The University Grants Commission - National Eligibility Test (UGC - NET) is a standardised common exam that takes place twice a year. The test determines whether a person is eligible for the post of assistant professor and also grants Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) to candidates aspiring for research.
In 2013, the UGC announced that the candidates who qualify for this exam shall be eligible for a private college lectureship job and can use this score in their recruitment application for advertised posts in varied disciplines like management, finance, research and development and so on.
With time, the NET has metamorphosed into a touchstone to check a student’s ability to teach at a university level, but there are key questions about the exam becoming more impalpable with time.
Establishing efficacy
Dr Rimi B Chatterjee, Professor at the Department of English, Jadavpur University (JU), West Bengal, calls UGC NET, “an exam quite derivative of the West”, hinting that the idea of NET examinations was taken from the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) that was introduced in 1936, in the United States that accords admission to master’s and doctoral degree programmes to the students.
Dr Rimi states, “Such exams eventually go out of fashion in the colonial mainland but few are still latching on to it. The redundancy shows when it doesn’t measure anything useful. A lot of students come to JU for admission into PhD programmes but their research proposals are not in tune with their NET scores as advertised.”
Professor Mani RSS, Vice-President, Institutional Development at ITM Group of Institutions and a career counsellor, takes the examination to be a ‘measure’ or a ‘starting point’ – “It tests those who at least have the ability to represent the knowledge gathered in a certain domain as accurately as possible.”
Dr Sami Anand, Head of Department of the Training and Placement, School of CSE & IT, Lovely Professional University, too says that the exam is not the only benchmark to test a student’s academic prowess.
Prof Mani adds that achieving a great score would not conveniently lead to the conclusion that a student is a good teacher or a researcher, “Ability to teach includes presentation skills, ability to tackle questions asked by students and a lot more.”
Scope for evolution?
The post-pandemic time marked a change in the education sector as the medium of instruction was lopsided by the intervention of technology. The approach to various disciplines of study too witnessed a change but what about these examinations, could they also evolve with time?
Toshiba Shukla, a UGC-NET mentor and an academician approvingly states that the pattern of the examination has changed in terms of examining a student’s conceptual clarity.
But there is consensus among experts regarding the change that should be incorporated into the examination. Prof Mani says, “UGC NET could consider a practicum as a part of the selection process, where, those who want to build a career in teaching should demonstrate their ability to teach both in offline and online modes, plus in hybrid mode too.”
The exam, a pursuit for jobs?
Many candidates appear for the examination to qualify for the position of an assistant professor and be able to teach at universities and take up different jobs under the Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs), but does this exam guarantee a job and give leverage to your academic career?
On this, Dr Anand says that the weightage of UGC-NET is rated high when it comes to jobs with PSUs and more. But UGC-Net is not the end of it all. Dr Manzoor Hussain states that even if UGC-NET is a common test for recruitment, there are other examinations conducted by states’ public service commissions where the candidate can appear, denoting the other opportunities that are available for aspirants.
Toshiba Shukla calls the scenario of employment “dynamic”. She adds, “The probability of getting a job depends on the number of vacancies available in a university. But sometimes even with enough experience or valid scores, finding a job can seem challenging. Kurchika Nath brings our attention to the plight of aspirants and scholars.
She states, “With the mass production of PhDs as a result of the increasing number of NET and JRF scholars, there are two kinds of academic employment that people seek, some go for college teaching to escape the publish or perish culture. Others, who choose to pursue research, seek to find employment in institutes that focus primarily on research with funds allocated for the same.”
She also draws attention to the factor of unemployment that is becoming common with the PhD degree holders. Having said that, there are still students who are struggling to get into good PhD programmes or seeking a job. Unemployment is not uncommon among scholars with a PhD degree.”
The exam, an MCQ Maze?
Dr Rimi, who herself hasn’t been able to crack it, talks about the “hidden trauma” of the multiple-choice question (MCQ) pattern where you have to produce and retain knowledge in chunks of information.
Prof Mani talks about an alternative way to the exam and asserts, “The efficacy can improve if we integrate more depth and for this, a blended pattern including MCQs, short answers and comprehensive passages can be integrated.”
Dr M Manzoor Hussain, Registrar of Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad says, even though students must prepare for the exam format which exists, “Weightage should be given to demo classes by participant where they exhibit their teaching skills and one can look for the research and publication history of the candidate.”
Dr Hussain states that there are various processes to go through even after passing the exam so one must prepare accordingly
Lovely Majumdar
(Inputs from Harsha Tallapragada)
The UGC-NET is an established parameter set to scrutinise a person’s ability to teach and carry on with their fundamental research. But does this exam validate what it seeks to establish? Let’s hear it from the experts and students