How can schools better prepare students for college life

Last week, I attended the 23rd Annual Conference of Sahodaya School Complexes. This is a conference where principals and other senior administrators come together to learn and exchange best practices. About 1000 of them from all over the country landed at Madurai for the 2-day event. These are only from private schools.

I was invited to address the gathering on the topic which is the title of this blog. The question was that when faculty members like me see students in the first year, do they get this feeling that schools could have done something more. What is that something more.

The topic was a bit of challenge for two reasons. One, most of the students that I have seen in various colleges where I have taught, have not always come through the formal education system but through a "shadow" education system of coaching. So may the issues that I notice are not because of schools but because of coaching. I wouldn't really know. And two, even if I know, is it fair on my part to demand more from schools without knowing their constraints. But once I had accepted the invitation, there was no looking back.

So I did the next best thing. I asked my daughter (who is a first year college student)  to do some brain storming with her friends and tell me what do they think of their shortcomings which they now believe should have been taken care of during the school years. And I asked a few faculty colleagues to think of their interaction with first year students and give me their thoughts. So this address was a bunch of ideas that I collected from others.

Before I say what students should have learnt at school, let us first consider what is the primary difference between school life and college life in India. The most important difference is that  colleges tend to treat students as adults, expect them to take several decisions independently, and be responsible for their actions and inactions, while in school, Indian students tend to remain dependent on their parents for everything. So colleges would have elective courses, the attendance in a class could be optional, how much money they can spend on what is their responsibility, and so on. While in school life, mothers would typically be responsible for waking them up, fathers would drop them at school or coaching, and both will keep an eagle eye on the use of facebook and whatsapp by the student at least till all the entrance exams have been taken. Basically the transition from adolescent to a young adult should have started at the age of 15, but in India it is supposed to happen on the 18th birthday magically.

Since students in school life have hardly been asked to take any decisions, they are extremely poor in decision making, even figuring out where to begin, what are the important parameters, how to collect data, etc. And this shows even before college admissions. They have no clue on how to decide which program in which college would meet their requirements, and finally end up following the herd, and last years' closing ranks become the only guidelines for most of them.

In college life, time management will play an extremely important role in learning. The students' schedule is no longer being dictated by parents (well, in some cases, it unfortunately continues). Students will have to prioritize and decide how much time to spend on which activity. Those without any experience in taking decisions will probably waste a whole lot of time on things that they will later regret.

What can schools do about this. Well, at the very least, have different styles of exams. Instead of mostly testing on recall (important for board exams), could they encourage students to analyse information, consider pros and cons, and then provide a reasoned answer. This will also ensure that learning is at higher levels (in terms of Bloom's taxonomy). But I will leave it to schools to really think about how to prepare them better for an independent life involving lots of decisions.

The other major issue which every single person that I talked to pointed out is communication. All four aspects of communication - reading, writing, speaking and listening. Communication is, of course, extremely important in one's career, in any career, but poor communication would seriously hamper learning in college. There is a lot more of self learning in college, and for doing that, you must have good communication skills. With poor communication, you would be shy of not just asking questions from your instructors and teaching assistants, but even your class fellows. (And there is enough evidence to show that you learn less from lectures and more from discussions with your peers.) The quality of your submissions, and the quality of your presentations will all suffer. And one thing that schools should find a way to do is to ask students to read a lot of books right from early classes. And given that one has to keep learning new things throughout the career, reading is a very critical skill that they must pick up early on. Remember, no education program can prepare you for future jobs. We can't predict what jobs will be there even 20 years from now, and the working life is 50 years. So learning to learn is the most important skill to become future-proof and that requires a habit of reading.

In my discipline, Computer Science, programming is one of the most basic skills. And one cannot write a program if one cannot write a coherent paragraph/essay. Try doing this: Write a set of instructions in your mother tongue on how to compute factorial of N. The instructions should be so clear and unambiguous that a class 2 student who has just learnt multiplication should be able to compute. A large number of students aren't able to do this. They, of course, can compute N! but don't know how to explain the algorithm. That is a communication issue.

The next thing that students should learn in schools is the concept of plagiarism. When they write anything in school, there can be no shame about using material from multiple sources. It should be perfectly fine to put lines in quote and say that this line is from such and such source. Why would teachers not insist on stating attributions and having a bibliography at the end of the report. No one is really expecting a school student to advance science and write something that s/he has discovered. They are writing up existing knowledge in their own words, and it should be fine to use a few sentences from existing sources and give proper credit to those sources. Once they come to colleges, the teachers are, in general, more demanding of proper credit, and students get into unnecessary trouble.

