Result of the first year examination of University of Calcutta, India, published recently after 5 months of completion of examination. I come to know that in the different Honours subject of Science stream, only 25-30% first year students get pass marks of 35%. Only a few students (among more than 100000 students) get marks above 60%.
The previous experience is that application for review yields generally nothing and the review result published after another 3 months. So there is definitely loss of one year of the students.
Do you think only students are responsible for that and the college teachers as well as University administration has no role?
Please share your views.
Dear prof. Pattanayak, when a student fail to pass the exam it is never only the student fault. Various factors contribute, among them the teacher. Every teacher should ask himself if he had done enough for this particular student to understand the material and at least talk to the student and find the reason why he had not pass the exam.
Regards,
Janusheva
70-80% of student fail! this is an abnormal percentage. There should be some thing wrong, so I don't think that the students only are responsible for that.
In India, government university teachers and administrations are not user-friendly, as they are permanently selected for all over life despite their performance in their professional life.
So vast number of failed students indicate failure of students or university teachers or both.
University teachers also needs actions and explanations. State government should interfere for such poor performance within university.
That is my point of view.
One suggestion is to do an intensive review and analysis of the examination questions themselves. Have the teachers take the examination themselves, blind the examinations, do the same scoring of exams as was done with the honor students, unblind the studies and reveal the results to the teachers who took the examination. This would be a start to a discussion among all.
Dennis
Dennis Mazur
In India, all the teachers and staff of Government college and Universities are PERMANENT. It perhaps means that anything about their performance is not QUESTIONABLE. So, nobody cares any criticism or hard talks about there performance.
Every non -Indian will be surprised to know that they do not agree to keep their attendance also! As per their version, they remain busy in library study and other academic activities so coming to the colleges everyday at regular time like petty employees are not at per with their standard of service!
So you can imagine what is the actual condition of those Government institutions as everything can not be written here.
The failure percentages are too skyrocketed! There must be something wrong with HOW the teaching and learning processes are carried out and the MODALITIES for assessing or examining students. I would love to research into these things or motivate someone to delve into it immediately to resolve this absurd situation. Best regards
Dickson
I think the responsibility is shared by many parties (the student, the educational system at the university, the family).
Dear prof. Pattanayak, when a student fail to pass the exam it is never only the student fault. Various factors contribute, among them the teacher. Every teacher should ask himself if he had done enough for this particular student to understand the material and at least talk to the student and find the reason why he had not pass the exam.
Regards,
Janusheva
I don't think is only the fault of the students. The lecturers and university management should also be responsible and taken share of the responsibilities. That's my own view on it. Thank you.
This is not surprising! The education system has nose-dived globally. Unfortunately, the students are victims of substandard and collapsed educational system at all levels. The 35% pass mark speaks volume in the first instance. The following stakeholders have their own proportions of blame:
- Government at all levels
- Decision and educational policy makers
- The shift in societal values and the attendant technology boom
- The parents / guardians
- Administrators and teachers
- Unmotivated learners
Dear Dr. Shibabrata
As I think , No ,
The students , the teachers , the college and the other conditions , all of them are responsible .
With best wishes.
It is not so obvious and easy, to blame teachers and student, only. In the era that everyone and in everywhere people carry electronic items, and show almost a sort of anxiety attacks, when they lose it, the PRIORITY is changing: students are working harder than before in lower jobs, to be able to afford living costs (cheap room to rent, old vehicle...); most of them move out of their parental house so early in the West, before exposing to full mental growth (around 21 years old). As a result, students would expose to nutrition problems, exhaustion, and stressed out. The only joy that does not have any expectation from them, is the same electronics, to relax them, and feed their emotionally. On the teachers & parents' side, there has been the popular lonely-syndrome that push them to their obedient friend (the telephones), to fill their lonesomeness, and communicate with somebody. Moreover, there are many many online-jobs now that could satisfy students at present time, when they can not find one, after the "graduation-no-connection".
I once attended a talk. In it the educator asked a very poignant question, "When we conduct examinations, who do you think is actually being assessed?"
He finished off by saying that the present examinations actually test the teacher's ability to pass knowledge to his students.
