The Annihilation of the Classroom

Why is Delhi University rapidly and relentlessly falling into a dark, depressing and dingy abyss, and there is no hope for the future for the helpless students, and their demoralized teachers? Here’s why…

By Ratna Raman

Sixteen years ago, the then vice chancellor of Delhi University, Deepak Pental, announced the introduction of a semester system that would replace the decades old practice of teaching and evaluation that followed the Annual Mode. This decision went against the spirit of university academic freedom since the majority of colleges who had been asked about the procedure had spoken out against the unviability of the semester system, after discussions in innumerable Staff Councils, Staff Associations and GBMs.

This was probably a sign of things to come.

This diktat set in motion a sequence of unforeseen and unfortunate events. All dissenting reports were filed away on CDs and the semester system was willy-nilly steamrollered in.

The science departments went under first, allowing for the indiscriminate hacking of syllabi.  The humanities keeled in a year later, along with the language departments.

Complete semesterization was achieved by muzzling the voice of teachers; college administrators began the process of liquidating teacher strength and participation in the academic life of the university, denying teacher-participation in syllabi-formation for all time.

When the system of annual examinations was in place, the social sciences and the language departments had a fairly good run. Classrooms were full. The number of students enrolled did not vary from first year to the third year, and there were very few drop outs. 

Classes began in the morning and teaching was over by two pm. Students had time to use the library and participate in a host of seminars, conferences and extra-curricular activities. This was a leisurely and yet rewarding pursuit of education.

This is because the way the human mind absorbs and recalibrates information and transforms knowledge into intelligence and learning, cannot be quantified in the manner in which we can compute the productivity of machines. 

In the science departments, and teachers of English language and literature in the annual mode, routinely witnessed overflowing enrollment in the first year. Annually, pleas were made to the administration that more sections were required to deal with a class strength of 150 plus students, since it was not feasible to teach enormous numbers in a single classroom, so that students could simultaneously listen, think, take notes, engage and ask questions. 

The administration, forever unwilling to hire extra hands, told us that the number of students was not stable and that there would be a huge drop in the second year. Our plea that we engaged with science students only in their first year, invariably fell on deaf ears.

In the science disciplines, the number of students continued to drop down, until a very small number of students remained on the rolls at the end of the third year.  These students, often on the lookout for more specialized systems of learning such as medicine, IIT and engineering, invariably graduated to academic constellations outside of Delhi University. Often, not in Delhi.

The semester system seems has curtailed the drop-out rate in the science departments. Compressing the availability of teaching and learning time in the abundant annual mode into two semesters, with examinations at the end of each semester, teaching and learning schedules have been drastically hacked.

Strangely, in this modular system, teachers teach twice the number of units over two semesters, in comparison with the units they taught in the annual mode. Students have more papers and more exams at the end of each semester, but only half the previous curriculum. 

Mandatory classroom lectures and tutorials/practicals that were the robust backbone of the teaching system in the annual mode underwent a sea change in the semester system. The increase in the number of students meant more students were packed into smaller classrooms and greater congestion was created in tutorial/ practical sessions. 

Well thought out annual curricula, was arbitrarily bowdlerized to cater to a hastily put together four-year programme called FYUP, that would extend student learning by an extra year for no tangible purpose. Teachers and students fought back and although FYUP was withdrawn, the semester system continued.  

There was an attempt to stream line courses under the semester system, but hastily introduced AECC courses, along with huge gaps in the learning process across disciplines, due to a truncated syllabus and a refusal to review the semester system or the curriculum, continued to be the order of the day.   

An un-reviewed and hurriedly halved curriculum that was hastily revised allowed the semester system with its drawbacks to trundle on, into the pandemic, where the university struggled with online modes of teaching and evaluation. 

The replacement of the annual mode of examinations with compulsory semesterization leading to six monthly examinations, drew attention to the fragility of institutions resting upon ideas. The annual mode worked well for students and teachers. It provided plenty of space to teach and to learn and to develop a range of extra-curricular interests, all of which were part of the history and heritage of Delhi University, which had great rankings all over the world. 

