Marks and market

The soaring cut-off marks for admission to Delhi colleges point to institutional failures in India's higher education sector.

A PERFECT 100. Nothing less would help you get into one of the top colleges under the University of Delhi (D.U.), India's largest Central university, if you were a science student seeking to join the commerce stream. The first cut-off marks for the B.A (Honours) commerce programme in D.U.'s Sri Ram College of Commerce stood at 100 per cent for students with a non-commerce background.

While the steady increase in cut-off marks in D.U. year after year has demoralised the hopefuls, this year they reached ridiculous heights. The cut-off marks for commerce and economics, the most sought-after courses, in other prestigious colleges in the university ranged from 97 per cent to 99 per cent. The Hindu College and the Hansraj College declared 98 per cent to 99 per cent for their commerce courses. The cut-off marks for other courses in humanities and pure sciences were between 90 per cent and 98 per cent in what is considered the best colleges housed on the university's north campus.

Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said the cut-off marks were irrational and exclusionary. Attributing such high cut-offs to systemic and policy issues, Sibal said: Is a student with 97 or 98 per cent incapable of studying commerce compared to a student with 100 per cent? Only one student in this entire list has 100 per cent marks in the science stream and he may never take commerce.

Sibal, though, did not elaborate on the systemic issues or the impact of these on the higher education sector in India. But he did, indeed, raise some pertinent questions on issues that have needed attention for long. For instance, the D.U. in the past decade has attracted only the creamiest layer of the upper middle class, who can afford to study in privately funded elite schools and bear the high costs of staying in the national capital.

There are also other issues that bog the system down. The D.U. administration, in the past two years, has apparently shown undue haste in implementing reforms without consulting the teaching community properly. There have been protests, including strikes, by the teachers against reforms like semesterisation in a heterogeneous university such as the D.U., where students get admission on the basis of percentages and not a common entrance test. This, they say, will make it difficult for underprivileged students to cope.

Amid this fear that the already elite D.U. would become even more exclusionary, Vice-Chancellor Dinesh Singh, just ahead of the new admissions, declared that the colleges had to come up with cut-off marks on their own and not on the basis of applications from students as it was earlier. This was ostensibly to avoid the need to apply individually to every college.

Consequently, the colleges had to speculate the cut-off marks on the basis of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) results in the North India circle. Fearing an onrush of applicants to limited seats, most colleges raised their cut-off marks significantly. Terming the high cut-off marks at Sri Ram College of Commerce an aberration, Dinesh Singh said: The colleges decide their individual cut-offs through their staff councils. We may have to take a look at this and alter the university statutes. The university is not for too much centralisation.

The larger issue

The trend raises larger issues with respect to the quality of education and assessment of students' work. Many teachers in D.U. feel that the central boards in charge of secondary and higher secondary education in India have been doling out marks.

Saikat Ghosh, a faculty member of the GTB Khalsa College on the north campus, wrote in one of the national weeklies: Strange as it may seem, the hundred per cent cut-off for applicants at a premier college of the University of Delhi stems from the popular imagination that our students are getting smarter every year. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) keeps this propaganda alive by doling out marks to many who are not even considered fit for low-end jobs at a later stage in their lives.

NASSCOM, a high-virtue conglomerate in a rapidly expanding service sector, has recently complained that it is becoming increasingly rare to find job-seekers with average linguistic, cognitive and ideational skills that will render them fit for employment. And yet, every year, around the time the board results are declared, bureaucrats in the CBSE and policy experts on secondary education emerge from their cubbyholes with self-congratulatory grins and loud shows of pomp.... He [Sibal] would find many students with 90 per cent or above in subjects like English and history struggling to string straight sentences. He might find them inclined to confuse globalisation with global warming. Their writing samples comprise nervously cobbled paragraphs replete with American slang and cliches.

As a result, students who pass the State board examinations in Bihar, West Bengal or Rajasthan, known for their strict marking, lose out in the race. Of 2,097 students who scored over 95 per cent marks across the country, 818 belong to the CBSE Delhi region and 97 fall under the Ajmer region, including the States of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, and the Union Territory of Dadra & Nagar Haveli.

But hardly any State board student, not even merit-list holders, has scored such marks. Prof. Yash Pal, former Chairman of the University Grants Commission, says students who score 100 per cent should be given negative marking as he feels that in the race to mug up, they would have learnt nothing and washed out their creativity. The recommendations of a report, Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education, he submitted to the Ministry of Human Resource Development in June 2009 are nowhere close to implementation. Among other recommendations, the committee had proposed a national testing scheme for university admissions on the lines of Graduate Record Examinations, an admission requirement for many colleges in the United States, open to all aspirants and to be held more than once a year.

