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Originally Posted by kcnetid If we look at IT services firm (not ITES) If I base my statement on % of students..i.e. ratio of trainable/employable grads to junk, the % will be ~ 10%. Others need at least 1 yr of formal training for them to be achieve basic productivity. |
That's exactly the percentage I came up with in the 2nd post in this thread.
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Originally Posted by greenhorn But what are we doing about it? Most of us, once we've passed out, want nothing further to do with the field. While There are several accomplished educators out there, Bernard Shaw said it best - "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach'
Instead of moaning about the poor quality of graduates now, remember , the quality is poor because of our inaction. If they have to suffer from conformist and idiot lecturers, its because you and I were too busy doing something else. And denying that knowledge/skills, and then mocking them for the lack of it - we have only ourselves to blame. |
A system can be only changed from inside, by people who have enough clout, power and political willingness to pull it off. Companies can scream from outside, give us better graduates, but the Universities wouldn't know how and have no incentive to do so.
Back in 2004 when I started building my company in India, I was quite shocked at the quality of C++ being taught in colleges here. When I looked at my brother-in-law's M.Tech syllabus, it was noted that memory allocation (new & delete) was an advanced topic and not covered. I almost fainted.
It is my firm belief that programming can be taught only by practicing programmers, it can't be taught by people who never wrote a real world application. A problem can be solved in many different ways and only an experienced programmer can teach that. But college faculty are paid peanuts compared to even a junior programmer. Therefore, there is very little chance that a college can hire a real world programmer to teach programming. Now you know why college staff can never really teach programming.
Then I had an idea. Since I always liking teaching, I toyed with an idea of offering my services to some colleges as a C++ faculty in my spare time for free. I had ample corporate training experience to quote as teaching experience. However, before calling up colleges with my offer, I started dry-running my idea, just like I do with any of my software design. For the non-IT folks, dry-running is like thinking your chess moves 10-20 moves ahead. If problems are discovered, the moves can be corrected or avoided before making them.
Say I successfully train a class of students in real world C++. What happens in the university exams? They will write real world solutions to problems given in the exam paper. The lecturer evaluating the paper would obviously have no clue and would award zero marks to each and every one of them. The college will throw me out and the students will curse me for spoiling their perfect record.
If you think I am exaggerating, please don't. During my days as TA, I learned some things about how the dark side of the University works. Here is an example. One day a colleague (senior lecturer) came back from his exam evaluation duty in a foul mood. I asked him what happened, and he gave me the following account.
He was at the university for evaluating material science papers. But they didn't have much work for him as they had enough material science evaluators that day. When he was about to turn and leave...
University Clerk (UC): Excuse me, are you free?
Senior Lecturer (SE): Yes, I don't have any work today.
UC: But we do, we have shortage for system programming evaluation.
SE: Er... that's nice. But I am not a system programming lecturer, not even the same department.
UC: That's OK, we have the model answer paper for your convenience. You can compare the answers and score the papers.
SE: What? You seriously expect me to evaluate system programming using a model answer paper?
UC: Yeah, why? what's wrong? We do that whenever there is shortage of lecturers for any subject.
SE: (storms off the room in frustration...)
Then he told me that some other lecturer would have accepted the assignment because you get paid for scoring each paper. That is when I realised why I was scoring low in some of my exam papers where I wrote better circuits using the knowledge acquired by my choice of technical books. The evaluator would compare it with the circuit design in the model answer and award zero without even reading my long explanation. If lecturers knew their subject well enough, what is the need for model answer paper?
When I understood the possible end-result of my teaching-for-charity effort, I backed off. Instead I decided to hire the best trainable candidates and teach them everything from scratch without the fear of university exams.
Who can really start fixing this mess? It has to start at a deemed university with good leadership, there are many of them now. Pay engineering faculty as much as their industry counterparts. With the high fees structure and capitation fees, it shouldn't be that difficult. Make lectureships/professorships available to highly experienced engineers even if they don't have advanced degrees. We all know that a 2 year experienced B.Tech engineer can blow away a fresh M.Tech, when will colleges learn this? If a B.Tech engineer with 10 years experience can become Asst.Prof without extra degree and similar pay scale, I am sure many will be attracted to switch fields. Some will do it for sane hours, some will do it for love of teaching. Right now they can only do it for charity. Make departments to take up real world assignments and execute them with the help of the students. Imagine civil engineering faculty designing real houses, comp.sci faculty designing/developing banking applications, etc...
Only when engineering colleges start doing real engineering work using industry experienced faculty, they can teach real engineering.This might sound like a pipe dream, but you have to start somewhere. Medical/Dental colleges do real medical/dentistry work, the faculty/students actually treat people. Imagine if Medical/Dental colleges manufactured doctors/dentists without real exposure, like they do engineers? Can you even imagine that horror? That horror is a reality in engineering today.