CBCS: Good Idea, Bad Execution

The choice based credit system is a wonderful idea to begin with. A wide and open initiative to launch a holistic inter-disciplinary study and vent break-through researches. Many foreign universities culminated their aspirations of inter-disciplinary progress in the manner of CBCS. The same notion eventually was picked up by many Indian universities and somehow somewhere the University of Kashmir decided to endeavour into it.

2015 batch was the chosen and destined one for it. The university picked this idea and tried to straight away begin with its implementation. Academic counsellors were designated and asked to explain the students what they meant by what they said! There was a committee made, constituting mainly of the young University faculty. Some understood it better, some doable, some average and some simply didn’t!

   

Some departments were actually efficient enough to pick up the changes and walk parallel to the CBCS track. Some counsellors themselves were deficiently counselled and didn’t actually deliver enough to the understanding of the students. That was to begin with, the first discrepancy the CBCS met faces with.

The first semester had to pass with understanding what was going on. Inter-disciplinary endeavours mean the related and complementary study of subjects and not a match making among the divorced entities. A student of physics by no means of rationality is supposed to learn, how to dye clothes! In the same manner a student of economics needs not to know how a zygote is made and a baby delivered.

The second mishap in the way of CBCS was the absence of compartmentalisation. Each department of the university was kept open for every student. Information asymmetry as always reigned supreme and mis-matched choices as above were made. “senseless consternation ” will suite a name given to this chaos. A macro-level reflection of absolutely wrong choices shows us as we jot and assemble the joint choice of the students as semesters passed on.

Third jolt to the system came as students began realizing that some departments gave higher grades or some teachers really didn’t mind the absence from the open elective classes. Clusters of bees began swapping around such classes. It was in this context that a student of psychology in the greed-mode of gaining more marks went to the Hindi department to learn the a,b,c of Hindi scripture!

There was no continuity. The best thing would be a single-choice mechanism. The choices made in the 1st semester should have prevailed throughout the degree. But the fact of the matter is that, each semester new (more stupid) choices were open to be made. A student of mathematics chose to learn the basics of Kashmiri language one semester, shifted to a,b,c of poetry the next, followed by rudimentary introduction of Arabic scripture and ended up picking knowledge bubbles from micro-economics. If this was a picture, painted over a canvas, this would be a ghost in the costume of a clown!

Fridays and Saturdays were reserved to be for open elective classes. 80% of students didn’t bother to attend the classes and the classes ended usually by 12 or 1. Or may be a class was ar 10 and another at 2. Asymmetry was the main characteristic feature of the on-going system and whoever and everyone was surviving on some stupidity miraculous basis.

So many electives were taken-left, left-taken, extra, less and so on. Whole system was in abyss and at the end, university had no other option but to announce a grand-open electives clearance exam. Now as the marks-sheets are coming out, there are a number of discrepancies in almost all of them. There is yje grading system (CGPS) and a lot of nuclear-physics like equations in it, that is much beyond the scope of a common interpreter.

Given this scenario, it won’t be empirically feasible for us to call CBCS system a success for the university of Kashmir; at least up until now. There are ‘n’ number of discrepancies existent in the system and a constant redress is sought. The university authorities do respond to these redressals of course but time and human resource is consumed in this process.

Compartmentalisation along with a single choice made once for all semesters could have helped a lot. There would have been precision and consistency in the whole degree plan and process. The end result of this process would have actually been a batch of fine and refined behavioral and inter-disciplinary experts. Certainly with this, the research proceedings would take altogether new heights and the university of Kashmir could be a miracle university; the way China emerged as a miracle economy.

Nevertheless, air-crash investigations are made so that future mishaps are prevented and never to evoke the dead. In the analogous manner, this failure comes as a lesson with a better revision and revival of the system. After all achieving excellence in education is never old fashioned!

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