This can be proved simply by the number of alumni who made a place for themselves in distinguished careers all over the world in different disciplines.

This collective space which the university community had nurtured was rapidly dismantled in the ninth decade of the university’s existence. Quality and pedagogy were quickly replaced by numbers and statistics.

Take for instance, the two august bodies, the Academic Council and the Executive Council, supposedly the brain and lungs of the university. Its main filters were elected teacher representatives, far less in number than the total number of members in both councils.

Yet, these teacher representatives, held in great esteem, were elected representatives of the entire body of Delhi University teachers. The halycon days of the teachers movements belonged truly to the 1980s and hard-earned academic freedoms of those years remain testimonial to the rightful privileges that university teachers enjoyed in decision-making bodies of Delhi University.

All of this changed between 2008 and 2012, when decisions taken on the floor of the Academic Council and the Executive Council, were no longer structured around dialogue or debate, but on numerical strength. This diminished the power of elected teacher representatives and DUTA was rendered toothless -- overnight.

The four-year university programme, first ushered in over a decade ago, was a terrible assault on the academic sovereignty of the university.  FYUP was rolled back in 2014, but the semester system made operational in all streams by 2012 was never reviewed. 

The university continued to be beleaguered by a resource crunch and by the induction of a greater number of students.  Infrastructure in colleges never matched the increase in student intake.

A bowdlerized curriculum was tinkered with, but the arrival of the pandemic hit the university the hardest. Regular classroom teaching was disrupted and replaced by arbitrary and unequal online teaching and evaluation by systems that were student and teacher unfriendly. The NEP was quickly ushered in, once again with little or no consultation with teachers or students.  

To make matters worse, this new admission policy directed students applying to the university to write CUET examinations for enrolment, striking a death knell to their right to higher education, previously enjoyed by students desirous of joining the university for almost a hundred years.  CUET was seen as the great equalizer of the pressure put on students by board examinations and its inflated marking system.  The class XII examination system definitely required overhaul.

However, replacing the evaluation criteria of a twelve-year learning system and making CUET the final arbiter of student destinies has bludgeoned the schooling system in entirety and demoralized students and educators alike. 

CUET placements that push students towards options they did not ask for in the first place probably explains why there is less rush and even less sustainability, and a larger number of drop-outs to the undergraduate programmes in Delhi University.

Students and teachers were part of a growing and thriving community, without CUET, NEP and the Four Year Semester  system.  The NEP 2020 was conceived and birthed when the whole world was sick and haunted by the ghosts of Covid. What chromosomes could it possibly have nurtured?  Whatever the air this new born could gulp down, has intrinsically damaged its DNA.

We are now at the start of the Eighth semester of the CUET-led  Undergraduate Admissions, propelled by NEP 2020. Earlier, students could exercise some choice over a preferred course, although the choice of college was restricted.  Now, access to a preferred course has become more difficult.  

Dwindling student numbers in the classroom that continues to dip by the semester despite an increase in the number of sanctioned seats, is a significant indicator.  Different courses such as VAC, SEC, GE and DSC are prescribed for study.  VAC and SEC are now graded and evaluated largely in individual colleges, while GE and DSE, courses that are discipline-centred and academic are evaluated centrally for 90 marks.

Courses such as the VAC (Value Added Course) and SEC (Skill Enhancement Course) are lightweight, vacuous and non-serious; that would be a more accurate description of courses that are titled The Art of being Happy, Emotional Intelligence et al.

SEC courses have up to a hundred students fitted into small rooms, where the possibility of enhancing any skill seems to be modelled on Mission Impossible. Another ambitious course, EVS, introduced perhaps in the hope that young students short on time and good learning practice, will find a way to tackle the enormous environmental crisis we are in!

These courses demand too much of student time and energy on the Net and focuses on activities that students have already learnt at school, without nurturing them to use their skills exponentially. 

Meanwhile the university’s primary role of providing inroads and highways into various disciplines and into processes of learning has been lost sight of altogether. Core disciplines do not get adequate representation in the teaching curriculum, edged out as they are by the vacuous VACs, the zealous EVSs and second rate SECs.

