Foreign Universities may enter India virtually

Why do a lot of people go abroad for higher education. There are many reasons, and I say them in no specific order.

1. If you have any skills other than doing well in exams, you may not manage admission in any good university in India (and there are only a handful of them). And in such a situation, if you can afford to study abroad, you would go out.

2. Even if you are skilled in taking exams, you may be unlucky on that one day, and you may not get admission in any of the Tier 1 institutions. So you consider studying abroad (typically next year).

3. You want to emigrate to a country where you think you will lead a more comfortable life. Indeed, this is a common reason as the number of students to a country varies drastically as they change their immigration policies.

4. You want to study a subject not so popular in India, or a combination that is not available in India.

What is clear is that students or families have to be either very rich or they have to take loans and to repay those loans you need to be able to work in that country after your graduation. Some universities do have need-blind admissions, and they do provide some scholarships to enable students from places like India to study, but such scholarships are very few, particularly at the under-graduate level.

The online degrees are slowly changing that. Now, there is an option for Indian students to study "abroad" at a lower cost and even if one takes loans for those costs, the loan can be repaid with Indian salaries. However, before Covid, an online degree, particularly at the UG level, was not in demand. There were student doing Masters online, but a UG degree sitting at home is considered low-quality, both from the perspective of poor learning of academic content (no peer learning, no direct contact with professor, etc), as well as from the perspective of lack of campus life (sports, other extra-curricular, learning about different cultures).

But Covid is changing those perceptions and business models. With all the US universities forced to teach online for half a semester, the online education no longer appears to be poor quality. If MITs and Stanfords of the world can teach online, even as an emergency measure, there must be something good about it. (Actually, they have been teaching online for a long time. They have been live telecasting their classes, and/or recording their lectures and making them available for later viewing.)

But what about the campus life. And this too is about to happen. Campus life within your country while you study online from a far away university.

The universities abroad are facing a problem. They offered admission to international students, but can't let them join in the coming semester. Either the university is not opening up and plans to have an online semester, or even if they open, there are going to be travel and other restrictions because of which the student cannot join. They can offer a deferred admission to the student, but they fear that the student may look for other options.

So one of the ideas on the table is this: Contact a good university in the country from where you have admitted many students. Have a deal with them that they will host your students for a semester only for the campus experience. So they stay in the hostel, eat in the mess, use all the sports facilities, sit in the library, use WiFi network, and interact with so many other students around them. The education will be completely online directly from the foreign university. (May be they can have a deal to use some labs too, or the deal may include proctoring exams.) Not exactly the experience these students were looking for, but better than learning from home or doing nothing for a semester or two.

And if this idea works, that is, if the students like this model, this can quickly gain a lot of traction. And that would enable a large scale virtual-entry of foreign universities in India. That is, they can have a large number of Indian students, do all the academic activities online, and hence have no physical presence in India. So no regulatory hurdles. No need for any permissions. And some enterprising campuses offer "campus support" within India. These could be campuses of existing institutions who could build more hostels. Or these could be campuses of institutions that are closing down. They would be happy to have such a business opportunity.

The foreign universities, particularly those, who are beginning to offer online degree programs, would welcome such a combination as it allows them to increase the admissions substantially while retaining their focus on education and not having to worry about campus services.

What is happening is unbundling of university services as I mentioned in my previous blog and that is making these new options available to students. Students may not want to be on the same campus for all 8 semesters. They may want to spend a semester or two in the university campus abroad. They may want to work for some semester(s) while studying online. All those combinations can be served easily in the unbundled world.

Is this a good thing for the country, or should we be concerned.

My take is that we should be concerned. If such a degree takes root in the popular imagination, and industry accepts these graduates (which is likely, industry will only worry about your skills and knowledge), the numbers could be large. If 50,000 additional students (over and above those who are going abroad today) take up these programs, it would impact quality of admissions in our Tier 2 institutions. Our Tier 1 institutions will not see any impact in foreseeable future as face to face classes in top colleges (that too at hugely subsidized tuition) will continue to be preferred over online education.