Going by this, I would say that the high failure rate of 1st year students shows a glaring weakness in the teaching skills.
If it happens once, and is not rectified subsequently, it shows not only a weakness in the teaching skills of the teacher, but also of the education infrastructure of that institution as a whole.
Dear Dr. Lakshmanan,
I totally agree with you. I wrote some comments previously as answer of this question, but these were only a little. Everything can not be written as I can not be able to produce any proof. But Personally I believe that if ALL Government aided educational institutions are closed from tomorrow and if only there is a office or system for registration of the students, it may not effect the students at all!
You have to understand the remaining.
If 75 - 80% of the students fail in the first year, then this is simply not acceptable and this indicates that there is a problem some where in the system. If this repeats year after year, it has to be a very serious problem needing immediate attention from all concerned.
Dear Dr. Bandyopadhyay,
I agree with you.
But who will bell the cat?
I guess I was lucky to have attended Uni at a time when almost all of my educators had industrial experience. Today in their chase for Uni ranking she and paper qualifications, Universities have sacrificed on quality.
Some of the best educators may not have PhDs. Hope universities wake up and realize this.
No, Not only the students are responsible but assessment criteria, lesson plan, lecture sheets and system of the teaching , environment may also be the responsible for this.
Concern faculty members should also take the responsibilities as the time has changed, assessment criteria to be fixed to engage the students in reading , assessment should be brought up in the learning process such as case study, field trip , factory visits, workshops, viva-voce, project works, etc.
Hi Md Zafar Alam Bhuiyan,
I have concern about your post. What makes time change for teaching and learning, please? The concerned students are in their first year. Their education background and academic foundation might be faulty or weak. Entry requirements into the Colleges and Universities might have been compromised. Some of the students may not have abilities for the chosen programs. Some may be technology addicts, who spend less time on their studies. These are learners blame. Other stakeholders I highlighted above have their own blunders.
How can I write everything clearly?
In our area, Government pay salary and other expenditures of school, collages and Universities in most of the cases. The employees of all categories ( teaching and non teaching) are given service as PERMANENT. That actually means that if somebody got any post, he do not require to pass any test for his/ her efficiencies for whole of the service period (30-40 years).
Almost all students of all level of education learn through private coaching by incurring payment. In many cases, the salaried teachers of the Govt. Educational institutions teach students in these coaching centers. Educational institutions are run in such a way that student do not feel it necessary to go there and attend classes regularly.
To show that the instructions are having good standard, questions are set very tough. Percentage of pass of students kept at minimum level.
The private education system is at it's infancy and limited among the high economic class of people for their high cost.
I don't know how long this system will be continued !
Dear Dr. Pal,
Somebody of your generation have to come forward to ask the king "Where is your garments?"
I can't understand the necessity of student's union if they are not having minimum courage to ask this most important question to head of the institution/ Vice Chancellor / Education Minister / Chief Minister or at least to the MEDIA?
Dear Dibakar Pal,
Good point! "Thus the library is becoming the store of large still books remained unread". In addition to this point. Library is not only becoming a store house of unread volumes of materials but a warehouse / depository of predatory journal articles where you can be feeding your mind with wrong information.
Thank you, all Research Gate members.
From the local newspaper, it appears some agitation has been started on the topic in Kolkata, India.
Today I come to know that in some Arts subject, the rate of getting pass mark (35%) is only 5% of students!
In this University, the highest marks given to a student (First class FIRST!) is below 75% in many subjects.
The teachers and administrators are perhaps living in 1800-1900 century. For correct answer, they allot 6 out of 10.
The teachers require special bonus for such activity.
They are only partly responsible for that. The other part must be accounted for by "the system" which lecturers are part of
The students are victims of a system which has been failing and the responsible people for them have not waken up to that reality.
The evaluation methods need to be reviewed. There needs to be a better exchange between high school programs and the university standards. If it is impossible to manager that, the university needs to create a prep year program which their students can take there or during the last year of high school, which can be accomplished nowadays online. But so far, the results tell to everyone the first year there is a wasting of time and an excellent source of stress. The University, having so many educators and other related area professionals need urgently to change a lot of things, otherwise why are they applying those tests if they do not change anything later? A test should also be for evaluating teaching practices and guide educational practices. Never should it let people to sit still and lament these outrageous results.
