Bengaluru: Visvesvaraya Technological University's crash' move stumps lecturers
VTU has directed all 200 colleges, to hold seven weeks of crash semester courses starting from December 26 for these students.
Bengaluru: Classes for a full semester to be covered in just seven weeks! This may sound strange, but this is what Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), Belagavi is set out to do with its crash/ extricating semester scheme. The move is purportedly to help thousands of students who joined between 2006 and 2010 and could not get promoted to fifth and seventh semester because of backlog of subjects.
Under the new scheme, VTU has directed all engineering colleges, numbering around 200, to hold seven weeks of crash semester courses starting from December 26 for these students. The lecturers have been told to cover the entire syllabus of the two semesters. These students will be promoted to their respective next semesters, that is sixth or eighth, if they clear their backlog subjects in the re-examinations conducted by VTU in December 2016 and January 2017.
Interestingly, all the students have been told to sign an undertaking that if they cannot clear the backlog in the re-exams, their internal marks and marks allotted in the crash semester examination will be considered null and void.
Officials of the higher education department and faculty of several top engineering colleges in the city feel that the crash course move will affect the education standard. "How can anyone teach the syllabus of an entire semester in just seven weeks and hold IA and semester examinations? This scheme has been introduced to help students who joined the engineering course around 10 years ago. They could not clear the backlog because they didn't study well. Now why this extra effort to help them,” questioned a senior officer.