Unbundling of Higher Education

Before I start, let me make it clear that I am only stating what I am sensing as unbundling of higher education. Any such transformation will have positive and negative impacts, and the impact will depend on the context. As of now, I don't understand in what contexts, what kind of unbundling may be positive or negative. With these, let us begin.

30 years ago, who would have believed that an airline ticket would not include some refreshments, some luggage being checked in, and a few other services. But over a period of time, we have seen the "extras" being stripped off and sold separately. Can the same thing happen to university education. What would it be like to have an unbundled university.

A university is arguably the most complex entity in terms of the range of services it provides. Besides delivering education (which as we will see below is itself a bundled service), doing research, providing consultancy to industry, it provides student residences, food services, additionally runs cafes and restaurants, reading rooms, libraries, entertainment options, a large sports system, transport, medical care, counseling, guest houses/hotels, placement services, and so on. In India, they may even have a full township with residential colonies for faculty and staff, with all municipal functions being carried out by the university.

Why does a university provide so many complex services and not focus on its core strengths. Why should it not ask the students to rent an apartment outside the campus, and live on their own. Why would it not ask the students to depend on medical care available in the city. Every such service can be justified by saying that it helps improve learning. If a lot of students live together and eat together, they will interact with each other and more peer-to-peer learning will take place. If students don't have to go far for medical help, they can spend more time on studies, will have less stress, etc. But surely, some of these services add lesser value at higher cost. Why shouldn't a university look at each service as how much does it cost, and how much it adds to the quality of education. Or at the very least, unbundle the charges, and give flexibility to students to pay for some services and not for the other. Of course, all universities have unbundled residential and food services. But all other services are part of tuition or compulsory fees.

The universities do this bundling for a couple of reasons. One is to ensure that they tightly control the quality of every related service. Further, bundling allows a service provider to increase charges by an amount higher than the cost of that incremental service (but only if the service provider has some market control,which the top ranked universities do). On the other hand, when we look at government supported universities, often the argument is that if the university will not provide all the services in a subsidized bundle, the poor will not be able to afford it.

But things are changing. Even if we look at the most basic function of a university - providing education - that itself is facing unbundling. If you look at online service providers, for example, the basic service of learning a course through online recorded lectures and a bunch of exercises, completely computer based and no human intervention, could come to you for free or at a very low cost. You want a certificate of successful completion. Well, they will throw in some limited form of evaluation, usually computer graded, some limited form of identity check (just taking a picture before the exam and password for logging in), charge you extra for it, and you get the certificate. Even our own Swayam, charges Rs. 1000 for the evaluation, while learning is free. You prefer interaction with other students and teaching assistants, you can pay a bit more for that access. You prefer that the certificate is signed not just by the platform but by a university, you go through some additional exams, this time proctored online through some AI based software, and you pay more. You want access to the faculty for some synchronous sessions, contact him/her during some "office hours",you further pay more. So, even the most basic function of a university is being unbundled with the result that the learning is available to everyone free or at a very low cost.

Unbundling in education is happening in other ways as well. A lot of students in US are doing basic courses at a community college who provide education without any bells and whistles at a very low cost, and then transfer those credits to regular universities, thereby spending less number of semesters at regular universities thereby reducing costs.

Online education is causing unbundling in other interesting ways. Can we unbundle campus services. Can I be a student of a university in US, but use campus services provided by some other entity in India. So I would register for all courses in the US university, obviously all lectures online, submit assignments, and have all academic activities being directly provided by this US university. But I need campus services. I want to interact with other students face to face. I want sports, culture, entertainment. I want the experience of living in a hostel. Can I check into a campus who will provide me all this for a cost. Believe it or not, it is starting to happen. I can then choose which "campus" to stay in which semester. May be some semesters, I will save cost and stay at home itself. Universities can then have some relationships with these providers of "campus" services, and see if they can also provide some academic support like labs, or face to face advising, etc.

