in May 2003, and last heard, it was still debating the advantages, disadvantages and possible structures. The University of Sussex initiated deliberations on the issue almost three years ago but is yet to start semesterisation. The University of Melbourne was able to semesterise partially after several years of deliberations. One can give many more such examples from all over the world.

These debates generated complex arguments both for and against semesters. It would have been instructive for the parties concerned in the current controversy in the University of Delhi to have consulted the relevant documents, which are available on the websites of these universities. A careful look at the records of these deliberations and the trajectory that semesterisation has taken in these cases reveals several interesting points about the whole issue.

First, in most cases, the administration (as against the academics) was always keen to semesterise, especially in privately funded institutions. Why? Because, as is transparently stated in the case of Heriot-Watt University, North American students, who are relatively rich, prefer to go to institutions that follow a semester calendar since that is the system in place in their countries. The academics who opposed semesterisation were in most cases equally concerned about attracting richer students with funds. But they also realised that maintaining and enhancing academic standards were the prerequisite to attracting any kind of student at all, rich or not so rich.

Secondly, the experience of Third World countries with less infrastructural support has not been very good so far as the semesterisation process is concerned, and those of them that semesterised in the last decade or so have been forced to revisit the whole issue in the face of declining academic standards. A case in point is the University of Zimbabwe, which actually semesterised all its courses in 2000 in the face of stiff opposition from the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences.

A research paper published in the reputed journal Feminist Africa notes: The semesterisation of the university paved the way for delivering fast education' in much the same way that fast food systems deliver cheap and poor quality meals. In higher education, operations such as teaching and examination are similarly broken down and repackaged in standardised combinations suitable for mass consumption, resulting in uniform, mechanical curricula that leave very little room for creativity by lecturers and students (Alienation, Gender and Institutional Culture at the University of Zimbabwe; Gaidzanwa; Feminist Africa: 2007; page 72). It goes on to note that it took four years to change the degree regulations to fit the semesterisation. The exodus of academic staff increased, resulting in a heavier teaching burden for those remaining.

Thirdly, no sincere academic participant in the debates even in Europe believed either the semester or the annual mode to be better than the other per se. Hence, after the initial round of messy controversies and black-and-white positions, the deliberations usually focussed around the suitability of the semester system for specific disciplines (humanities, social sciences, professional courses, sciences, and so on), at particular levels (undergraduate and postgraduate), and with regard to structure, size, constituency and the needs of the university concerned. This in itself was a highly enriching process for most universities irrespective of which side (pro- or anti-semester) won the debate in the end. For, it became an occasion to deliberate over pedagogical practices, institutional arrangements and more generally a means through which the limitations of the present system were identified and dealt with.

One may point out that the University of Delhi also took the initiative in 2008 and is still in the process of semesterisation. However, the last three years have not witnessed a grind of ideas across the spectrum. The process started with the Vice-Chancellor writing to all stakeholders of the university asking them to give their suggestions for the implementation of the semester system at the undergraduate level.

Clearly, there was no space to discuss the desirability or feasibility of the system per se even though the responses from teachers across colleges and departments showed that they had decided to deliberate over that basic question. The administration on its part never responded to the detailed critiques, suggestions, concerns, and so on provided by various colleges.

Since 2008, in fact, the space for debate has continuously shrunk, and this one way, ram-it-through wisdom recently culminated in an extraordinary and unprecedented decision by the Academic Council to take over the powers of other designated bodies of the university (such as the Committee of Courses and the Faculty of Social Sciences) and hand them over to the superior discretion of the Vice-Chancellor. By this decision, the Academic Council authorised the V-C to take all necessary measures as the Vice-Chancellor may deem fit for semesterisation of remaining undergraduate courses (including bifurcation of existing syllabi if required) to be implemented from the academic session 2011-12.

Unfortunately, in the case of the University of Delhi, the process never matured out of the initial round of controversy. Instead, it has snowballed into a full-fledged constitutional crisis of sorts. This is because the university administration seems to be seized with a missionary zeal and in an inexplicable hurry to reform the university, precluding any possibility of serious deliberation over the issue.

