The Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) introduced in Delhi University from 2015 onwards has led to a number of changes in the way things work for the first year students, and is now changing things for others studying in the university as well. According to CBCS guidelines issued by the university, all lectures need to be an hour long in duration for it to count as one credit. For convenience and to avoid dissimilarity in timings of lecture slots, a lot of colleges have altered college timings and lecture slots to follow the guideline. The implementation came early for some colleges and is being implemented in many others from the current semester.
While the change isn’t that major for colleges that had teaching periods that were 55 minutes long, the 5 minutes change for all the lectures in a day- usually 7 to 8- has certainly added up and led to slight preponing of the morning lecture and extension of the last lecture to considerably later than it used to be. In Miranda House and SRCC, for example, students now start the first class of the day at 8:30 a.m. instead of 8:40 a.m. When asked about this change in timings, Shreya Vishishtha, a second year student of Miranda House pointed out that for those traveling from longer distances to college, a change of 10 minutes is often the difference between getting to have and not have breakfast since they’ve been accustomed to the older timings. However, it’s the later lectures that are proving to be more problematic because the additional 5 minutes adding up for all lectures means the last lecture ending 30-40 minutes later than before. No reports have emerged of colleges shortening the duration of breaks as of yet.
Students of colleges with inadequate infrastructure are suffering more due to this change in timings. Not being able to accommodate students of all three years at the same time, classes are often scheduled one after the other and for those ending up with the later slot, classes go on till way past 5 p.m. in the evening, making for an inconvenient, skewed timetable.
Image Credits: du.ac.in
Shubham Kaushik
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