Yatendra

Copying in a Victorian classroom from Vaughan, J, Nelson's New Drawing Class


This system is well aware of the fact that it has failed to provide students with an environment which will make them develop their cognitive and intellectual abilities, and it is completely fine with it.

Several news sources are talking about the incompetence of engineering graduates in India. As an engineering student, that too from a private college, I see this as an opportunity to share a collective view from the section that is most affected by this problem. It is quite infuriating that this is only seen as a crisis for the market. Around 15 lakh engineers graduate every year in India, which means that this is actually a crisis of a generation. A generation that is systematically being paralysed educationally, socially and politically by the system.

An  article about the employability of engineering graduates on the web based news portal, The Wire that I recently came across  raised a very important point. It claimed that “(t)he problem is not the lack of latest knowledge but the lack of any knowledge.” Any knowledge, even the most basic of all!

In our society, one does not become an engineer by taking a four-year course, one becomes an engineer the moment she/he chooses to study PCM in class 11th. When we are just 15-16 years old, we are burdened with the load of deciding the fate of our life by choosing a stream, i.e. Science, Arts or Commerce. Once a teenager chooses science, there is no looking back. Without breaking this norm, there is no reasonable solution to this problem. We need a flexible school education system. The system needs to come clear on its priorities - comprehensive development of a school student, or fulfilling family aspirations of a career determined largely by market trends.

Well, guess what! It has already been declared by the school education system that schools must focus on students’ comprehensive development. Although at the same time, coaching institutes are openly declaring that they are factories that produce IITians, where students spend their life’s most crucial years with minimal social interaction, without co-curricular activities and even school. While knowing this fact, there is no point in even discussing comprehensive evolution of students, because what could be the best solution to alienation of workers under capitalism? Alienate them the moment they are born! Our education system seems to be succeeding wonderfully in doing precisely that.

That leads us to the next link of this chain of problems.

This system is well aware of the fact that it has failed to provide students with an environment which will make them develop their cognitive and intellectual abilities, and it is completely fine with it. This attitude has been perfected by engineering institutes way too well. Students completing their assignments with dishonesty is only the tip of the iceberg. The main part of this problem is the fact that all the teachers are aware of this, and are actually at peace with it. And, the most absurd part is that students get marked differently on the same copied assignment. Even the original assignment written by the brightest (so-called) student of the class is also a copied from teachers’ favourite website or book, from where teachers themselves copy the problems they give as assignments to students.

 Students already know that the teacher would not accept any different answer from what she/he is familiar with. Because of this, the whole learning process has shrunk to just googling and copy and pasting. Even if students claim that they are experts in the field, deep down they know the true meaninglessness of this practice. This process has become a routine and when this happens, learning loses its meaning. This void of meaninglessness spreads across the whole field of engineering education like a chain reaction. The most noticeable and weird consequence is the unspoken agreement between the management, faculty and students that their future does not require any serious engineering knowledge, or exposure to laboratories and latest technologies in order for them to become engineers.

The situation worsens in the case of semester examinations when (sometimes) students do not know who is evaluating the answer book. Which leads us to-

Non-transparency in the Evaluation Process

The director of IIT Kharagpur, Prof Sanjay Govind Dhande has expressed concern about the examination pattern of the JEE that it is not quite effective in evaluating entrants to IITs.  According to him, “(w)hile setting an exam module, the exam planner should have a clear idea of which parameters the test is supposed to test a candidate on. This needs to be well conveyed to both the exam setter and the grader.” If the JEE is failing in this expectation, the condition of examinations during the course of engineering education is much worse. What Mr. Dhande said was way too correct.  One thing that scares engineers is too much correctness. What could be more exemplary than the fact that we take the value of pi as 3!

The whole question paper can be easily pre-assumed with a little help of statistics, probability and common sense. All our engineering minds are being judged on our ability to mug up the answer keys. It is evident from the flourishing answer key business in localities near engineering colleges. What a weird time to be alive, humanities exams have become objective, and engineering exams, subjective.

As the market requires only unskilled people who can easily be taught coding, the main purpose is to fulfil this need. Computer Science and Information Technology branches get the maximum preference, other branches are just the substitutes. Hence it becomes very important for students of other branches to learn to code even if the level of expertise in it (coding) will not help them in their own field.

On top of that, the evaluating pattern gets worse with the lack of communication between teachers and students. A teacher gets paid on the basis of the number of answer sheets she/he checks in the specified time.  Since in most private engineering colleges many teachers are themselves PhD students with similar pressure on them, they often have other priorities than their students. This becomes obvious at the time of final year projects, when teachers appear unable to help students on topics other than their own PhD topic.  Students are either forced to pick the project topic according to teachers’ preference, or there is a pretty easy way out. Just buy the project!  Our marks in the examinations (our “future”) completely depend on the morality and the mood of the evaluators, who are also products of this system only. Merely good handwriting, a list of important questions and densely filled lot of pages with utter nonsense are a better way to get more marks, than knowledge and an honest work ethic.

 “Passing” the semester exam is not a big task; this is the common perception among students. Most of the job choices students have do not require any sort of expertise in the subjects they study in classrooms. The chances of getting a job depend only on the student’s personality and coding skills, even if she/he is a civil engineer. This leads us to the next problem:

The Ingrained Hierarchy of Engineering Branches

It has already been assumed by everybody concerned, the AICTE (the national body overseeing engineering education), managements running engineering colleges, teachers and also students, that engineers exist only to fulfil the market demand. As the market requires only unskilled people who can easily be taught coding, the main purpose is to fulfil this need. Computer Science and Information Technology branches get the maximum preference, other branches are just the substitutes. Hence it becomes very important for students of other branches to learn to code even if the level of expertise in it (coding) will not help them in their own field. On the other hand, as the only goal of most of the students is to get a job at the beginning of the seventh semester, it does not seem like a problem to them. So, when people say that engineers are incompetent in fulfilling the demand of the market, these actually are engineering graduates from different branches who are compelled to learn to code along with their own branch of engineering.

Another reality is that the number of career opportunities for other branches is similar to the number of opportunities for a fine arts student.  These are even worse in the case of Instrumentation, Chemical, Leather, or Textile Engineering.  As long as our institutional system remains more focused to serve the demand of the market, than to provide students proper knowledge in their respective fields, and our education system continues with placement-oriented education, there is no point in discussing the competence of students/engineers.

 “The struggle itself towards the height is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus). That is the absurdity of engineering education in the country.


Yatendra is an engineering student in a college in Greater Noida.