It is a usual event in engineering colleges in India to conduct repeated tests for students not bothering about their interests. In their first year, students simply do what they are told to for the fear of being punished was always there. Here again the goal of education fails, instead of imparting quality education to the students, it imposes a mere fear of the professors and the assignments are completed not due to interest but due to pressure.
As years roll on, students mature by mind and realise what's going on around them. What the industry needs from them. Is it the ability to merely fill the papers is the need of the corporates?? Or the ability to solve problems with common sense? Definitely the latter. But, what's that our college education providing us with? Loads and loads of subjects, totally of no hint to students as to where these are leading them into. Students get lot of things into their minds and finally fail to figure out what is the ultimate benefit of learning such subjects.
Stuffing too much into a young brain diminishes its ability to think on its own and imparts the habit of total dependency, wherein the mind expects someone to guide in solving any problem. We lose our originality and our productive power is almost gone. Once we dwell into the thought of whats the subject is all about, the semester exams sound an alarming bell and we are doomed to prepare for those "Discuss the foll..." stuff questions, which purely represent the author's view and the exam gives no freedom for us in proving our skill. Professors argue, when students continually complain that the subjects are theory oriented and when the question paper contains a problem, they fail to solve although they said they needed problems in it. The reality is the student is accustomed for theory papers that he must learn only those paragraphs from the book and the same old examples when certain questions are asked. But, when suddenly a problem comes in the paper, he is not prepared for this and the result he succumbs to this unexpectedness!
"Artificial Intelligence" is a subject wherein the student learns how to impart thinking ability into a machine artificially. But the exam tests actually the "author's intelligence", how well he has written the book, because the questions demand the students to reproduce whats given in the text book rather than asking them to think rationally. This is not the aim of education. All this type of learning will vanish from the student's mind once the exams are over. As Einstein has once said "Education is one that remains after he has forgotten all that he has learned". How much you retain is what that determines the success of an educational system. But, its otherwise here.
I usually stand amazed at the way students present their paper during semesters and the happiness they get out of it. The happiness of having decorated the paper thoroughly. Its a utter shame to do this at the engineering level. This occurs because, the student has been over stuffed with the subjects and he is unable to find the one that suits him the best and starts embarking on those semester and scoring in the same, which amounts to nothing to the outsiders. When there is a gap between the teaching period and the exams, when the student is allowed to experiment on his learnings, that is the period when engineering achieves its mission. Till then it is still a "Vision".
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