Hyderabad: Days after the Osmania University (OU) cracked down on an autonomous college for flouting norms, officials of state universities alleged that several colleges in Telangana have been misusing their autonomous status. According to them, institutions are unlawfully inflating the marks of students to ensure all of them pass the examination.
Violations also include ‘leaking’ question papers, wrongly evaluating answer scripts, and not holding academic council and board of governance meetings, among others.
“Most of the autonomous colleges have turned into degree-granting establishments. In these colleges, marks, attendance, etc are for sale,” alleged KVK Rao, general secretary, All India Federation of Self-Financing Technical Institutions. He added: “Almost 99% of students pass in autonomous colleges. This, despite only 20% of their students managing to clear the exams before the autonomous status was granted.”
Seconding him, D Srinivas Varma, who used to set question papers for 20 autonomous colleges, said, “They used to provide a question bank with six questions from each unit. Of these six questions, I was compelled to use four in two sets. That’s the reason I stopped setting their papers.”
Currently, Telangana has 89 autonomous colleges — 83 engineering and the remaining pharmacy — under the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad (JNTUH). Another 38 colleges — seven engineering and 31 degree colleges — are under OU. Of the total autonomous colleges under JNTUH, about half were sanctioned in the last three to four years. Under other state universities, there are about another 30 institutes, most of which are govt degree colleges.
Officials mull new mechanism
Officials from the state universities said they are planning to bring in new mechanisms to ensure that the quality of education is not compromised in these institutes.
“In any college, there will be normalisation of marks as classes will comprise academically good, average, and backward students. To assess this, we have decided to check the internal marks of students and subsequently external marks as well to verify if a college is forging marks. Similarly, we will also be strictly checking their academic audit reports,” said Kumar Molugaram, vice-chancellor, OU, adding that autonomous status is granted with utmost trust and that colleges should not misuse it.
K Venkateswara Rao, registrar, JNTUH, said that while it is true that there were several violations about four years ago, colleges are mostly on track after they introduced a 36-point checklist in the examination branch covering various issues including instruction time, internal and assignment marks, among others. “We will not tolerate any violations,” he said.
An official from the Telangana Council of Higher Education, meanwhile, said that the state has already written to the UGC asking it not grant autonomous status to a college, without required permission from the state, as it is becoming hard to maintain quality of education at the state-level.