Within the university, there are designated institutions and established processes through which academic reforms can be initiated. Some of these institutions are dominated by administrators (including some who are also academics). Thus, for example, the Academic Council, the apex body for academic matters in the university, has only about 25 elected teachers out of a total of 175 or so members. The bulk of the council's members are either nominated or ex officio members such as heads of departments (about 86 at present), deans (close to 20) and principals by rotation (15). The council has historically played a crucial role in the maintenance of academic standards, and if the university today stands as one of the most reputed affiliating universities for undergraduate colleges, this is also on account of the maturity and seriousness with which its members have democratically debated issues of grave significance over the last six or seven decades. Academic Council meetings at the University of Delhi are notoriously long, sometimes lasting close to over 20 hours. It is in this context that one must view the fact that the council meeting during which the semesterisation of undergraduate courses in the university (taught mostly in affiliated colleges) was approved lasted only for a few minutes (June 5, 2009). This in the face of a demand by elected teachers for a debate.

It surprised no one when the Executive Council (which has 23 members but only two elected teacher representatives) also passed the semester proposal, on June 26, 2009, without much deliberation and with four dissents.

Contrary to this, many statutory bodies (for example, the Faculty of Social Sciences) with the brief to make concrete proposals for academic matters and where teachers are in a majority have opposed these proposals, leading to a situation where different constitutional bodies seem to be working at cross purposes. Interestingly, however, this constitutional crisis is not even acknowledged as one by most on either side. In fact, the media, the general public and even some academics erroneously describe the situation as a face-off between teachers on the one hand and the university on the other. It is easily forgotten that the university is not coterminous with its administration and that the teachers as members of designated bodies are part of the university. What could have been an enriching moment for the university community to reflect over its problems and promises and to gain from the rich diversity of opinion has been lost, it seems, irretrievably. Instead, it now has litigation and counter-litigation, and the outcome will be decided in black and white by the justice-dispensing system of the overworked courts of law.

What is at stake in the whole issue? Let us briefly examine the idea of the annual system as against the semester system. Historically, the annual system at the undergraduate level has been organised around a set structure of an Honours programme, in which the college/university offers fully formed packages in terms of courses like History Honours, Physics Honours, Philosophy Honours, and so on. A student is admitted into a fully formed course, and the papers that will be part of that course are predetermined.

The semester system, however, is based on an altogether different concept of learning. Typically, a semesterised institution designs a large number of small papers within each discipline. Students choose from these free-floating papers from various disciplines and make a bouquet of papers to suit their own interests and requirements.

In some of the better institutions with the semester mode, these choices are in fact made semester-wise and not at the time of admission itself.

Ideally then, in a semester programme, students can opt for a certain number of papers from a particular discipline in which they major and the rest can be chosen from out of a range of papers from a variety of other disciplines. On the face of it, this is an alluringly flexible system that allows students numerous choices.

If this were the end of the matter, the issue would never have been so contentious and the choice would have been very simple. Yet, there are several other administrative, pedagogical, social and structural implications that need to be sorted out before any conclusion can be reached.

The semester teaching takes place at a frantic pace through an uncompromisingly inflexible schedule of lectures, tutorials and assignments. It assumes more or less even levels of competence on the part of students and hence favours those who have come from educationally advantaged backgrounds. Learning for the rest becomes an exercise in picking up problem-solving skills without the time to explore the more complex knowledge processes that lie behind the exercise.

It is for this reason that the semester system originated in and is very popular in societies with a more or less uniform standard of and equal access to school education. Such is the case with the United States, Canada and certain European countries with less diversity in school education. In countries such as India, the semester system with all its choices, one may argue, can be a luxury that a few may enjoy at the cost of a vast disadvantaged majority. (One teacher likened the dimensions of this problem to proposals to make a Singapore out of Delhi by chasing away those slum dwellers on whose underpaid labour the city survives.)

For the same reason as cited above, infrastructure-rich institutions that admit extremely selectively, fewer than 1.5 per cent of the aspirants through tough entrance examinations, as in the case of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), face fewer problems running in a semester mode. Other institutions that are running successfully under the semester mode are primarily postgraduate institutions, such as Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), with a much higher ratio of per student financial grant.