Other forms of unbundling are more obvious. Do I need to seek admission for a "degree" program or can I just seek to do an odd course or a few courses. Again, online courses are allowing for such unbundling easily. In an on-campus face to face classes, it was too much of an overhead to have an "admission" process for just one course. If employers have an independent way of judging my skills and knowledge and I don't need a university degree for getting their attention, it will result in more and more people doing a few courses from diverse places and collecting course-wise certificates rather than a degree. Universities must consider this as an opportunity and not a threat, since this also encourages older people coming back to university for courses to upgrade their knowledge and skills.

I foresee that in future, even for a degree program, a university may not have any content of its own, or any other infrastructure. It will pick and choose from vast number of courses available online and ask its students to select from those. It will have agreements with service providers who can provide campus like services in different parts of the country/world. In fact, students can stay in different parts of the world in different semesters and what a great learning experience it will be. (Minerva Institute already does that - let students spend different semesters in different countries.) So without owning any content and without owning any infrastructure, it would be able to provide quality education and degrees to students.

This future is exciting, though there are too many unknowns and hence a bit scary as well.

Covid19: Will there be jobs for graduating students

In the last few days, several local media outlets have asked me about placements. And my reply has been that with economy all over the world going down, it is bound to have an impact on job scenario for the graduating students. For the batch graduating in 2020, it would be a few withdrawals and several delayed joining, which is excellent news considering the pandemic situation.

In my opinion, the real problem will be faced by 2021 graduates. The companies in India have traditionally not fired people or gone back on their job promises (though it will happen in some cases given the economic scenario). Also, the government has been requesting companies not to fire their employees, and also honor their job commitments. So most of the companies already have excess manpower, and they have commitments to hire more. Even if they can somehow manage this, making more commitments for 2021 later half does not seem to be a good idea, unless the companies believe that economy will be back on track by July, 2021 or soon thereafter. In some sectors, this may indeed happen, but is unlikely across all sectors.

So, it is likely that fewer companies will do campus recruitment, they will make fewer offers, and perhaps those offers will be for a slightly lesser salary than in the past. Let me hasten to add that I am saying all this in the context of engineering education only.

How should students plan for this tough scenario. Only two mantras: Stay positive and Work hard.

How do you stay positive in the middle of a pandemic. You have a choice: You can feel unlucky that just when you were entering final year, pandemic happened. Or you can feel lucky that you are part of a higher education system that is of such poor quality that you can be among the top with very little additional effort, and there are going to be jobs for the top students.

Covid is not going to change teachers, curriculum, infrastructure, and given that instruction is moving online instead of face-to-face, the quality will only go down in most places. However, staying at home also means that you have huge opportunity to learn on your own through some excellent online resources. The same teacher teaching online is likely to be worse than that teacher teaching in class, not only because there is a lot peer learning in class and in hostels, but also that teacher has a lot of experience of teaching in the class and no experience of teaching online. However, we have a lot of faculty around the world who have learnt the art to be excellent in online education, and these resources are likely to be better than not only the online education provided by faculty of Tier 2 and Tier 3 institutions, but even the in-class teaching by them.

Invest effort in learning from such resources.

Today, the perception of students in our engineering colleges is that academic learning is useless. That none of the courses are of immediate interest to industry. The curriculum is outdated, and so on. They have been told by their seniors that in the placement interviews the technical questions that are asked can be answered mostly by studying 5-6 courses. The other 40-odd courses that they do are there only because the faculty is sadist, the regulators have insisted that engineering be a 4-year degree with a certain minimum credits. And in those 5-6 courses, the best way to prepare for an interview is not really to learn the concepts well, but read up of answers of a question bank.

From my experience of advising 1000s of students in various institutions, I can say that students don't believe that academic learning is useful in career. Instead they believe that while CGPA is important from the point of view of crossing the shortlisting threshold, the extra-curricular and personality and soft skills is what clinches them a job, besides the ability to answer technical questions in those 5-6 courses. A common question that I have asked these students is the number of hours they study on their own, and typical answer is that unless there are exams coming up or there is a project deadline (in which case they may work overnight), they will spend no more than 7-8 hours a week on academics. That is about 1 hour a day. So no revising the content. No self-study. Of course, extra study is totally out of question. That one hour is usually to complete the assignments, or copying notes, if one missed the class. How could you complete all your assignments in such a short period. Well, many instructors don't give any assignments (not even readings), if they do, they don't require to be submitted (so, no need to solve those problems), and if they are required to be submitted, it is best to copy them. So, one hour a day is enough.