Vilemar Magalhaes
Obtaining a qualified professional or scientitific education is everywhere difficult on this planet. The mentioned case shows a clear bottleneck problem; 'the system' should always provide 2 gateways: one that leads to professional practice, and the other that leads to scientific excellence. Even for those, who pass the bottleneck, the same question arises: What about employment? Where can I find a job, according to my qualifications? It is all about the selection criteria and the selection processs. Not everybody can be employed by the state, entrepreneurial qualities are also essential. Attached is a tuition-free e-learning MSc in Financial Engineering as a future model.
40 years ago, I had to survive a longer statistics course at tech uni, where the participants quota was: 5000-500-50-5.
That was not the best way to develop your talent.
Dear Dr. Shibabrata,
Seems to me that all the structure needs to be reviewed, from the family support to the school methods.
I am associated with university education since 1972. At that time the situation was different. The ultra left group geopartised the complete education system and therefore the common students started taking advantage of that situation. Mass copying was a natural occurrence in those days. However, most of the teachers and the guardians were against this and therefore after few days it was possible to get the situation under control.
For last five to ten years the condition started detonating. This is because money became the most important factor and therefore Guardians, teachers, administrators and last but not the least the students felt that earning more money is the soul purpose of life. Most of the teachers stopped “believing” that teaching is their prime responsibility. The classes became irregular and the teachers do not feel guilty (the word is too strong) anything bad for not taking classes. Teaching became the least important activity for the teachers. Guardians have no time to monitor the behavior of their children. As a result the present behavior of the students is highly expected. Recently another nuisance is the role of politicians who indulge them for their own gain.
Dear Dr. Pal,
I do not agree with you. In any University, 95% student spent their time in mobile or cinema hall? If so, they were not attending there classes. THEN WHERE IS THE REQUIREMENT OF TEACHERS or COLLEGES?
Let start Universities, as per my proposal, MANLESS UNIVERSITY.
Dear Dr. Bandyopadhyay,
I agree with you. Many teachers are running behind private coaching to earn more, more and more money.
To suppress this, they collect some very tough questions and prepare question papers by these, I suppose.
Sir, I have one definite proposal.
The questions are to selected from question bank by computer programming. They should be mostly objective type. AND
THE TEACHERS HAVE TO SIT IN THE EXAMINATION WITH STUDENTS AT EVERY THIRD YEAR.
I know, very few will agree.
What is your comment, Sir?
For results all students , teachers, college and other related factors are resposbile
I always tell my students that if many of you fail, then I have failed. Any professor can be tough and fail his/her students but that doesn't make them good teachers. You either have an admission problem (selectivity) or teachers who don't understand their primary role to inspire students to succeed.
Many years ago I studied for my history A level at a local London college. We all worked hard on the subjects provided. The lecturer appeared to know his subject well. Come the exam, we all quickly discovered to our horror that none of the questions connected to the lectures and our study. We were faced with questions on Stalin, for example, over which I superbly waffled. Consequently we all failed and sued the college.
my simple advise to such student is "We know it's easier said than done when you are in a grim mindset, but try. Look at your life five years down the lane. If your 10th grades are low, it's a much small cause of worry because you still have two years to get a better score. Analyze where you went wrong and do not blame your friends, family, study environment or any other factor. They all are insignificant if your will is determined."
1.Universities are not to fail students, faculty members and university authorities must think for this. They are only for the students.
Look China, every thing is for the betterment of the students.
2. More research and investigations are required
There is something really wrong that no one has noticed yet. It is possible the students did not grasp the content of what was taught; or lecturer did not leave up to the billing. I do not know the situation in your institution but when such thing happens, lecturers should be invited to the academic board to explain what exactly went wrong so that amicable remediation solution can be implemented.
I am not too much astonished with the facts. It raises a serious question of standard of elementary education in West Bengal. Frequent and absurd changes in the syllabi with the vested interest of every rulling political parties are taking its toll in higher education in West Bengal.
