Bhopal: A strange situation has emerged in the recruitment of assistant professors to universities and colleges in Madhya Pradesh. In June 2018, some 20,000 candidates took the Assistant Professor Examination, competing for three thousand posts advertised by the Madhya Pradesh Public Service Commission (MPPSC) – which was conducting this exam after a gap of 25 years. The results of the exam were released in just three months, a record in itself. A layman might applaud the MP government for speeding the recruitment process. Except there is a glitch.
The original advertisement by MPPSC prescribed both written exams and interviews to qualify for the posts. On May 9, however, it put out a small corrigendum that the interview round had been scrapped completely. Assistant professors would be recruited simply through the written examination. The University Grants Commission rules state that the selection process for these posts must include an interview. These rules and regulations are not to be treated lightly. Teachers are the heart of academic culture in the country; literally responsible for imparting knowledge to generations of students.
According to Jagdish Chandra Jatiya, an officer of the state Department of Higher Education, the reason for scrapping the interview process was time. To fill the 3,000 posts, around 10,000 candidates would have to be called in for interviews, to maintain an approximately 1:3 ratio between the number of aspiring and qualifying candidates. This would have been time-intensive, so the state cabinet decided to create an exception for just this year.
The decision to hasten the recruitment process was made within a month of chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s announcement that he would abolish contractual employment, create one lakh permanent government jobs and fill 31,000 vacant posts for assistant professors across the state.
The circumstances suggest that the entire recruitment process was hastened, at great cost to quality, in order to release the results before the state assembly polls on November 28.
Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Credit: PTI
Is simply a written exam enough of a basis for selecting who will shape the state’s higher education system for the next three or four decades? Being a teacher is about more than academic knowledge – it’s also about being willing and able to build interest in a subject and convey it to the weakest student in the classroom. Interviews allow a selection panel to assess both the personality and the intellectual qualities of a candidate.
A teacher can be both passionate and compassionate – a second guardian, a mentor or a friend to students. These qualities cannot be judged by just a written, multiple-choice examination.
Along with the interviews, the MPPSC also scrapped the Academic Performance Indicators (API) essential to judging candidates for a teaching job in universities and colleges. The API assigned points for candidates’ educations, teaching experience, publication record and other qualifications.
Without this process, a candidate with a masters degree and a NET (National Eligibility Test) qualification is treated equally with somebody who has a doctorate, published research and years of teaching experience.
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India’s higher education system is in an alarming condition. Many state universities and colleges are in shambles. The intellectual environment there is degrading rapidly, making them averse to good research. In such a situation, recruiting teachers through just an MCQ examination it is a great disservice to students, and the country at large.
To rectify this gross injustice, one approach would be to scrap the whole examination and bring out a new notification. Another is to re-introduce the interview round in the current examination. which would require re-releasing the written exam results, to make sure that the desired ratio of candidates to vacancies is maintained. If nothing is done, it sets a very poor precedent for the future of higher education.
Martand Jha is a freelance writer based in New Delhi.