Know your cuppa on ‘cafeteria education’

June 24, 2015 12:00 am | Updated 05:34 am IST - NEW DELHI:

The wind of change is blowing in the Delhi University again and this year it is in the form of Choice Based Credit System (CBCS).

While various student and teachers’ organisations are protesting the implementation of CBCS, the university is clear about their stand that there is no going back on the implementation of the new system.

The CBCS, as the UGC explains, is a ‘cafeteria-approach to education’. “CBCS renders a student the freedom to choose what and at what pace they would study,” a university official said.

“In terms of the syllabus, while 80 per cent of the syllabus is uniform across all universities following CBCS, 20 per cent of the syllabus can be designed according to the needs of a particular university and course. Syllabus for most of the science courses has already been designed according to the new system, humanities courses are yet to do it,” the official added.

Talking about the changes in the new system, the official said: “Contents of a course will now be counted in the form of ‘credits’. While Honours courses will be made of 140 credits, programme courses like BA programme will be made of 120 credits. The system also divides subjects associated with a course under categories, namely “core courses”, “elective courses” and “ability enhancement courses”.

Inter-disciplinarity, first introduced with FYUP in DU, also stages a comeback with CBCS. A student of a particular course will also study subjects of another course, the credits will be part of elective subject credits. For example, a B.Com Honours student may study four subjects related to the Economics discipline and four of Commerce, thereby fulfilling their quota of eight elective subjects to be studied.

Once CBCS is implemented, DU will have a unique structure, the students who will be in the third-year will be studying according to FYUP syllabus, those studying in second year will study according to the regular DU syllabus and the ones taking admission this year in first year will study according to the CBCS syllabi.

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