HYDERABAD: Even as students want the detention system in engineering colleges to be scrapped, academicians support the system saying it is beneficial for both their academic and psychological well-being.
Touted as a measure to improve the quality of engineering education, the system of detention since its introduction has had students up in arms. Unable to secure the required credits, each year thousands of students fail and thereby lose an academic year.
Prof Syeda Sameen Fatima, principal of Osmania University College of Engineering, said that detention system acts as a warning to students and make them buck up. “Earlier, when students were promoted unhindered, in the final year they would realise they has to clear the backlogs since the first year. They would become depressed and even suicidal. Under the detention system, students have to work all four years so that there is no additional burden in the final year,” she explained.
OU engineering students have to get 50 per cent credits to get promoted from the first year to the second and thereafter 50 per cent cumulative credits of all years. The first-year students of JNTU-affiliated colleges are required to get 28 credits in the first year, 68 in the second and 100 in the third year for promotion.
Dr V Kamakshi Prasad, director of evaluation, JNTU-H College of Engineering, said that the credit system was not an invention of the university but a directive from the AICTE and UGC which now even professional colleges are adopting because it has been proved to be being fruitful.
Unlike OU, JNTU has the option to hold advanced supplementary exams offering students two opportunities to get the requisite credits. “This year 7,000 students were detained in the first year but after supplementary exams 1,100 of them passed. The number of detained students decreases in subsequent years,” the official said.
Students, who have been at loggerheads with the administration since the introduction of the credit system, however, allege that total number of 15,000 students were detained in 2018 by about 250 JNTUH-affiliated colleges and a couple of thousands by eight OU-affiliated engineering colleges.