What is interesting is that the placement data often shows that there is a correlation between CGPA and the jobs. The most sough after jobs typically come to those with good academic standing. But every year in every college there will be a few students who, despite an average CGPA would have been selected for one of those sought after jobs. Everyone will know of those examples. They often are the role models for next batches (so they can justify not working hard). And no one would believe that there is correlation between CGPA and jobs.

But here is the thing. In most courses, the important learning is not the specific context of that course. The important learning is often more generic like problem solving, critical thinking, etc. And these generic skills are what will enable you to do well not just in the interviews but also in your career. If you are unable to give an absolutely correct answer to a question, it is not an issue in most cases. If you can show that you know how to think about it, how to attack the problem, that is good enough. And that ability you would have if you had tried to solve problems in a variety of scenarios. That is the value of learning all those courses.

Also, adults learn by connecting dots, by putting your learning in the context of other things you know. So if you know more things, you learn new things better. This is another reason to take your academics seriously.

No, I am not suggesting that extra-curricular or having fun is not important. But there is time for both in your life. For example, a good engineering college will tell you that they expect you to spend about 50 hours a week on academics (including lectures, labs, etc.), and that too for only 8 months in a year. That leaves a HUGE amount of time for all your hobbies, passions, both during the semester and during vacation (even with internships).

Not focusing on academics may have been alright till now. But in this year, the competition for jobs is going to be much higher. You have a choice. You can continue to do what you have done in the first 3 years of your engineering education. Or you can work harder in these times and improve your chances of finding a job.

Just ask yourself a question. How have you used these forced stay at home. Did you make use of a large number of free courses available online. Did you complete a few Swayam or Coursera courses. How much time did you spend in doing programming exercises on various sites, if you are from CS/IT or are looking for an IT sector job. How many webinars you attended in these two months to learn some new knowledge. If you didn't do these things, don't blame Covid.

Of course, learning things better would open other options for you. In difficult times, spending extra year(s) in universities could be a great strategy. You get another degree, hopefully from a better known institution, and the economy would certainly be better in a couple of years, and you start a great career at a higher level. So you need to take exams like GATE where it is so easy to improve your scores with just a little bit of additional effort.

I am sure there are others who will advise you to continue ignoring your academics. I hear so many people saying what sectors will have jobs, and what one should focus on to get those jobs. In short, these pundits are telling the students that may be the set of 5-6 courses that they should be preparing for placement interview has changed. May be they should include a course on Machine learning in that set. But the insistence is still on learning just the bare minimum. My take is that if you invest some more hours, you would be able to learn so much more that you will be ready for most jobs.

Covid is not for ever. This too shall pass. Economy will be booming again in a couple of years. But you must prepare yourself for a difficult two years, and be ready when an opportunity knocks at your door.

Covid 19: How is PEC dealing with graduating batch

On Tuesday, I posted on different social media a summary of what Senate of PEC has decided regarding the 4th year BTech students. Within a day, there have been more than 1000 likes, a large number of questions, several emails, phone calls, and it is continuing. So I thought of writing the entire thought process behind our decision on this blog.

The best question I faced was whether I recommend the same decision for other institutions. And I want to make it very clear that each institution must take its own decision. We too talked with several academic leaders around the country to see what their thought process was, and in their context what was their decision. And we certainly learned from such discussions. But at the end, we have to take decisions that are best in our context.

Background:

Due to spread of Covid-19, the Institute was closed on 14^th March, 2020. We were the first institute in Chandigarh to announce closure. The decision at that time was that we may be able to open in April, and we will restart from where we left off, complete all lectures, have exams, etc. We would compress the summer vacation, and the next semester will start on time.

However, we always have worked on multiple scenarios simultaneously. So there was this possibility that we may not be able soon, and we may have to go online. We had created a taskforce for online lectures even before we announced closure, on 11th March.

