Hyderabad: JNTU to act tough on college faculty

Hyderabad: With 11,199 out of 48,000 BTech first year students failing to get the required credits for promotion to the second year, the JNTU has decided to take tough measures to ensure quality teaching in affiliated engineering colleges.
The varsity wants the colleges to recruit Ph.D faculty to meet the norms for each course or reduce their student intake per course.

As per the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) norms, the teacher-student ratio in engineering colleges should be 1:15. The cadre ratio of professors, associate and assistant professors should be 1:2:6.

In view of the dearth of Ph.D faculty, JNTU has decided to give some relaxation on this issue. There should be one senior professor (with PhD) for 120 students and one additionally for every 60 students thereafter. Therefore, if a college has 240 students in CSE, the faculty should comprise at least three PhD holders. JNTU vice-chancellor A. Venugopal Reddy said the decision was taken in view of criticism that teaching standards were plunging in affiliated colleges.

“Almost one-fourth of the 2015 batch students have failed to get 28 credits out of the required 56 credits for promotion to the second year. Since students are at risk of losing a full year, the supplementary exam was conducted in advance; 5,600 candidates cleared them while  5,500 failed again,” he said.

“There may be many reasons for the students’ below-par performance, but the varsity has resolved to take steps so that teaching quality improved in all affiliated colleges,” he said.