Dear Sir/Madam, This post is in response to M.Das on UGC-NET: Necessary Changes and Amendments posted on 13th Jan and 18th Jan 2012.   Madhuryamay Das has brought out some of the very significant issues but CAT and GATE both of these exams have not been very success in producing good number researchers in IIMs and IITs. If we taken into consider the research productivity of IIMs, it is not very significant. One of the major issues with IIMs is that IIMs have not produced many researchers. IIMs are famous because of the highest salary packages offered to its students in campus recruitment by various multinational companies not because of the researchers they have produced despite the fact that IIMs have highly competitive faculty and students.   GATE exam is also in similar line. The students getting training from “Kota Schools” are filling up IIT seats.   This is what Narayana Murthy of Infosys has said about the IITs “Thanks to the coaching classes today, the quality of students entering IITs has gone lower and lower”.   The new format of UGC may lead to increase in coaching classes. Already in second tier city like Mysore, the coaching institutes like BASE and TIME which have been training students appearing for CAT or GATE have started to advertise that they coach candidates appearing for NET or SLET. Objective type questions are best suited for them to train students. Certainly they will have good business here after.  Reading whole text of “Five Laws of Library Science” by S.R. Ranganathan would give a different perspective than just remembering “Five Laws of Library Science”.  What objective type will help us in remembering “Five Laws of Library Science” not to incite us to read whole text of “Five Laws of Library Science”.   We are living in very fast changing world.  Many we depend Internet for accessing information. Research data have shown that the nature of non-linearity of text available on the Internet has contributing in cognitive decline of the Internet users. The recent works mainly of Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the way we Think, Read and Remember”, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and another interesting article which has been appeared in EDUCAUSE Review entitled  “Individual Knowledge in the Internet” by Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia have critical of how the non-linearity of text available on the Internet changing the way we read books either in analog or digital format and  turning us as a “skimming machine” instead of engaging in deep reading or critical study. This aspect also provides us different perspective.   Madhuryamay Das cited GRE (Graduate Record Examination) as an example. If we see the format of GRE, it did contain a section called “analytical writing” wherein the student has to write an essay on the chosen topic. Delay in declaration of NET exam and transparency issues are also very contentious. Any student who qualify NET exam are not offered job immediately. Delay in NET result in no way has effected any students. Transparency in terms what? Objective type questions are not tamper-proof. There are lots of issues. If UGC has deliberated on this issue in a public domain (with student and academic community) before introducing it, would have been come out with a more robust NET exam pattern.   ------------------------- With best wishes Vasantha Raju N -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.