Thursday, February 3, 2011

Students at sea sans syllabus to study

KATHMANDU: Thousands of students of Tribhuvan University are a confused lot, thanks to the country’s oldest university’s failure to provide them with course of study.

TU a few years ago changed the course of study for bachelor’s and master’s in humanities and bachelor’s in management stream, but it is yet to finalise the syllabus. Nor have the students been advised about reference books.Mahesh Upadhya, Head of Humanities Department, St Xavier’s College, a TU-affiliated campus, said due to the lack of syllabus of critical thinking, a subject in bachelor’s third year, the students were baffled as to what course they should follow.

“TU changed the curriculum two years ago when the students, currently in their third year of education, were in their first year. Unfortunately, TU is yet to provide them with a new syllabus for critical thinking,” said Upadhya.

Upadhya accused the Curriculum Development Centre of not making the course of study available.

Master’s in humanities’ students are facing a similar problem. The classes are on, but the students are completely unaware of what syllabus to follow. “The classes began in October, but we don’t have the syllabus yet,” said Ritesh Pandey, an MA second year student at Ratna Rajya Campus.

And the management students have their own share of woes. “We faced problems during our first year exam earlier,” said Santosh Adhikari, a BBS third year student at Premier College. “We studied new course but got questions from old course.” Rishi Neupane, Academic In-charge, Premier College, a TU affiliated college said they were yet to get model questions and reference books.

CDC Director Keshav Shrestha said CDC was unable to distribute the syllabus, as the subject committee was yet to prepare it.

Navaraj Kandel, Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, said dilly-dallying attitude of members of the subject committee was to blame for the delay. According to TU, 369,880 students are currently studying several subjects at different levels in 60 constituent colleges and 732 affiliated campuses across the country.
source: THT



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