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.