All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) vice-chairman Prof MP Poonia believes the PARAKH survey undertaken by the council will help colleges identify learning gaps so that students can be made industry-ready while they are pursuing their courses.
On Monday, The Indian Express reported that the survey, undertaken between last September and June 7, has found that first year engineering students are struggling with maths more than any other core subject. It has also recommended structural reforms in the civil engineering branch which lags behind other disciplines.
Why was PARAKH launched?
The industry is looking for problem-solving, decision-making abilities among students. They want students capable of critical thinking, offering fresh ideas. The objective of PARAKH is improving higher order thinking skills among students. We are also testing academic skills but it is more about assessing to what extent students can tackle unknown problems. It goes beyond improving the employability factor of students.
How have you tried to address the problem of not enough engineering graduates getting jobs?
If you are able to solve solutions, people will run after you with jobs. See, if the industry says that a student lacks ability after he leaves the education system, it is of no value. Issues should be addressed while the student is in the system. We can take corrective measures then, be it in the form of syllabus change, changes in teaching-learning process, internships to make a student industry-ready so that a student is technically sound and professionally-competent.
How was PARAKH designed?
We followed the Bloom’s Taxonomy model in drawing up the questions. Around 40,000 to 45,000 teachers were trained to create a question bank for the test. The involvement of industry is not much in the question drafting process for now but we are trying to address that aspect also.
