Student Selection in the Scenario of Democratization of Higher Education Reforms in India

Abstract

In the conventional system of education, a student can regularly interact with teachers and peers and effectively and smoothly carry on with the learning process. However, in the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) system, students have to learn by themselves with the selfinstructional materials and with the minimum guidance received from counselors, making the system more demanding. In other words, although opportunities are created in an ODL system for student interaction with faculty and peers, these are less frequent as compared to the conventional system, making effective learning challenging. Besides the facts placed above, this paper is also based on the premise that the admission process in conventional institutions/universities are highly selective where decisions at the entry level is influenced by the academic performance of the students and /or scores at assessment/screening examinations; therefore, the students so selected are relatively academically stronger students capable of better academic performance. Due to its inherent constraints of providing space and infrastructural facilities, conventional higher education is more selective and consequently more merit and excellence based in its approach. At the other end of the spectrum are the institutions of open learning which are primarily addressing the issues of access and equity in education and therefore have more open and flexible admissions. While following basic eligibility criteria and/or standardized test scores, it is seen that students would not have to be outstanding or even necessarily academically strong students to be admitted to the various programmes of study. As a result, a major chunk of the students who enter the ODL system are those who are filtered and are unable to get admission into the traditional and conventional system of education. It becomes very difficult for these students to manage with the demanding ODL system contributing to low pass out rates. On this premise, the paper tries to discuss the possible mechanism/s for student screening for all programmes run in the ODL mode too so that justice is ensured to students. The authors also try to reason that use of ODL would be successful only for those learners who have a certain level of intelligence, competence and capability and are self-motivated to put in more effort. Further, the authors attempt to highlight that democratization of education is actually being misinterpreted and is targeting mass enrolment. If self-learning is achieved in its true sense, which can be attained just by competent, selfmotivated and select students, only then can we say that ODL system is effectively contributing to educational development of the country.