Burn it down. Review on University of Pune

We go to a temple to pray, and similarly we come to colleges to educate ourselves, though when all one does for four years is learn to suppress the mind by acting like mindless idiots, one seriously begins to doubt the merits of the education system. I happen to be talking about the engineering degree offered to all young students by one of India’s premier universities, the University of Pune.

When I took up Instrumentation engineering 3 years back I happened to believe that this course would revolutionise my thinking, it would induce in me a new thought process and perhaps a few good qualities. Gone were the days of mindless roting, and studying things without inquiring into why one should be doing a particular subject. HA!!! Soon was I to learn the follies of youth for no different did the course appear then my previous years, yes the only difference was that now I was studying much more difficult concepts in half the time, and if anything, understanding even lesser of why I happened to be studying a particular subject than when I was in 12th. My brother far wiser than me, and who happens to also have completed his engineering from this same univ., too cannot explain why engineering in Pune is filled with such crap.

I mean what is the point of doing a course and have a company hire you only to send to another in-house course to teach what you are expected to actually know. Virtually every professor I happen to know agrees to the fact that almost every course is sadly behind its time, and much of the concepts we learn happen to be obsolete.

A student doing his engineering degree is expected to appear for exams every semester, in each exam he is expected to appear for 5 papers, so in a 4 year course he is expected to appear for over 40 papers, and about 15 orals and practical. With figures of these kinds how exactly a student is expected to do justice to every subject I don’t know. In most cases we happen to leave parts of the syllabus for option (this is commonly referred to as the option theory, where one studies the previous papers and figures out which parts of the syllabus are not asked in the exam and we then simply don’t study that part), unfortunately while every student does this, one also knows that many times it is the part that one leaves for option that forms the basis of a future subject, so we end up having to do some of the previous subject all over again (you might say at this point that that should teach you a lesson, but one ends up doing it every exam, it simply is not practical to learn everything. You end up forgetting stuff while writing the paper).

So we have engineers, the builders of tomorrow’s world, coming out of institutes knowing a little of everything but not one subject in depth, and then one wonders why the standards of engineering works in the country seem to have gotten so poor in the recent past, its not very surprising when one checks out the facts. The engineers coming out just don’t know enough of anything. Of all the engineers Pune produces every year, almost 90% know next to nothing about the subject they have just graduated from, a sad but true fact of engineering life.

I happen have a few suggestions which I know will never be applied but I would like to mention them over here nonetheless….

1) Reduce the no. of courses studied every year down by 2, no more than 4 courses in a semester, and in semesters where there happen to be harder subjects then lower the figure further. Knowing 3 subjects well is better then knowing 5 subjects poorly.

2) Carry out tests every month, remove the semester ending exams, they prove nothing. One doesn’t remember much from the exam anyways, regular testing of one’s knowledge will make retention of what one has learnt far easier.

3) Introduce greater interaction between industries and students; after all we are supposed to work in the industry after completing the course. Also make it compulsory for a teacher to take up research work; the cretins teaching me could do with some exposure to the real world.

4) Being an engineer doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t learn other subjects. Introduce an optional subject every semester where the students can learn something new, be it something as non technical as cooking, but there should something that can teach the students how to relax.

5) Counseling should be provided to the students, might prevent mental breakdowns later in life.

How far these suggestions would go to making for a better course I cannot say, but this much I sincerely believe that if implemented it would be a far better courses than the one currently being provided by the Univ. of Pune.