We train our students to work for others. Indian colleges teach their students to make nuts and bolts, and the so-called specialisation that institutes talk about is highly unrealistic. Even the Indian Institutes of Technology are nothing but undergraduation factories, said Yash Pal. While this could be an extreme view, it can be safely said that the University of Delh's skyrocketing cut-off marks are a symptom of larger institutional failures in India's higher education.

The University of Delhi has 77 colleges under it, but the rush for admission, as usual, is on the north campus, considered to house the best colleges of the university in terms of quality and infrastructure. Consequently, the cut-off marks for admission to these colleges soar.

The quality of education in many colleges under the university is abysmal. And so is the infrastructure in these colleges, said a faculty member in D.U. on condition of anonymity. Many of the teachers in these colleges, especially the ones which get the Delhi government's funding, have been recruited because of their political connections. With the poor funding, the situation has become pretty bad. Both the Union government and the UGC have paid no attention to monitoring these colleges, as a result of which they could never improve its standards in the last 50 years. Unlike these colleges, the so-called prestigious colleges have the advantage of funding by some rich trusts and are also the oldest that have helped retain the UGC's attention. Thus, they could keep their standards up, the teacher said.

Sanjaya Bohidar, a faculty of economics in Sri Ram College of Commerce, says the fact that D.U. has become the most sought-after destination for undergraduate programmes speaks largely of the state of other universities in northern India. Most of the institutions, like the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) or the Allahabad University (A.U.) and other State universities have drastically degraded in their quality, he said. BHU and A.U. are much older than D.U. and were once known to be the best in northern India. Most of the State universities have not upgraded their syllabi in the last 30 years. The student-teacher ratio in these universities is abysmally poor.

Saumyajit Bhattacharya, who teaches economics in Kirorimal College, finds fault with the higher education policy for the present situation. Firstly, there are too few publicly funded universities in the country to meet the demand. Because of the withdrawal of state funding, the existing ones face a huge infrastructure crisis. The government proposes to bring the Foreign Universities Bill so that Indian students can benefit from foreign education at home. The government has called for private investments in higher education and has been gradually withdrawing from all its responsibilities. The question to ask, however, is who will benefit from the foreign universities and these private universities? The elite or the poor? he said.

Secondly, the recruitment of teachers has gone down drastically in Central universities. There is no incentive for good students to come back to education. There is a severe crunch of teachers in Central universities, he added.

Thirdly, the incentive for existing teachers is everything except teaching. According to the point system of grading teachers as conceived by the UGC, a teacher gets points by the number of publications and degrees he or she has, and there is no point for teaching in the classrooms. The basic principle of pedagogy is being compromised, said Bhattacharya.

It is not hard to find examples of what Bohidar and Bhattacharya are speaking about. For instance, even as the government allows reservation for other backward classes (OBCs), teachers say these seats are never fully occupied in D.U. because most underprivileged OBC students cannot afford to stay in Delhi. The number of hostels the university provides is less than adequate despite its repeated demands to the government for more.

Another desperate situation is that of a teacher who passed out from JNU and went to his hometown in Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan to teach in a local college. His colleagues have allegedly threatened him with dire consequences for taking classes and disturbing the way things are now. Jhunjhunu students, it is said, are used to learning from guide books authored by their own teachers who seldom come to classes. Many teachers, it is alleged, earn commissions from the publishers of these guide books. The problems in India's higher education are thus all interconnected, and the high cut-off marks only point towards the government's systematic negligence of higher education over many decades. With the centralisation of employment opportunities in Delhi and the degradation of infrastructure in small towns across North India after economic reforms were introduced, it will only be high hopes to imagine that the D.U. cut-off marks will fall in future.

Aryama, a political science teacher at the GTB Khalsa College, put it aptly: The vision of mass education is long lost in the race of the economy based on scores and percentages. It is an age where an individual is born with pre-fixed choices. A science student cannot shift to commerce; a commerce student cannot take up humanities as the cut-offs do not allow them to. A 15-year-old child in class X has the responsibility of making the most important choice of his life. The dominant economy demands such a situation where education is directed at manufacturing and not aimed at social change.

The present education system, right from the primary to higher levels, has become urban-centric and caters only to middle-class sensitivities, which sees education as a direct route to a profession which the market demands. The saddest question is, however, which other country would need a progressive liberal arts education more than India?