Within a week of closure, it became apparent that we will not open in April, may not even in May, but only in June. It was then felt that in order to not delay the next semester, we will need to compress the current semester. Since we already had started planning for online lectures, Senate took a decision that all remaining lectures shall be delivered online, and students will be given exams when they come back to campus.

Senate announced a new schedule according to which exams were to be held end of June, or beginning of July, and the result was to be announced by 25th July, and the next semester would start on 3rd August, only a week late.

When we reviewed the situation last week, it was felt that we will not be able to conduct exams of all students in June/July. We may be able to conduct exams in July for half the student body with social distancing but not everyone. And even this was optimistic.

When we had announced our last academic schedule, an unwritten goal was to ensure that our final year students graduate around the same time as those from other fine institutions around us, mainly IITs, and NITs. This was to make sure that our students are not disadvantaged in any way in joining the jobs they had secured. Many of these institutions had announced in March/April that they will reopen in June and their students will graduate by July.

But in the last couple of weeks, some of these institutions have decided that they cannot reopen in June. And if they still wanted the final year students to graduate by July, they cannot depend on exams being conducted in campus. And if something else was to be done (like online exams), that may as well be done early and graduation may happen in June itself. Hence, we too had to take steps to complete the 8th semester evaluation by June.

Options for Evaluation:

In our discussion with academic leaders around the country, we came across the following mechanisms that were being considered:

1. Pro-rate marks obtained in continuous evaluation till mid-March. It essentially amounts to considering just those marks and assigning grades based on that.
2. Having an online exam whether MCQ or writing long answers, scanning them and uploading them.
3. Take home exams in which they are allowed to read books, search Internet, but cannot just do copy and paste. Plagiarism is not allowed. They need to write answers in their own words.
4. Asking every student to do a different term-paper or a project in each course, submit that paper/report, and have an online presentation to the instructor.
5. Taking an oral exam through a video-conferencing.

Before we discussed these options, it was agreed that we will not compromise on our academic principles. We wanted to make sure that grades must reflect student learning.There could be some reduction in content. There could be somewhat liberal assignment of grades, but still to a reasonable extent, grades assigned at this time should be comparable to grades assigned in all other semesters and other batches.

An obvious corollary is that the evaluation mechanism should be reasonably fair. It should not allow or encourage unethical practices in which a large number of students may show performance that does not reflect their learning. It should also take into account our specific context in terms of students’ background, availability of Internet and computing devices to them, faculty-student ratio, our infrastructure, etc.

Having an online exam, whether MCQ or long-answer type will be a problem for us with a significant number of students coming from Jammu and Kashmir where government does not allow 4G based Internet (or even 3G). Also, unless we can hire the services of an online proctoring company, it will be very difficult to control unethical practices. And hiring such services is not only time consuming in government, it was impossible for now, as we have not been allowed any non-salary expenditure for now.

Take home exams require setting up of question papers which do not test just recall and do not have questions whose answers are easily available through searching Internet. So some novel exercises would need to be assigned. This is not something that comes to faculty easily. Also, while this would work for students with intermittent Internet access, it would not work if there is no access at all. Also, students have complained that they had left their lecture notes and books in the hostel and do not have any material to prepare for the exams.

Assigning all students a different term paper or a mini-project is a challenge for large classes. And whenever there is an evaluation which is different for each student, there would be perception of unfairness and the student body is unlikely to accept it.

For the same reason, an oral examination over video conferencing will have a strong perception of favoritism even if we can assume that faculty would try to be as fair as possible.

This leaves using the continuous evaluation till mid-March as the only viable option for the final year students. Note that for the other batches, we can still wait for an on-campus examination in July, but if we wish to let the final year students graduate in June, there does not appear to be any other suitable option.

It may be added here that UGC recommendations include an option that marks in courses of this semester could be assigned based on marks received in courses of previous semesters, if exams cannot be conducted this semester. This recommendation essentially means that if we cannot hold an examination for Machine Learning course, we may assign marks in this course based on the marks that the student received in a course in Thermodynamics. It violates our academic principle that the grades must reflect the learning of the student, and hence not been considered as an option.

