“Students please take down the notes…. blah blah blah blah…… never ending blah….”
This is how classes are conducted in a very very famous and reputed private engineering college in Kerala. Students are forced to take down notes, as if it were a primary school. Notes have to be submitted on a monthly basis to be verified by the teacher.
There are weekly assignments for students. Students are not allowed to write the assignments from home, instead they have to come to the college on Saturdays and write assignments as if it were an exam.
Now a few questions.
From where do the teachers get assignment questions ? Do they come up with their own questions ? What is there in an assignment that makes it so special ? What’s the point in giving the same question to everyone and asking them to come up with different answers, considering the fact that the question itself is copied from the text book ?
Just think, how many productive hours does an engineering student waste in his 4 years of professional education writing stupid, nonsense assignments. We used to call assignment writing, “Xeroxing”, either from a text book or from another written copy of the assignment.
Why do we force our students to go through all sorts of such nonsense. We are so system oriented that we forget the essence of the activity itself. Its time that we asked to ourselves – “Is the system for us, or are we for the system”.
“how many productive hours does an engineering student waste in his 4 years of professional education writing stupid, nonsense assignments” productive hours ?? except for the hours just before the d day no hour is productive for majority of us (from the engineering education perspective)
Regarding the assignment ya i too feel that it in current form is not productive it is only xerox(Hand written) of the text books.
Comment by Aravind — June 25, 2009 @ 8:17 pm
Yeah, The assignments are not at all productive. We follow a system which is completely un scientifical. The assignments are assessed based on the readability and not the content. And about the content, it is purely Xerox of someone elses work.
I urge students not to write the notes given by teachers. Better save time reading some other books in the class. In my class, our teacher often fight with me for not taking the notes. And i used to be engaged with some other works. I think that is more productive to save time.
Comment by Tony Jose — June 26, 2009 @ 10:21 pm
Don’t mistake me when I say private colleges hardly encourage independent thinking. I would urge you to compare the students of pvt and govt colleges and most often than not, one would notice stark differences, often idealogical in nature. The strict oversight imposed in pvt colleges may trick the public into believing that govt colleges lack any proper guidance systems in place for students. But the truth is that such a lack of oversight also provides for a much more open and free thinking and often it is the alumni of such institutions that go on to do some very innovative things. Although pvt colleges see to it that their students perform splendidly well n exams, they do not ensure any development or foster free thinking. Independence found in govt colleges where nobody cares is precisely the breeding ground for such multi dimensional thinking. That could be one of the reasons why so many entrepreneurs rise from such colleges (just my observation here).
Comment by The Nomad — June 27, 2009 @ 12:41 pm
Its not that government colleges allow independent thinking… its just that they dont care… what you think…
Comment by Kenney Jacob — June 27, 2009 @ 12:58 pm
Precisely. So that should give the students an opportunity to think on their own. They don’t teach you enough that you pass exams let alone teach you to think! Its just that such a situation works out in the favor of free thinking.
Comment by The Nomad — June 28, 2009 @ 9:08 am
LOL… Just one correction, “This is how classes are conducted in a very very famous and reputed private engineering college in Kerala.” Please read this as “This is how classes are conducted in almost all engineering college in Kerala.” The reason:: The staff. I am not trying to put the blame on any1. Consider the facts.. 90% or more of all the teaching staff in these engineering colleges are aged between 23-27. These guys are just out of college, attend some interview, fail to clear them, finally end up at some colleges, as there is no other option left for them. Yeh!! You have a degree and if you can fool some old guys into believing you…. congrats you have landed on a job, with CTC at around 168000. Given the current scenario, i dont think our future *engineers will be saved from this trauma…. It will always remain the same.
Comment by Athul Raj — July 6, 2009 @ 8:01 pm
If the lecturer really knows what he is doing, assignments will be a lot more useful for an engineer’s future. We had our professor, made us write an assignment in the format of a technical paper in our semester 3. That gave us the exposure that, there are serious papers are out there, unlike the “xerox” assignment
In Kerala, the challenge we face is, almost all the lecturers join for the job, just after their studies (I too had done the same and I know how immature I was). They don’t get any orientation (every teacher in schools go through training, but college lecturers don’t).
It is something every college needs to work on.
Comment by Nasrajan — August 2, 2009 @ 5:20 am