UGC sets up committee to examine whether NET exam serves any purpose (Source: Times of India, 07 March 2013)

UGC sets up committee to examine whether NET exam serves any purpose

It devalues critical thinking 
    TheUniversity Grants Commission has set up a new committee to examine whether the National Eligibility Test (NET) is actually effective in its role as a gatekeeper for all those who seek to teach in the Indian university system. Actually, the wonder is not so much that the authority of the NET has been supreme ever since it was instituted in the 1980s, but that this has been so despite the many second thoughts that the UGC itself has had about it in the interim. 
    In 1993, UGC decided to give PhD and MPhil degree-holders exemption from the NET, because these are the highest degrees in academics, and thereby denote lofty standards in and of themselves. In 2002, the blanket exemption was withdrawn. In 2006, a concerned committee recommended scrapping the NET, but all that was once again scrapped was the requirement for PhDs and MPhils to take the NET. In 2009, MPhils lost the exemption. In 2012, qualifying scores were changed across general, SC/ST and OBC categories after the NET results were published! 
    It’s education that has been the casualty of UGC’s whimsy. It has been pushing for inter-disciplinary courses for students even while promoting a multiple-choice exam for teachers. With critical thinking at one end and rote cramming on the other, UGC has basically set up an unworkable equation. Universities set up as centres of excellence need to be autonomous, and an essential component of that has to be autonomy in selecting their teachers. Using the NET as gatekeeper relies on a centralised, colonial model of university education that is obsolete. So let NET retreat into limbo. And shed no tears for the death of its ‘common national yardstick’, for higher education is actually about creating excellence, also known as distinction. 
A central eligibility test is essential Pyaralal Raghavan 
    Appointing a committee to review the efficacy of the NET and quality of the candidates is welcome, as there is always scope for fine-tuning a threedecade-old test for teacher selection in 
higher education institutions. But any attempt to do away with this rigorous meritbased selection will be disastrous. In fact, NET was introduced in the 1980s when the UGC stipulation of MPhil/PhD degrees as the minimal criteria for entry-level appointments failed to raise teaching standards. 
    And earlier efforts to do away with NET were equally unsuccessful. In fact, the Bhalchandra Mungekar committee had recommended automatic eligibility of all MPhil and PhD holders for teaching posts and exempted them from taking NET in its interim report in 2006. The result was a sharp spurt in MPhil and PhD theses of poor quality. Distance education courses conferring MPhil degrees sprang up and third-rate universities spewed out ghostwritten theses and PhD degrees. Consequently the Mungekar committee was forced to recommend restoration of NET in its final report in 2008. This reaffirmed the need for a base criterion for appointment of entry-level teachers in a country where quality of research degrees is highly skewed. Though critics might argue that NET leads to excessive centralisation and infringes on the autonomy of higher education institutions, the ground realities are very different. One reason for the poor state of higher education is that teaching appointments are made on the basis of recommendations of political leaders, powerful bureaucrats and nepotistic academics. In fact, except in a few top universities and colleges, such weighty ‘recommendations’ or money – neither of which have anything to do with scholastic or professorial aptitude – are used to secure teaching appointments. Doing away with the NET will only further reinforce these trends.

Source: -http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/UGC-sets-up-committee-to-examine-whether-NET-exam-serves-any-purpose/articleshow/18835795.cms