Because of poor quality students, 75% of second year engg students fail in one paper.
Nearly 75% of second year engineering students in 170 colleges
in and around Chennai have failed in at least one paper in the third semester. The
pass percentage of around 65,000 students in colleges affiliated to the Anna University
of Technology (AUT), Chennai, shows the quality of technical education in the state,
experts say. Academics attribute this to the poor quality of students learning in
bad colleges under unqualified teachers who are unaware of the teaching-learning
process.
Mr. E Balaguruswamy, former vice-chancellor of Anna University and UPSC member,
said, "You get poor students because the qualifying percentage is greatly reduced,
so anybody who applies for an engineering seat gets one. Many seats go vacant so
all are given admission. The quality of the faculty in these colleges is poor. More
than 50% were not qualified, and many colleges don’t have senior faculty who know
the subjects," he said. "The college environment in many institutions is not
good as the quality of the management is bad. They treat the faculty and students
badly," Balaguruswamy added. Analyzing the results, vice-chancellor
of AUT Chennai professor C. Thangaraj said inability of the lateral entry students
to catch up with portions and faculty migration are to blame.
Lateral entry students join colleges with poor mathematical fundamentals as
they do not study Class 12 maths, Thangaraj said. Lateral entry students undergo
three years of polytechnic education after Class 10, and are allowed to join the
second year in an engineering college based on their polytechnic results. There
are 9,800 lateral entry students in the 170 affiliated colleges, with a maximum
of 177 such students in any one college. If 8,000 of these students fail to make
the grade that translates to 12% to 13% of the total, Thangaraj said.
Around 70,000 seats in more than 500 engineering colleges in the state went a-begging
this year. Still colleges continue to crop up.
Courtesy: Times of India
