PhD factories give a damn for quality
HYDERABAD : The need to improve the academic profession and to uphold the standard of education has necessitated the need for a PhD degree, making it a prerequisite for teaching in higher education. This, some from Telangana allege, has turned universities into PhD-churning factories where the quality of output — both of the research scholars and their bodies of work — has been dwindling.
To produce quality research, academicians feel there is a need to retrospect the rigour with which the supervision is being done.
Prof BP Sanjay, Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, said that universities need to have provisions like a related doctoral committee, which would create a kind of intellectual resource to help the students. “Contextual and applied knowledge is essential and they come with some degree of quality supervision. Intellectual resources to strengthen the understanding of the topic by the scholar, coupled with basic articulation, writing, logic, argument, etc. are requisite. Any gaps in these linkages is bound to have a cascading effect, since PhD is the highest level of educational qualification,” he said.
Obtaining the doctoral degree, which requires years of research and fieldwork, has become a tad bit easier with a large number of student-researchers seeking the help of ghostwriters to write their thesis. This, experts say, is producing substandard professors with poor language and communication skills in the universities. They are often unable to explain their own thesis properly. This trend is bound to adversely affect the quality of the country’s academia.
Consultants, who have left their teaching jobs in degree colleges to take up the job of aiding PhD scholars, charge around `3,000 for a proposal, `5,000 for a synopsis and `30,000 - `50,000 for a dissertation. “With the PhD degree becoming mandatory to pursue teaching, students have started seeing it as a way to get fellowships for years. Then it becomes a mere road to get a job,” said the VC of a varsity, who requested anonymity. Despite the UGC norms limiting the number of scholars per guide to a maximum of eight in the case of a professor, universities with just a couple of faculty members offer 30-40 seats under the PhD course.
“If action is not taken now, many PhD scholars from Telangana will soon be blacklisted like the students of Osmania University were during the first Telangana agitation,” he said. Prof T Tirupathi Rao, former VC of Osmania University, however, is hopeful that with the UGC now cracking a whip on plagiarism and all universities installing anti-plagiarism software to run the doctoral works (UoH even runs assignments through the checker), not only will incidents of cut-copy-paste thesis reduce, but it is also bound to improve the quality of output.
STATISTICS SPEAK
According to the AISHE 2018 report, for the first time in over seven years, enrolment of research scholars has recorded an increase of 684 in 22 of Telangana universities and its constituent colleges. Currently, 4,884 candidates are enrolled in research courses
Governor’s guidelines to VCs
Governor ESL Narasimhan, who is also the chancellor of all universities in the State, had admonished the vice chancellors at a meeting last week, over the off-the-wall research topics that earn the students their doctoral degrees these days. Stating that it was the supervisors’ job to approve socially relevant subjects as topics, he instructed the VCs to not bow before students’ groups and take note of controversies and delays in PhD admissions. He also directed the VCs to follow a common academic calendar for PhD admissions, from the notification to the announcement of results and enrollment. He also pointed out that the universities hardly follow the norms regarding the number of scholars per guide, as some professors end up having very few, and others too many scholars to supervise
TSCHE seeks detailed databases on PhD scholars
TSCHE has asked all universities in the State to submit department-wise lists of research scholars for the last 4 years, along with their thesis topics and names of their mentors. The information will be forwarded to the governor by next week