Dear Friends, My heartiest thanks to my colleague Mr. Vinit Kumar (who is fairly experienced in the art of our profession) for his valuable inputs. I seek my colleague’s kind permission to bring about some contextual issues again in this regard. My dear colleague has mentioned ‘The education is just not mugging of facts and by heart some questions’. I exactly agree with his words and want to say in symphony that just mugging up the things, preparing model answers of ten years UGC-NET papers along with plenty model test papers available in the market, practising on how to write answers to these descriptive questions and finally just reproducing the things in the answer sheets in the examination hall on that D-Day, should this be the focus that we expect from the UGC-NET ? Now in the context of exams like IIM-CAT, GATE, etc., I would humbly like to mention that these are not entirely the entrance examinations just to admit students in regular academic courses as has been claimed, but also, the scores in these tests are used equally with that of UGC-NET by the premier institutes viz. IITs, IIMs, et.al. for selecting researchers in the respective disciplines and these facts can easily be tested for genuineness in the respective websites of the above mentioned institutions. With my colleague’s kind permission again, I would like to state here that it is the beauty of these tests to offer to the takers a system that is either almost or absolutely free of repetitions. Let us take an interesting example. There are a lot of articles, newspaper reads, and other relevant documents supporting the fact that the CAT is a kind of test that is being held for decades with it’s unique nature i.e. without any repetition and this has also been observed that the new things are being incorporated in the system in novel fashions. GRE(Graduate Record Examination) is another very significant example and it is used by the best universities worldwide for the selection of research scholars. Anyway, I believe that the possibility of repetition becomes more in the descriptive type papers rather than objective type tests. So, if one mugs up ten years papers by UGC, more are the possibilities for him/her to get repetitive questions in the descriptive paper. I do agree with my colleague that that there is possibility to have some innovative type question in the said type of descriptive model, but the previous year papers available in the UGC-NET site tell us a different story here. Our LIS discipline is facing challenges like never before and it is high time that we need to have smart professionals in our field well conversant in modern techniques as well as the traditional base. In my humble opinion what we need to have is a well mix of things to make our profession in harmony. Either we have to adopt changes in proportion to the need of present day challenges a professional faces in our discipline or we are on the verge to get perished. Finally, I found this platform to be very healthy and thus put a disclaimer that nothing is personal here and not aimed to harm individual’s thoughts, but to enjoy a freedom to express within the given scope. Best Regards, Madhuryamay Das DRTC, ISI-Bsngslore

Message: 2 Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:39:15 +0530 From: Vinit To: lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Subject: Re: [LIS-Forum] UGC-NET: Necessary Changes and Amendments Message-ID:         Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Dear colleagues,   Apropos to the post on UGC Amendments (UGC-NET: Necessary Changes and Amendments - Madhurjyamoy Das), I second with the thoughts of my dear budding colleague. There is no doubt that the objective type questions provide transparency and a fair level playing, but they just ruin the basic tenets of education. The education is just not mugging facts and by heart some questions. It trains our mind to think intuitively, observe, analyse the observations and most importantly *interpret* and* express* the observations in a standard and unambiguous way. Unfortunately our educational setup has produced more mugging experts than thinkers.

The exams (IIM-CAT and GATE) mentioned by my colleague are entrance examination for a course of study and not for a herculean task of teaching and research which involve independent thinking and analysis. In the case of entrance exams objective type questions can be justified as the session has to be started on time. Where UGC does not have any deadlines  to meet. I think this is the reason till date UPSC for its IAS mains examination has not opted objective type questions. Here one can easily argue that the objective type questions can also be set intuitively to check the conceptual, analytical ability of a candidate. But after a period of time the questions start getting repeated and then again the mugging starts. This has been exemplified by the IIT JEE modification in 2002( the main exam was made objective), now the big cram shops have opened in every street.

The point raised by my colleague that this objective type pattern will handle the problem of inter examiner varibality of marking third paper is baseless. As in the present system one answer sheet is checked by a panel of 12-13 experts and not by a single person and this is the reason for delay in the results. This delay can be justified if the quality evaluation is the cause of it.

In my opinion, the only good decision of UGC of having national level test is everyday diluted by UGC itself and over the passage of time this will ruin the quality of NET and UGC.

Rest UGC is known for changing policies frequently.

With best regards

-- Regards Vinit Kumar Assistant Professor, Dr. Ranganathan Institute of Library and Information Science Bundelkhand University Jhansi, U.P. 284128 Alt email: vinit@drtc.isibang.ac.in Home page: http://drtc.isibang.ac.in/~vinit =============== Join DLRG : http://drtc.isibang.ac.in/dlrg Submit your articles to LDL : https://drtc.isibang.ac.in/

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