Another shortcoming is conduct of laboratory experiments. Many students have not done lab experiments in their science courses but the lab assistant or a teacher has just shown them an experiment. This not only kills curiosity, but also they lack confidence that they can do things on their own. And they show lack of interest in doing lab experiments in college and lab reports are perhaps the most commonly copied documents on campuses.

Given that I exclusively meet only science students in the first year, I see a lack of appreciation for non-science subjects among them. While all engineering colleges have some humanities and social science subjects in the curriculum, students look at them as useless or at best, courses to get easy grades. In today's world, an appreciation of society and individuals is extremely important for all careers. And given that students are required to do all courses till 10th class, teachers must be able to explain the importance of all these subjects, and while students may not study those subjects in 11th and 12th and may not even do extra readings because of board exam and competitive entrance exams, they should come to college with an open mind on such subjects.

At the end, schools should take everything I say with a pinch of salt, since as I said in the beginning, I do not claim to understand the constraints of schools. I have tried to keep only those points in this which I thought would be practically possible to focus more in schools, but I could be wrong about it for some suggestions.

Fare hike by DMRC

First, a caveat. I am just a railfan who wants rail based transportation to do well. I am not an economist or a sociologist or a ... So take everything below with a pinch of salt.

Delhi Metro fares were hiked last week, a second hike after 5 months. But let us remember that this was because there was no hike since 2009, and the Fare Fixation Committee decided that a very large fare increase be done but split into two phases. Naturally, there are people supporting fare hike and others opposing fare hike. Those who support will argue that if passengers want good service, they must be willing to pay for the cost of that service. Those who oppose fare hike point out that society benefits a lot in terms of reduced traffic, pollution, etc., and hence society should have to pay too (through a subsidy by the government from your tax rupees).

Pro-hike people would want to point out that society has already paid and continue to pay somewhat. The land was given cheaper, the right of way, certain tax benefits, and some land specifically for development and earning money were all given by the government. And anti-hike people will say that that was too little. The benefit to society was lot more and continues to be lot more. Everyone would agree that DMRC should try to generate more non-ticket revenue - advertisements, shops on stations, etc.

I see this debate as problematic, since the beneficiaries are either passengers who can be identified and asked to pay for their specific journeys, and society-at-large which means government must subsidize through taxes since individual beneficiaries cannot be identified. The debate would be very different if we can identify other beneficiaries of Metro and ask them to pay.

Are there such identifiable classes of beneficiaries. Indeed, there are, and they were identified even before the first KM of track was laid. Somewhere down the line, they were forgotten or lumped into society-at-large.

First, the property owners. The value of properties near Metro stations have gone up. Also, there was plan of allowing higher FAR to residential buildings near Metro stations. If property owners have benefited from Metro, they should pay for it. The property tax collection should go up, and a part of the increase should be shared with DMRC.

Another category of users who have benefited from Metro are users of private vehicles. While it may sound strange that because of Metro, vehicle owners are able to drive faster, but imagine what would have been the traffic like if an additional 30 lakh people were on the road in a day. So people who are driving are a significant beneficiary of Metro and must be asked to pay. One way to do so would be to levy an appropriate Metro cess on every litre of petrol/diesel sold in NCR and that money shall come to DMRC. (Government may decide to not increase the cess but give the same amount of money from the significant amount of taxes that it already is collecting.)

I am sure one can identify other beneficiaries of Metro and find a way to charge them. If Delhi Metro is paid for by all its beneficiaries instead of mainly passengers, the fare would be less than what is being charged, and DMRC would not be in financial stress.

Of course, I have no idea on how to apportion costs to different beneficiaries and hence I am refraining from giving any numbers.

Is Biometric the right way to avoid Proxy Attendance?

Most academics in India seem to believe in compulsory attendance at university level. Unless you have some minimum attendance in the class, you should be punished by either failing the course outright, or in some enlightened institutions, by one grade less. (Of course, then we have places like IIT Kanpur, which leaves the attendance issue to its instructors.)

The logic that is often given is that people have often found a positive correlation between attendance and performance. That Indian kids were never given freedom while they were at school, and hence they are not ready to be responsible adult and thus must continue to be forced to do certain things in their own interest.

I, of course, disagree, and believe that if we will not let them be responsible for their own actions and inactions, they will not learn to be adults. So I don't take attendance in my classes (unless it is the institutional requirement in the university where I am teaching that course and I have no choice).