Pass/Fail:

However, if we consider only marks obtained till mid-March (and any mini-project or term- paper assigned till then, but submitted/graded later), there is one obvious concern regarding fairness. Several students are likely to claim that they would have performed better in the final exam. And it is indeed the case that many students do quite well in exams and not so much in the continuous evaluation. And it is not just the question of student performance but also of student trust. Students trust examinations more than quizzes, assignments, and any other in-class evaluation. Out of about 40-50 percent evaluation done in different courses, only about 20-25 percent (half) was mid-semester examination. To assign a course grade based on only one mid-semester as the only trusted component will only result in too many complaints.

If there is no satisfactory model of examination that can result in a fair and consistent gradation which can be used for finer grading, the only solution then is to implement coarse grading. And hence it was proposed that for all courses registered by final year students in this semester, the grading will only be in terms of Pass/Fail.

Specifically, based on continuous evaluation done in each course, the instructor will divide the class in three groups: Those who would have certainly passed if the semester had continued without interruption, those who were borderline, and those who would be assigned a Fail grade based on those marks. One possible way to do this would be to use the distribution of marks as if they are the final marks and assign grades as an instructor does every semester. For those who are assigned an A/B/C grade, the instructor will put them in Group 1. For those who are assigned grade ‘D’, the instructor will put them in Group 2. And those who are assigned the grade ‘F’, the instructor will put them in Group 3.

Now, all Group 1 students can be assigned a Pass grade.

Group 2 students are asked to prove additional learning in some way. One way to do that is to ask them to complete an online course from Coursera, for which we have licenses. The instructor can specify what are the relevant online courses corresponding to his/her course. If the student completes such an additional learning within a deadline, they would be assigned a “Pass” grade. Otherwise, they are assigned an “Incomplete” grade, and they can be treated same as Group 3 students for final grade.

Group 3 students should not be assigned a “Fail” grade, as they could have done much better in the end-semester exam. They should be assigned an “Incomplete” grade for now, and they will be asked to come to the campus whenever it is safe to do so. We could organize a couple of doubt clearing sessions between these students and the instructor to help them out, and then give them what would have been the end-semester exam in the normal course. Based on the performance in that exam, they can be then assigned a Pass/Fail grade.

For the project courses, the students may be asked to continue work from home in terms of background literature reading, design, programming, simulation, etc. A report may be prepared by them and submitted by 1st week of June. The departmental committees for BTP evaluation may meet online and students can give their presentation online. If sufficient work has been completed, the committee may assign a “Pass” grade to the students. If it is felt by the committee that more work needs to be done (for example, fabrication, prototyping, which could not be done from home), they should assign an “Incomplete” grade to the students. These students would be allowed to come to campus as soon as it is safe to do so, and given a week or two to complete the project work and then evaluated again for a Pass/Fail grade.

Most students to graduate in June: If we consider the previous years’ grading patterns, it is expected that about 90 percent of students will be able to pass all courses in June and can be given a provisional degree certificate. The remaining students may be able to complete their respective degree requirements in July. Note that for such small numbers, we may not need to wait for the university to open fully, and we can invite them as soon as travel is possible. Each instructor or BTP committee can work with the few students and come up with a mutually acceptable schedule for their evaluation. So even those who have “Incomplete” grades should be able to receive the final grades and hence provisional degree certificates in July (if final grades are all Pass).

No change in CGPA: Assigning Pass/Fail grades to all courses of graduating batch would imply that their CGPA will not change. Whatever was their CGPA at the end of 7^th semester would remain their final CGPA. It was told to us that some organizations require a separate performance evaluation for each semester to be submitted and hence an SGPA for each semester will be needed, we decided to give a letter to each student that their SGPA for the 8th semester may be treated same as their CGPA after 7th semester (which is effectively what Pass/Fail is achieving anyway).

