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Engineering Education in India
Serious concerns have been raised from time to time about the effi cacy of the engineering education in India in providing the skills to be employable. A study on summative questions asked in an engineering exam, of a state university, revealed that the questions lingered in the fi rst three levels of lower order thinking skill. This article attempts to identify the weaknesses of the existing curriculum in the areas of pedagogy and assessment which are pertinent to improve the employability in the context of the New Education Policy, 2020.
The authors are immensely grateful to Gautam Banerjea, Arindam Chakravorty, R N Datta, Debashis Chakraborty of St Thomas College of Engineering and Technology, Kolkata and Joji Rao of UPES, Dehradun for their valuable inputs and wholehearted cooperation.
Major concerns have been raised from time to time about the efficacy of the engineering education in India. In terms of employability, there are serious questions. The McKinsey Global Institute study titled “Extending India’s Leadership of the Global IT and BPO Industries” (2005) found that only one-fourth of the engineering graduates in India had the requisite skills to be offered for direct employment without preparatory training (New Indian Express 2012). Over time, the scenario has not changed.
A 2019 report by Aspiring Minds, an employability assessment company, concluded that every four out of the five engineers included in the survey were not fit to be employed in the new technology sector as they did not possess the necessary skills. Another study, by the same agency reported a near-stagnancy in the growth of the employability figures among engineers in the IT services sector. The trend was 17.45% in 2010, 18.43% in 2014, 17.91% in 2017 and in 2019 it was 16.25% with no improvement in the knowledge of the new technology tools (Aspiring Minds 2019). The study further claimed that only 4.77% candidates could write the correct logic for a programme—a minimum requirement for any programming job. An online media reported that, more than 36,000 engineering students from the IT-related branches of over 500 colleges took “Automata”—a machine learning-based assessment of software development skills—and more than 60% could not even write the codes that compile. Only 1.4% could write functionally correct and efficient codes. (Economic Times 2018). Such dismal figures cast doubts about the quality of the Indian engineering education.
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