One of the
things which I have been thinking is how the sixth term (typically most B
schools have three terms every year and the sixth is the last term) and how it
has become quite different from what it was.
Typically, students used to be gearing up for their placements in the
month of February and March and they would get a job and walk out of the b
school with the graduating ceremony happening in end March or early April. So the students used to keep their load a bit
down for the last term. They would get
their nose down to prepare for the job interviews. Since they had no idea of the jobs they would
get, usually were serious about all the courses they were doing. This was the fairy tale where everyone – the
faculty, students and employers all lived happily ever after.
Now the
situation has changed. Placement happens
in all b schools any time starting October.
Employers cajole, blackmail or threaten the B schools for early dates in
their anxiety to be the early bird to get the fat worms. Since students are uncertain of the number of
companies, they try and get the companies in so that the companies do not
exhaust their requirements in other campuses.
B schools leadership (especially those which have larger batches to find
jobs for) now shut their eyes to missed classes, disturbance to the general learning
environment and accept the situation.
Faculty go around murmuring about academic rigour being flown to the
winds.
Long and
short of this is that most students in B Schools, barring the few struggling
ones or the few choosy ones, have jobs under their belt and typically their
interest in the classes seems to wane in the sixth term.
They plead with programme office that “heavy” courses should not be
scheduled in the last term or “meaty” courses which are needed from a career
point of view should be in the fourth term before placement. Professors wanting to schedule an elective in
the sixth term due to workload in other terms would find registrations
low. Typically, students seem to prefer courses
by visiting teachers in the sixth term as these courses get over in shorter
duration as visiting teachers come in short spurts and try and finish up the
course.
It is only a
question of some reallocation or it is a mere scheduling problem and why should
we worry about this? I am afraid that
the long term impact is deleterious for the entire system.
First of all
the professors jostle around to get their courses included in the schedule in
the first two terms of the second year and specially in the fourth term itself
when students are perceived to be serious.
In other words too many courses get offered in these terms. Students are bound by upper limits for the courses
they can take in a term. This results in
students making suboptimal choices for the courses they would be taking in to
their portfolio?
The fact
that the sixth term is now considered by all people around to be a “light term”
would soon mean that the teaching activities which happen in the sixth term would be crushed back to the fourth and fifth term. The question is can most of the work, in
terms of the mandated courses, be actually completed by the students over the
two terms in the second year. This
results in classes having to be scheduled at odd hours; sometimes as late as 10
in the night. Students are occupied in classroom work sporadically in the day
and this leaves them with little quality time to do any co-curricular activity
due to the scheduling issues created by the large number of courses. Spacing
out of learning and such learning principles are given short shrift of?
Typically,
new and experimental courses would get pushed to the sixth term. Here students would, depending on how they
view it to be light or heavy, would choose these or avoid these. Excessive registration for a course which ideally
has to have smaller classes would kill the course. Perceived heavy courses would not take
off. In the long run, this would mean
floating newer courses would become that much more of an uphill task?
Younger or
newer professors are likely to get pushed to teaching electives in the sixth
term. This means that they would not get
the comfort zone of teaching in a term when the students are more receptive to
learning. It makes life tougher for the
professors who are new to the system. It also leads to unnecessary politicking inside
the faculty group and newer professors would be eyeing courses (which they need
not necessarily be the best to handle) just because it happens in the fourth or
fifth terms.
Sixth terms
in many B schools now seems to be less serious, more of fun and courses are
done merely because of the need to complete the credits. Learning and
development seems to have become a casualty here. How do we reclaim the last and sixth term of
MBA programmes?