Option to Students:

It is expected that most students would accept this as a desirable solution to the extra-ordinary situation that we find ourselves in. The only possibility of loss to them is if they were confident that they would do better in this semester compared with the previous 7 semesters and that their CGPA would improve. Note that it is unrealistic to assume that a student’s CGPA can increase by more than 0.1. So, if a student has a CGPA of 7.6, the proposed grading will keep it at 7.6, while the usual grading had the possibility of increasing it to 7.7 (along with the possibility of reducing it to 7.5). Given that most students have already received a job, this small possibility of increase is not going to give any advantage to them.

However, if any student insists on regular grading, we allow such a choice to him/her. But this choice cannot be course specific. Either they get Pass/Fail grades in all registered courses, or they get the usual finer grades in all registered courses. And as we have mentioned in the beginning, finer grading is only feasible if there is a proper on-campus evaluation. The choice will be sought before any grading is done in any course.

Therefore, for all such students, there will be an end-semester exam in all courses that they have registered for, with usual weight and other policies announced in each course. Similarly, for the Project course, the usual expectations of work should be considered by the departmental committees and students should be given sufficient time to complete their work before an evaluation takes place.

It may be noted that if many students opt for regular grades, then it may not be possible to conduct their end-semester exams in June/July. When it was about 10 percent students with “Incomplete” grades, we could organize exams on a case to case basis, ensuring only a handful of students come to campus on any given day. But if the number is going to be much larger, we will have to centrally schedule it and do it when it is safer to handle larger groups on campus. And, therefore, such students may not receive their provisional degree certificates in July or even in August.

Covid19: How to finish current semester

All colleges in India were closed from mid-March. Different colleges had completed 50-70 percent of the semester. Now, the burning question is how do we complete the current semester.

If the lockdown was to be for a period of 10-11 weeks, it would be straightforward. You assume the lockdown period to be your summer vacation, and do the remaining semester and exams after students return, and then with a very small break, start the next semester.

If the lockdown was to be for 12-14 weeks, some of the remaining lectures could be done online, thereby compressing the requirement of time when they return for exams. May be the next semester can be delayed by a week or two.

But, now it seems that the colleges will not be allowed to open for an even longer period. How do we handle this. If we delay the next semester by several weeks, and again compress vacations, it would take a long time to bring normalcy back to our campuses after the Covid has been dealt with. So we need to think of alternate ways of handling this closure.

Also, staying at home is stressful. Our students are starting to suffer from anxiety. Will they graduate in time. Will they be able to join the promised jobs (or for junior students, will they get jobs). We need to deal with that stress also.

One of the solution that is being considered by many colleges is to deliver all lectures online and do an online exam and give a grade accordingly. Close your eyes to obvious issues with online exams. Close your eyes to inability to conduct labs. Close your eyes to project work. After all these are extra-ordinary circumstances, and we must be flexible in these times.

Yet another set of institutions are talking about giving grades based on whatever evaluation had happened by March, and finish the semester. If students think this is unfair to those who may have performed better in the remaining part of the semester, well, we will informally advice the faculty to be lenient in grading. So everyone is going to be happy.

In short, every college is trying to make some small compromise with teaching/learning process, with evaluation, with graduation requirements, etc.

But how do we decide how much compromise to make. Is there a principle behind such decisions.

The most common statement that I am hearing is a variant of the following:

The students are not at fault for bringing Covid to country. And hence the innocent students should not suffer because of it. This is then extended to imply that students should graduate roughly around the time they would have graduated in a normal year, may be a few weeks delayed at best.

One of the IITs has taken a view that they will give a degree to students who have failed up to 3 courses. The argument is that in a normal year, the result would have been out in the first week of May. The students are allowed to register for 2 courses in the summer term. In the past, we have allowed exceptions to register for 3 courses. So let us assume that we would have allowed all students who have up to 3 courses to graduate permission to do those courses in summer. Now, let us further assume that all these three courses would have actually been offered in the summer. Then we further assume that all these students would have passed all these three courses in the summer. And therefore, let us give them degrees. This is on top of a liberal grading in the 8th semester courses.

Is that a problem?