In the fast-paced format of semester education, there is absolutely no margin for either administrative error (you cannot have revaluation, for example) or infrastructural lag. Many students mobilise their reading materials with help from their seniors, running around to other colleges, using teachers' personal copies, and occasionally also getting some support from the college library. One of the biggest struggles for the undergraduate students of the University of Delhi is finding the right reading material in time. While this is not a desirable situation in any system, semesters will penalise students more than the annual system by not allowing the uneven pace of studies that is necessary to minimise the loss on this account.

A BSc student of St. Stephen's (which is already running in semester mode), Ananta Joshi, who scored 95 per cent in the 12th standard examinations, had this to say about her experience with the semester system: There was no time for understanding anything in the subject, let alone to go into any depth. We simply collected photocopied notes from seniors and tried to memorise them. To adopt the semester system first and then to try and update infrastructure or look for reading materials in the Hindi medium is like trying to run trains without first laying down the tracks or building railway platforms.

However, if one were to come up with innovative ideas to overcome the problems of the semester system, one would still need to sort out a whole bunch of other issues. In a semesterised college with many choices open to students, some papers that are offered are not opted for by even a single student. In such a case, the teacher who is hired to teach such a course is either given the pink slip or is expected to concentrate just on doing and guiding research. Neither of these options is available to colleges of the University of Delhi. College teachers do not get to guide research (though this is now theoretically possible) and they cannot be fired, at least not under their current service conditions.

However, the science courses of the university, which are already running under the new system, have not faced this problem because the structure within which they switch over from the old system is not the famously flexible system of semesters. Rather, only the pattern of two examinations in a year has been adopted. Indeed, in this way the university has been partially semesterised for decades now. Courses such as journalism honours (taught only in five or six colleges) and business studies (again offered in very few colleges) have always followed the semester system. The university is now on its way to stamping out the annual system from every single course. The students in this biannual system of the university actually have fewer choices than they did in the annual system. Unfortunately, however, this superficial switchover will make the university vulnerable to all the notorious disadvantages of the semester system.

Superficial reform

So, why is the university projecting this superficial examination reform as a progressive educational reform? And why is it not adopting the ideal semester system? The reason simply is that the ideal semester system for which the American institutions of higher education are known cannot be adopted in the University of Delhi. The colleges that teach the bulk of undergraduate courses do not have the appropriate student-teacher ratio or even a quarter of the infrastructure that is a prerequisite for adopting that system. It would take the university at least a decade to adopt the system, and it would need substantively higher resource grants than it can afford.

The catch, however, is that even if the university were to miraculously acquire such First-World levels of infrastructure, it would still not be feasible to put in place the format of the real semester system. For, this system is simply incompatible with a university the size of the University of Delhi, which has about 80 colleges affiliated to it. The Vice-Chancellor of the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India (ICFAI) University had to say this on the issue: Most of the institutions or colleges in India are affiliated to some university where there is an external examination system. In such a scenario the semester system is bound to fail (India Education Review: March 2011). Semester courses involve personalised interaction between students and teachers, where the teacher sits across from students and guides them.

Such a practice is laudable but impossible to adopt in colleges where teachers do not even have a place of their own to sit in, let alone an office space to work in. Another prerequisite for the system to work is that the teacher who sets up a course, teaches it and guides students through it is also the teacher who evaluates them in the closed-knit format. Such is the practice followed in smaller institutions such as the IITs, the IIMs and JNU. In the University of Delhi, where courses such as English, history, political science or economics honours are taught simultaneously in more than 50 colleges, such pedagogy is difficult enough to imagine let alone implement. It is not difficult to see then why it is the bigger departments of social sciences and humanities that have most doggedly opposed the initiative.

For, the advantages or disadvantages of the system lie in the structure within which it is placed. The structure within which the university is going to make a transition for its arts and humanities courses at the undergraduate level and the structure under which the science undergraduate courses have already semesterised is a structure prepared by a committee whose members were nominated by the Vice-Chancellor. This body, appropriately called the Empowered Committee and consisting mostly of principals, made its proposal six months after the Academic Council and Executive Council approved semesterisation without a blueprint of what kind of semesterisation they foresaw. It is most unfortunate that this proposed structure, arguably the most important document for semesterisation, has never been discussed or even circulated in any of the academic or administrative statutory bodies.

Pankaj Jha is Associate Professor, Department of History, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi.