Revisit the terms of use for this scholastic ABC

News: National Education Policy 2020 aims to transform higher education to make it more student-centric and multidisciplinary. Recently, UGC notified the implementation of Academic Bank of Credits, which is a welcome step, but it has certain flaws.

What are the benefits associated with Academic Bank of Credits?

Students can create an account in the ABC portal and store information on the completed courses and grades obtained. These grades are stored for five years.

Under this, students can enroll simultaneously in an equivalent course from another college in the same city, while pursuing their main course. They can even enroll in SWAYAM  or the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) and their credits will be added to the ABC. Students can even choose an online elective course, e.g. in literature or archaeology, or pedagogy. Thus, education will truly become flexible and interdisciplinary, without forcing any single institute to introduce an unmanageable number of courses.

What are the drawbacks associated with Academic Bank of Credits?

First, The regulations do not address many issues or questions. For example, if an IIT is to allow 20% or 20 extra seats for students through the ABC scheme, then how will the selection of 20% extra students be made, in case many students apply through this route? From where will the extra human resources come. The regulations are silent on this.

Second, even if Massive Open Online Courses platforms like Swayam, etc. can provide enrollment to remaining students, there is no evidence that these platforms can provide a reliable assessment of learning achievements. Which is largely based on MCQ format tests. Course coordinators might even provide liberal scores to paint a rosy picture. This came to light when some institutes put guidelines to adjust scores obtained by students in MOOC’s.

Third, to register a course on ABC portal, filtering criteria requires institutes to obtain an ‘A’ grade or higher in National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). But NAAC’s assessment itself is often questioned by experts. For example, NAAC provide excellent or A grade on the basis of record books prepared by institutes to ‘prove’ compliance with NAAC quality criteria. Consequently, institutes spend quality teacher hours on maintaining records to prove compliance with NAAC.

Fourth, the ABC scheme provides that students can take up 70% of courses from another institute while being enrolled in one college. In this case, students might prefer to pursue a particular course from an institute with a good brand name, like IIT. It will lead to lesser number of students in a few selected courses.

What should be the way forward?

This scheme has good intentions and would work well in an equitable society. But in India, where the quality of education varies drastically from one institute to other, this can lead to unmanageable academic and administrative issues in higher education Institutes. E.g. grade inflation. So, UGC must really think about implementing this scheme.

Source: This post is based on the article “Revisit the terms of use for this scholastic ABC” published in The Hindu on 19th February 2022.