One More Batch of Students Pass Through Our Portals

When I was looking around my facebook page, one of our last year's student came up and we had a chat.I suddenly realized how fast one whole year have passed. Right now we are in the middle of that phase where the 2011 pass out have completed their exams and over the last couple of days been leaving the campus.

Last year the placement scene was bad and this guy I was chatting with, had to go over to Bangalore and got a very good placement. This year situation is a lot better, yet there will be quite a few who would have to seek employment off-campus. We were actually chatting about how just going over to Bangalore and other such centers will let people find jobs. Couple of questions arise from there. Why can't these people find jobs here in West Bengal? The long time ruling party did not do much in terms of attracting these IT companies into this state. The party was actively opposed to this so called "automation" and the state was synonymous with bandhs, strikes and trouble in general. Now that that has changed, hope the scenario will change.

Second question was the quality of the engineers that are being produced in the country. A Mckinsey report had said only 25% of engineering graduates are employable. West Bengal did not have the private engineering colleges as in many other states for a long while. Over the last decade though these colleges proliferated and were put under the umbrella of the WBUT, the technical university. Strangely, these colleges as a lot seem to produce engineers even below the national average. This university has almost a 100% pass rate. I cannot imagine that could be good for anybody.

All the subjects have a 30% internal evaluation quota. Thje purpose must have been good when set up. But, what has really happened is the marks obtained by students are not any indicator of their quality but an attempt by the colleges to keep the pass rate high. Students get a very high set of marks out of this 30 marks. Thereafter they just have to pick up 10 to 15% may be a little more to achieve the 40% pass marks.

Thus, this has given rise to a strange phenomenon. Final year students, particularly in the last semester, do not attend classes. They demand and get reasonable numbers in the these internal evaluations. The balance 10-15-25 marks out of 70 is easy to get, thanks to various question-answer help books available in the market. Students have tough balancing job of course. They have to manage placement interview etc. But, all the same, not doing any class at all cannot be good! Do they learn any of these last semester subjects? Doubtful.Yet, every year we are churning out a few hundered of them, from each of these colleges. Where are we going!?

But then that is just one side of the problem. Most places there is a problem with teaching too. Teachers quite often are not up to the job. We manage to get the syllabus completed somehow. We are unable provide enough effort to get the students interested or make them learn. It is rather a vicious cycle. We go through this year after year, when can we turn all these into a virtuous circle, if at all!!