DUB Speak

The FYUP- One year on

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Ours has been popularly called the batch of guinea pigs, and rightly so.

For those who aren’t aware, let me bring you up to speed with some ‘radical reforms’ that my batch has been subjected to: the scrapping of class 10 board examinations, the almost sudden shift to the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation system and most recently, the change from a 3 to a 4 year undergraduate programme.

So here I am, after years of being poked and prodded by the education system, taking a moment to really think about how the first of four years in college treated me. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a tirade of how we all have been wronged (maybe it will, we’ll see how this goes).

Let’s start off with us all agreeing that in theory, the idea of a FYUP isn’t so bad, keeping aside the issue of having to finance an extra year. The problem, as many of us have realised, lies in the hurried implementation and faulty execution of the programme and not in the actual rationale behind it. What I’m trying to say is, it just doesn’t seem thought through.

Before the beginning of the session, DU Beat came up with two separate and comprehensive lists on the FYUP; on what might and might not work. The most disappointing part is that while the apprehensions still persist, none of the possible positives have made themselves obvious (other than one extra year of being the senior-most batch, yayy).

Two semesters in, I can’t help but wonder how different and positive the situation would have been, had the syllabi for the Foundation Courses been actually relevant, and not so pedestrian. However, things have gotten better from the first semester to the second. Semester one was a mess. The students were confused, the teachers were unsure, college authorities were uncertain, the semester passed in a haze of presentations, cancelled foundation course classes, and suspiciously bloated results. The second semester has been tidier. Some may even say we have resigned to our fate by handing in all submissions, well, submissively.

On the one hand, some of the major highlights of the new system like the DC II and multiple exit options are yet to be tried out, and on the other, BJP and AAP have promised to rollback the FYUP in their manifestos. With ambiguous promises such as these, the fate of the current FYUP batch, the guinea pig batch, remains uncertain.

 

 

[email protected]; 'Trying to unlearn one societal belief at a time, I'm passionate about topics of feminism and atheism and have recently started discovering nihilism. If I were to reconstruct the world, I'd start by mixing in a little more compassion and a lot of space for intelligent conversations.'

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