Thursday, May 12, 2016

Now, university students to evaluate teachers

NEW DELHI: The contentious Academic Performance Indicators (API) that had the university teaching community up in arms across the country since 2010 has been modified and made flexible with onus back on teaching while caps on various sub-categories of research has been removed.



Also for the first time student feedback has been introduced. Only students with 75% or more attendance will be able to evaluate their teachers. UGC will shortly notify the modified API. Sources said, "The existing API despite few amendments in the past was not favourable to teachers who only do teaching and was also resulting in poor quality research and publication in all sorts of academic journals."


In the new API, under the category of teaching/learning/evaluation a teacher will have to annually get 100 points at the level of assistant professor, 90 at the level of associate professor and 80 for professors. Student evaluation has been introduced and the five sub-categories of earlier API has been made four.


Categories of co-curricular activities and research earlier evaluated together will now be evaluated individually as well as collectively depending on certain factors. Sources said that in the earlier API too much subjectivity was involved in case of co-curricular activities with college principals and vice-chancellors often acting as final authority. Now it has been simplified and scores have been reduced. Also, evaluation of these two categories will not be done annually. Even new field of co-curricular activity has been introduced to inculcate value education. The new fields are sports, NSS, NCC, field trips and few others.

In case of research, sub-categories remain the same but cap of minimum score from each sub-category has been removed. For instance, in earlier API a teacher had to get 55% from research papers/publications, 20% from research projects, 10% from research guidance/undergraduate dissertations and 15% from training course and conference/seminars. Now a teacher can score from any sub-category. Also, to ensure that research papers are not published in shady journals, UGC will be listing out the name of peer-reviewed national and international journals where publications can take place. Also, for the first time research journals in Indian languages will be included

No comments:

Post a Comment