Clear all arrears in 3 years: Official

The Higher Education department is working on a major reform in the evaluations system. Explaining the details, Higher education secretary Sunil Paliwal  said, “Once the question paper is administered, an expert committee will look at it and evaluate the difficulty level. Also, even after the evaluation, we will look at moderation.”

He also announced that students now will have only three extra years to finish their engineering course. In case they have arrears, they will have to clear them all within those three years, he added. Explaining the rationale, Paliwal said last year the University had to set 6,000 question papers for arrears examinations, against the usual norm of 1,800 to 1,900 question papers.  

Talking about completing the syllabus on time, given the delay, he said that with a few working Saturdays, they will make up for the lost time. He also reiterated the need for giving students time to attend internships and other curriculum-related activities.  “We said that the semester must start from June 3 and end on a particular day. This gives students the time to go for their internships, where they gain industrial experience, for a month. This will be more useful for them in the longer run,” he said.

He also pointed that colleges conduct internal tests in an ad hoc manner. “If the dates are given in advance, a student can plan the list of activities. There are already clear guidelines in place, which are listed on the website. In fact, this time, 23 of our regional officers have conducted a meeting with all the college principals and we have requested them to follow the schedule, failing which, they will lose marks on affiliation.” 

Anna University Search Committee: 

Talking about the Search Committee for Anna University, he clarified that the search committee has already met. “We have given notification asking for applications which have appeared in newspapers -English and Tamil. We are accepting applications from all over India. The Search Committee is writing to the institutes from across the world. There are many Tamils who might want to come back and serve in Anna University.” To ensure that the VCs concentrate on the academics and research, Paliwal said there were systems in place. “We do not want our Vice Chancellors  burdened with recruitments, purchases et al, so we are delegating work to other departments. For instance, the directorate of Stationaries will take care of the purchasing of the answer sheets,” he said.

The Higher Education secretary further said that they are looking into suggestions to set things right. One of them is to allow the medical college, that takes a substantial portion of financial support from the government, be taken over by universities, like the MGR University.