Yes. Extra-ordinary circumstances require extra-ordinary decisions. But like every special case that we deal with all the time, there has to be consistency in application of principles. These extra-ordinary decisions cannot be taken in an arbitrary fashion.

For example, if we were to consider this principle that innocent students (and indeed, no one has ever claimed that they are not) must not suffer, an immediate question would be what about students other than 4th year under-graduate students. If we look at MTech students, for example, they too would have started writing their thesis in March/April, submitted in May, defended in June. Why should they suffer despite their innocence. Why shouldn't they get their degrees in time too. What about 3rd year UG students. They too could have done two courses in summer, and may be graduated in December (that IIT allows 7 semester graduation), or if they had failed courses earlier, doing 2 courses in this summer would have allowed them to graduate in time next year, which they may not be able to do now.

And would we take this principle of "innocence should not suffer" to next semester and say that any students who is ill enough to be in hospital for a prolonged period will be deemed to have passed all courses in the semester, without taking any exams. Or are we then going to argue that s/he was responsible for illness, and is not innocent.

Note that I am fully supportive of diluting the academics in such an extra-ordinary situation. I am only looking for a better principle to do that, because I believe that that would allow us to take consistent decisions across all programs, and also be consistent with special case decisions that we may have to make in the future.

So, how would I justify dilution of academics in a university in such circumstances.

We should remember that a grade assigned this semester, or a degree given now, will be valid for ever. The degrees given this year will be considered comparable with respect to degrees given in the previous years. And hence certain minimum outcomes must still be fulfilled. So there is a limit to how much dilution we can permit in grading, or in degree requirements.

I would justify dilution of academics by making two points.

One, all structures have safety margins. Likewise, all academic program structures have safety margins. An academic program is expected to have certain outcomes, that is, an expectation that a graduate will be able to do some N number of things. We train our students in a way that at the time of graduation, they have the ability to do all those N things (with a high probability). We some of those N outcomes, we do just about enough training, but for some of those outcomes, we may do a lot more, and if we cut down on some training, our degrees will still indicate the ability to do those N outcomes. So, one should basically look at those outcomes and the program and see in what areas could we dilute the requirements and by how much, while still maintaining those N outcomes. If some part of the training is absolutely critical to those outcomes, don't dilute it. But the training which is not so critical, dilute it.

The principle, "Dilute only within the safety margins" can be applied to all programs reasonably consistently, and I will state it how in a little while.

The next question is whether the principle can be applied across time domain. Can we use this principle next year when one student asks for it. What happens to consistency then.

So, here is the second principle. We dilute not because of a particular batch, or their need to join the job, or any such thing. We dilute because it serves a much larger societal or national purpose. If the universities don't open for months, and we do nothing, then as I mentioned in the beginning, we will have too much anxiety in the society. We will have to compress next several semesters to bring situation to normal. So, we dilute only when it is a national imperative, and not when it is an individual imperative.

So, next year, if someone falls ill for most part of the semester, we ask him/her to drop the semester. We don't dilute academic requirements for him/her. But if thousands of students fall ill, we dilute within the limits imposed by the so-called safety margin.

These two principles could be used to argue that we could reduce the graduation requirements by a few courses (except that some critical courses would still be compulsory). We could argue that some labs and lectures in this semester could be reduced because that would be within the safety margin. But then  would it be ok to assign an "A" grade in a course for which a significant part wasn't taught, and an even greater part wasn't evaluated. Remember the grades are for ever. Could we instead assign just a pass/fail grade. (Of course, universities that deal with marks would not know how to handle this.) It could be argued that an MTech thesis is a critical requirement for the degree, and we can only reduce some course credits, or a minor project, or some thesis credits. We could reduce the requirements of final year students a bit more than others because that is justified on the basis of national imperative. But we could reduce the requirement of other batches also to alleviate some level of anxiety in those students as well. So each institution will have to take calls based on their own "safety margins" for each program and each batch.

At the end let me say that the ideas presented here, I presume can be applied with a greater consistency, but there may still be issues with this, and I would love to hear comments about it. Also, I am sure there can be other articulations of principles which are even better in the sense of consistency. Again, please let me know as a comment on this blog.