Rollback of FYUP ....

For me, rollback of FYUP simply means flushing out the importance of Foundation Courses.

The main argument on which the need of this FYUP structure was based on, itself defeats the purpose of this much hyped exercise. Those few who support FYUP often say that the employing industries feel that students who used to pass out from the earlier Three Year graduation scheme were not found job-ready and they had to be trained for six months or an year to make them 'employable'. Although this statement is an exaggeration at least for those who used to choose academics and research as their career but leaving this point aside even if I agree to their contention, according to their own admission, the students were even earlier becoming job-ready after completing four years of registering for a graduation course. The 'employ-ability quotient' that earlier students were acquiring rightly at the expense of the employing industry is now being done by financial burdening the students. Not only this, but there is no guarantee even now that these students will not have to go through the mandatory 'trainee period' whenever they get a job in an industry. A logical conclusion of their understanding of the situation would have been that the students who were earlier either unable to clear their graduation exams or were able to do that could have been offered an additional year of optional courses at the college. For these students, who had intentionally chosen not to pursue a career in academics and research, this additional year could have been run in collaboration with the employing industries to provide them an opportunity to earn the desired 'employ-ability quotient' ending in their employment at the same place.

One can make the existing FYUP a TYUP just by adequately replacing the Foundation Courses with DC I/II papers. Not only that but all the positive features of the Foundation Courses can also be retained by asking students to work for a project that they would be required to submit by the end of their second year. And the nature of this project should be such that they include features as collection, analysis and interpretation of data by students in a group of around ten students preferably of different backgrounds. Besides this, it should also include writing about the project by each student and presentation of the same too on an individual basis. Encouraging gradually the use of laptops, computers, Internet (searches and social media) and projectors even in regular discipline courses should also be welcomed.