DU Admissions 2023: As Delhi University (DU) announced the lecture classroom sizes for undergraduate and postgraduate will remain at 60 and 50, respectively, the strength of tutorial and practical classrooms will increase from a small group of 10-12 students to about 20 this year. However, is increasing the number of students the right decision? While some faculty members claim that this was a necessary step to accommodate students, some Delhi University students believe that it can adversely affect the quality of education imparted in the tutorial sessions. What does the rule say? Last year, Delhi University notified the size of undergraduate classrooms in its colleges as 60 students for lectures, 30 for tutorials and 25 for practical; the same for the postgraduate classrooms at 50 students for lectures, 25 for tutorials and 15-20 for practical. As an update of the same, the strength of tutorial and practical classrooms has increased to about 20 this year. How is a tutorial different from a lecture? Delhi University adopted the Learning Outcomes-based Curriculum Framework (LOCF) in 2019, which works towards a more holistic experience for the students. LOCF focuses not just on knowledge delivery in higher education but also on the application of knowledge through field and lab work and emphasises on application of knowledge to real life experiences. To ensure the optimum adoption of the LOCF, Delhi University conducts tutorial sessions, which are different from lectures. With this being the post Covid era, a lot of students do not have the same kind of attention span, as was the case in pre-Covid days. These are also batches in which students have been mainly used to online classes and less of physical lectures. Faculty, students split on decision Some leaders of the top Delhi University colleges believe that this regulation has come in as a good and necessary step as it regulates the number of students being scheduled for every tutorial. "Earlier, some colleges in Delhi University had 20 students in tutorials while others had 30, but with this guideline we know that a section should now have 50-60 students, and beyond this, we are not in a position to hire. For example, earlier some colleges had crossed 60 as the classroom size, but now colleges are aware that this decorum has to be maintained," Simrit Kaur, the Principal of Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) told indianexpress.com. However, Delhi University students believe that an increase in the batch size, especially in tutorial classes, will eventually lead to students hesitating to ask questions from their professors. "The aim of these tutorial classes is to ensure that students get enough time to sit with their lecturers and clear their doubts, and have intellectual discussions on a more one-on-one basis. But with this big class size, how will that be possible? Students will start hesitating in asking questions. It destroys the basic motive of these sessions," says Sneha Dey, who is pursuing Political Science (Hons) from Miranda House. Prof Kaur also agrees with this complaint by students and adds that even though the number of students in tutorials and practical classes has been regulated, "the issue is that this is still much above what has been stipulated by the UGC and other norms. So, every increase in the students without a corresponding proportionate increase in the teachers adversely affects the teaching-learning as well," she added. N P Ashley, an Assistant Professor at St Stephen's College, Delhi University said, "I like smaller groups because students listen to each other. For example, in a tutorial of 8 people, if I speak for 5 minutes and all students speak for 2-3 minutes, it becomes a collaborative learning and everyone is involved, which in turn helps them listen, process and grow. But as per the new guidelines, this will become a teacher-centric thing because we cannot ask so many students to speak individually, and it will become similar to a lecture. Last year, I took small tutorial groups and I know all of them personally, but not necessarily the students I have lectured," he explains. He also added that the existing structure of Delhi University (in relation to tutorial) was good and didn't require any change. "They (Delhi University) increased the number of courses, and there is so much more of continuous (internal) assessment now that students are forever writing exams. I don't want any conversation with the student to be something that they have to be graded on because students will not make mistakes and grow then, "Had they (DU) not increased the number of courses and changed the rule for appointment of teachers (from AdHoc to Guest lecturers), this problem wouldn't have risen. This was the best undergraduate system in the country, even according to the rankings," he added. Poonam Verma, principal of Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, Delhi University, however, claims that her institute has been allocating the same number of students to every lecturer. "We have followed almost the same ratio (around 20) in tutorial classes for years now as the number of lecturers is less, so this doesn't change anything for us. But I am glad someone worked on rationalising this kind of a size of the tutorial and classes," she said. When asked if she worries this can increase the pressure on lecturers, Verma quickly dismissed it saying that teachers should remember that "minimum is not maximum. UGC asks teachers to spend 40 hours with students, but not many teachers are doing the same. If you are able to meet the minimum required hours through offline classes but you are still not satisfied, then nobody is stopping you from holding extra classes to help students, these can also be held online. This is being followed by a lot of lecturers in my college" Tutorial batch size to increase. if the tutorials take place Some students and former Delhi University faculty members have also raised concerns that there are several occasions where the tutorials don't take place. "In my first year, there were several times when our tutorials were not conducted because the lecturers were too busy with other work to conduct these sessions. This might be because our semester in 2022 had a very hectic and chaotic schedule due to CUET UG introduction," said a Delhi University student, on condition of anonymity. Charushi Soni, a second year BA (Hons) Political Science student from Miranda House, Delhi University also agreed and revealed that no tutorial class was held for her core disciplines throughout the year. "Professors are usually busy and all of their time goes to lectures, so there is no time left to conduct tutorial classes. Also, since our semester was for a shorter duration than usual, it adversely affected the timeline. The only tutorials that were held were general elective courses," she said. However, Poonam Verma claimed that it is students who tend to miss out the tutorials. "The ground reality is that students were not even turning up for their tutorials. And in any case, these are minimum classes, so there is no limit to taking extra classes which I encourage," she added.
