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Originally Posted by Blue_V I don't know what percentage of mechanical graduates are actually doing design work in India. Might be a small percent. |
It is kind of chicken and egg problem. Unless we have enough graduates who are very competent in design work, such work won't come to India.
Some colleges are aware of the problem, especially the ones that are headed by managements that care about education. But they don't know how to fix it. They have the will, they have the means, but the regulatory/statutory constraints don't allow for any major experiments.
For example, colleges that are affiliated to a government university don't have any say in the syllabus. Even if the college is part of a private deemed university, they are still shackled by the rules of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).
A professor in US/UK can define his own syllabus, teach it, set the exam questions, and grade it. I didn't realise the massive impact of it until I experienced it as a graduate student of a UK university. Here the professor can have detailed plan to transfer knowledge, and execute it. The professor can decide the scope (depth & width) and set the course syllabus. Then she can pick her most effective method to teach that course. She can constantly tweak the content based on the student feedback. Then she can set the exam paper that is most likely to test the knowledge she has tried to impart. Then she can grade the answer papers seeing whether the student has successfully demonstrated the understanding of the course. The pedagogy is entirely under the control of one person, who if competent enough will be constantly improving it as a matter of pride.
In India, it is done by 4 different people. So there is complete disconnect. The syllabus forming committee/person designs the syllabus based on a certain criteria. The lecturers who teach that syllabus have no idea about that criteria. The exam paper setter may neither knows the syllabus criteria nor the teaching technique. And the examiner who grades the paper is neither aware of the criteria nor the teaching method that was applied nor why the question was asked. Frankly, we don't have anything that can be called as pedagogy. In fact, we don't even use that word. I didn't hear the word pedagogy until my graduate studies.
Even if we have a brilliant lecturer who successfully makes her students internalize the concepts of the course, the exam paper setter can ask question suited for memorised answers. If the students who understood the concepts well, write brilliant answers, the examiner would compare it with standard answer and give a big zero. In other words, we have a grid locked technical education system that cannot produce good engineers. Good engineers are mostly self taught or trained later by the industry.
We can't abruptly shift to a new system either. The education industry is full of people who can only survive in the status quo. There are only handful of teachers who can create syllabus, teach, set papers and grade well enough to transfer real knowledge. Because it requires deep practical knowledge of an industry segment. These days most knowledgeable engineers only have bachelors' degree, few have master's degree and very very few have PhDs. According to AICTE rules, most of these won't qualify to teach. Also, industry pays lot more than universities. Therefore, people in the industry who love to teach, can't switch to full time teaching because of lower pay and inadequate educational qualification.
Unless and until
AICTE rules for faculty is drastically changed to allow experienced professionals to teach using their own pedagogy, and without getting hobbled by formal qualifications, nothing is going to change.