State varsities may offer choice-based credit system

A meeting of V-Cs of all the universities in Gujarat,education secretary and commissioner will be held at Rajkot on September 11 to discuss the matter. “It’s about widening opportunities and broadening perspective. It’s internationally accepted system. The SU will join the club of a few universities in India to adopt this system,” said Joshipura.

The fact that SU has semester and internal grading system in place will help it implement the new system from the next academic year. The state higher education department had embarked on setting up a different kind of model curriculum for which M S University’s Faculty of Education of Psychology was given Rs 10 lakh grant. Currently,the system is in force in some universities in Tamil Nadu,the IIMs and the IITs.

In the initial phase,the format for PG programmes will include core subject,basic subject and an elective subject (from a cluster). Accordingly,an English literature student can also elect Sanskrit or Journalism,Human Rights,and other subjects of his choice. The entire programme will be based on credit system. A student will be required to get around 90 credits in a subject. The credits will be awarded on the basis of the student’s attending lectures and practicals.

MSU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ramesh Goyal said:

“R G Kothari,an education expert who is with MSU Centre for Advanced Studies in Education (CASE),had come up with the idea of the choice-based credit system.” He added: “UGC’s 11th annual report stressed on many issues such as Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER),which needs to be worked upon. The CBCS has been taken up only in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. We are documenting and taking inputs to develop CBCS across Gujarat.” There are several sessions that are being held from time to time and “we already have 300 pages documentation so that it can be taken up in the next academic session”.

The effort has been jointly taken up by Prof Goyal and former GU V-C A U Patel.