I believe that there is a positive correlation between attendance and performance. I can give an anecdotal evidence. In the course that I am teaching this semester, if I look at the mid-sem exam answerbooks that have not been collected (because the students were not present in the class), the average is much less than the class average. Also, in the last class before Diwali, I decided to announce the top 10 students of the class in the mid-sem exam and offer them a chocolate each. I found that all 10 were present in the class even on a day when the attendance was only 60 percent. So students whose performance has been good are regularly attending the classes.

However, I am not convinced that the correlation between attendance and performance can be considered as a correlation between attendance and learning. My own gut feeling is that if you attend all the classes, there would be some random stuff that you will be able to recall in the exam (and any exam would have at least a small component of recall type questions). For passing the course, that may be enough, but if the goal is learning, we may not have achieved much by insisting on attendance. (So poorly motivated students would not learn much from lectures, but they will get a few extra marks in the exam to pass the course is my gut feeling. I don't know how to verify this through an experiment.)

I also believe that to the extent there is correlation between attendance and performance, we can advice the students with data and let them decide if they want to really attend the class. Frankly, I have no problems if they can learn Computer Networks from the best faculty members in MIT and Stanford through MOOCs. And if they waste their time and don't learn, they should be prepared for a poor grade, including a Fail grade.

Many faculty members would say that failure has a cost. Not only do they become unpopular for failing many students (and they don't want to be) but also, the class size becomes larger, the infrastructure needs are higher, if a student has to stay on for an extra semester, then hostel accommodation becomes an issue. And hence forcing attendance is ok. (I don't agree that you have to fail a large fraction of the class to get the next batch to become serious. My own failure rates, other than failures for copying where I am very strict, have been pretty much in line with Institute averages, and without any requirement of attendance, I always have had a large attendance in my classes.)

But is taking attendance without costs, and does it really give you correct data. In a large first year class, the immediate question is how do you avoid proxies. If you don't do anything about proxy attendance, you have completely wrong data which is pretty meaningless. So what do you do about proxies.

You obviously don't want to take attendance manually and then enter the attendance into an excel sheet manually. Typical methods include swiping your college identity card in some machine, or having an RFID chip and the attendance machine is really just an RFID card reader, or having WiFi access point figure out whose mobile phones are connected to the AP within the class, etc. All these methods which require the student to own something and carry that with them to the class, have one problem. The student requesting the proxy can easily share that ID card or phone with another student who is going to the class and will be marked present.

So then we come up with the nuclear bomb - the biometric based attendance. This seems to be the seasonal favorite. We use them in most colleges and universities. That avoids proxies (at least for now, there is a news item that people have been able to make a stamp of finger prints which can be used to mark attendance as proxy), but does it bring in any new problems.

While the proxy is avoided, one notices that a student enters the class, marks attendance, and walks out. Has he really attended the class. Are you now going to put cameras everywhere and build software that would recognize people who come late or leave early and mark them absent. Surely, technology can do a lot of things for you, but at what cost.

What if the biometric database is leaked. Are our institutions really well equipped to keep someone's personal biometric data safe.

If we had used one of those non-biometric mechanisms for attendance, and checked for proxy on any random day, and if someone is found guilty, s/he gets a severe punishment, wouldn't that minimize the proxy to the level that the attendance data is reasonably good quality. Do we really need to put every student at a risk of making their biometric data public.

So, why do we use biometric. It does not solve all problems and introduces a huge problem of possible leakage of biometrics.

Well, you ask this question from the students. We have two options. One, we will use a mechanism without bio-metrics, will check for proxy once in a while, and if someone is found guilty, then that student will get an F grade in that course. Two, we will use a bio-metric attendance method. We will never check for proxy or any other problem. But there is a risk of bio-metric data becoming public, and you educate them on what it means for biometric data becoming public.

You can be sure that most students would prefer a non biometric attendance. So you implement that as an administrator. One fine day, the instructor catches a student and tells him after due diligence that he will get an F grade in the course. I can bet that all hell will break lose. This is too tough. Proxy is done everywhere. You are spoiling someone's career for such a trivial thing. May be a warning can be issued or at best some 5% weight could be there for attendance in which this student can get 0, and so on. They will forget that the system was something that they chose. They signed some piece of paper.

Admins know this by experience and do not wish to agitate the entire student body. So they won't ask students for their opinion at all, and just implement the biometric attendance.

I really think that biometric technology is great and should be used when the security and safety is of utmost importance, but to use this for solving small problems like attendance in a classroom (which is not even a problem according to me) can be counter-productive. But administrators want a solution which will lead to more peace with students in the short term. (Of course, when the whole country is using biometrics for so many simple things, why fault poor universities from following the herd.)