Surprised by the title we mentioned here? Believe it not! Anybody who can pass Intermediate can become an engineer today. Thanks to the low qualifying standards and mushrooming of colleges with lakhs of engineering seats waiting for students to finish their Intermediate. These are some of the factors which are encouraging even below par students to get into an engineering college. Many students are joining engineering colleges not out of any ambition or proficiency in the subject, but just because of the large number of seats created by the state government.
Very difficult to get disqualified
Imagine what will be the probability of a student to get disqualified if the qualifying marks is a mere 25 percent of the total. Interestingly, it is impossible for any student to get zero marks in EAMCET. One of the Deccan Chronicle’s correspondent recently pointed out that the pattern of EAMCET this year was such that the students could have got 31 marks for selecting the option ‘A’ for all questions, if they selected ‘B’ they would have got 41 marks, 40 marks for ‘C’ and 30 for selecting the option ‘D’ for every question. So that means if they had just blindly marked either ‘B’ or ‘C’, they would have qualified to join an engineering college.
Free for almost all
The state government last year had come up with ‘total fee reimbursement scheme’, to ‘ALL’ the students, whose annual family income is below Rs.1 lakh. The government bears 80 percent of the fees for students in the convenor quota under the new scheme. The government has already allotted Rs. 2,500 crore for 2009-10 under the scheme and has already released Rs. 965 crore.
Most of the student population is going for this highly scholastic, useless education because of their deep seated feudalistic attitude – status is everything. Aptitude wise, they should have done ITI, not even polytechnic. Instead of that, a person is joining an engineering college because it is free. Thankfully, since this year, the student has to first pay and then get a refund.
Wrong assumptions of being successful
Consider the following example to better understand the scenario. During World War I and II, Germany used U-boats or under sea boats (military submarines) to target the merchant convoys bringing supplies from the the United States and British colonies to Great Britain (islands). U-boats were extremely effective in destroying allied shipping in World War I and the early stages of the World War II. But when the U.S. entered the war with its enormous force, everything turned upside down. The U-boat fleet suffered extremely heavy casualties – a 75% casualty rate, the highest of all German forces during the war.
In fact, towards the end of the World War II, Germany continued to manufacture new U-boats and train new staff for the new boats. The crew of the most U-boats never returned alive from even their first mission. However, during training this was never mentioned to them. They were only told of the fantastic successes that happened in 1939 and 1940 with near 100% success. Not that towards 1944-45, almost 75% lost their lives on their first mission.
Several years back, our engineers were very competent and effective. Today, thousands of incompetent people are entering the engineering courses (like the new staff for the new U-boats), assuming it to be the same professional course as it used to be a few years ago.
Need to Revisit the Positive Stereotype of an Engineer >>
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