This case wasn,t for Calcutta university only .It was a common phenomena faced the first year students in most universities.The interpretation for this may be due to the sudden change in the nature of study compared with what they studied in the previous stage which caused a drop in students comprehension there fore the students marks was very low in first semester,but they developed their marks during the second semester ,so that we can not blame university teachers for this drop , but we suggest to develop the educational system to appropriate this case.
I do feel that if 75 to 80% students fail to get pass marks in an examination then there must be some thing wrong in the system. We elders are responsible for such happening. It must be investigated why the students are not attending classes.
I also agree with Dr. Aparna and I see that the most other colleagues opinions are valuable and suitable.
Good luck for all.
I think, students,teachers and the department that sets the program(course) are responsible that.The university and specialist department should provide program (courses)for students included easily learning and required skills
I think teachers are also equally responsible. Also, standard of education in the lower levels are also getting deteriorated, which severely affected the basic root of education.
when majority of students fail then it implies failure of the concerned teacher primarily, keeping other factors constant viz., standard question paper paper, proper learning environment in terms of student teacher ratio, no disruption in regular classes, sufficient attendance etc.
Is the marking being done correctly? Of course the failure rate is much too high and probably lies with poor teaching, but what about recruitment? Does the university concentrate on who can pay?
One problem is surely that many students shouldn't be at university in the first place. As @Dibakar Pal has noted above, they have no interest in or no capacity for academic studies. They are only there at the behest of their parents and should be working or learning a trade instead. Universities are also culpable; faced with cutbacks in funding, they fudged their admission requirements in order to increase enrollments and tuition revenues.
Dear Dr. Pfeifer and all other non Indian RG colleagues,
The education system in India is totally different from almost all other countries of the world. All the schools, colleges and universities were controlled ONLY by government until a few years ago. The private education business started in this country only a few years ago.
Presently, most part of the education sector is controlled and totally funded by only government. In this country, if anybody become selected once for any government service, s/ he considered as permanent after three years for whole life upto 60 years of age. No update of qualities or efficiencies are made any compulsory even for promotion in most of the cases. That is true for education sector also.
So, you can find many university professors of highest rank of professor without any publication as a first author in this country.
Promotions at higher rank is reserved at 50% of seats officially on caste (race) basis, not on quality basis.
Many corruptions are acting among these matters also.
The college and university teachers do not put signature on attendence sheet. They do not agree to keep any proof of their presence in the institution through digital signature also.
Students do not feel necessary to go to their college regularly for presence and quality of teaching of the teachers. Just making some tough questions for exams are considered as the only important job by many of them.
The school, colleges and universities get all money from the government. The fees of the Govt. school, college, universities are kept very minimum. So, nobody bothers about anything. The university take 4-6 months time to publish result of exams.
The students attend private coaching to get some notes to vomit it in the exams.
But everybody know how to keep the political forces in favour of their side to continue the status quo.
The condition of the whole system is just horrible!
Please try to engage some of your students to perform research on Indian govt. run education system, as many things are not written here. The reason you may guess.
Thanks.
If students are failed at Mass level then certainly some other factors like syllabii, faculty, college admnistration are also responsible. A complete overhauling of the system is required!
There are many factors that can be accounted. It is not only the students. It is not only the teachers but there are many factors that are acyually interplaying to each other that produces such result. With that results, one van undergo multi regression analysis studies so that the reasons or tbe factors contributing to such phenomenon can be established.
With the scenario that you have provided it can be due to the following:
iq of the students;
previous academic performance of the students;
study habits of the students;
thw kind of school the studwnts previously attended;
number of hours in studying;
the self efficacy of the students; and many more.
In the teachers perspective:
was test valid and reliable? was it actually validated and tested for reliability?;
were the teachers educationally qualified?; and many more.
In terms of testing:
Was it tested according to the standarda of testing?
THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS TO CONSIDER AND IF YOU LIKE TO PROBE SOMETHING ABOUT THE POSSINLE FACTORS ON WHETHER THEY ARE CONTRIBUTORY FACTORS- DO MULTIPLE REGRESSION ANALYSIS.
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