A relentless, continuous, evaluation system is in place, in lieu of the previous 100 marks requirement, wherein 25 marks were part of attendance and evaluation. Core papers of 100 marks with five units have been replaced with 160 mark papers of three units. While the marks have increased, the curriculum per paper has shrunk.

The exam papers carry more marks and continuous monitoring of their progress is completely unnecessary. Students have far less time in the semester to absorb ideas and even less time to understand them.  Each core paper for 160 marks is evaluated externally for 90 marks; 70 marks for each paper is controlled by the teacher tutoring the student.

Attendance for Internal Assessment is for 6 marks while the test and assignment are for a total of 24 marks;  35 marks are allotted for Continuous Assessment of the student’s proficiency and 5 marks are for tutorial attendance; 11 marks for attendance in a paper of 160 marks is a strange requirement.

Stranger still is the fact that students can be withheld from writing an exam if they fall short of attendance. Since they forfeit up to 11 marks for non-attendance, the programme to hold back students from writing exams seems doubly punitive.

Continuous Assessment for the student is onerous, unfair and completely unnecessary to the processes of learning.

Within the academic assessment systems put in place for the semester, more troubling questions present themselves. How do you grade a class with a student strength of 60 plus, where each student must submit four pieces of writing for Continuous Assessment and two longer essays for Internal Assessment per paper?

Students are required to study seven papers in each semester and churn out approximately 42 written assignments. Of course, this is not humanly possible, since ideas do not form at the speed of light and learning’s growth chart is much slower.

It is good that older cut and paste methods of writing assignments have been replaced by modern Chat GPT and AI systems which allow students to navigate the academic minefields created by the NEP 2020.

Over the last two semesters, I have discovered that many students do not read longer texts such as novels anymore, because, there is no time available to them, in which either a curiosity for learning or a habit of sustainable reading could be developed.

Students perforce fall back on chapter summaries or abridged versions of novels because that stretched out quality of time to read and learn, and discover the world as thinking adults, has been thoughtlessly and ruthlessly taken away from them.

I have moved in the last four years at the university, from a growing anguish over the impossibility of teaching anything well, to a quiet despair about what the future holds for young, promising minds that we continue to deaden and damage.

In the seventh semester, we are meant to turn the stragglers who have not opted out of the university programme into academic prodigies who will also produce cutting edge research papers, preferably publishable, at the end of six semesters wherein the curriculum has been hacked and chopped beyond recognition. I have no doubt that in an ideal universe, university students could be nurtured to produce brilliant theses, but there is a dearth of resources in the university, both material and intellectual, and an absence of both a holistic programme and an edifying vision.

We do not have infrastructure, equipment, rooms to teach, and conduct practicals in. Nor do we have even the required number of teachers who can mentor students in the direction of research in the seventh and eighth semester.

Student teacher ratios were rendered irrelevant when 20 students plus 20 percent became the sanctioned number for a single tutorial group. It allows for three minutes to engage with a single student, should the class strength remain at 20.

Oddly, it is common knowledge that three minutes is not enough time for successfully hard boiling an egg. At the end of three minutes, even eggs are allowed to rest for 7 minutes before they can be shelled and eaten.

Incidentally, SEC practicals are conducted for over 80 students in an hour-long period.  To add insult to serious injury, in the ambitious cutting-edge research programme outlined for the 7th and the 8^th semester students, no tutorials have been earmarked in the teaching plan. Clearly, writing is a skill we do not need to teach. It is inborn and innate, melded into our Vishwaguru heritage, and combusts into life when young people turn 19.

Our timings are awry, and our timetables are out of sync. Our curricula are no longer robust and our yearly calendar has run off the rails.

Extra-curricular activities, mostly pedestrian, are adopted by every Academic Discipline in the University. These cut into teaching and learning schedules every day of the term. Exams are held in the coldest and hottest months of the year, semester after semester.  

That both students and teachers need vacations and term breaks is now the subject of a much-contested debate.  This year, end semester exams that began in early December 2025, concluded on January 1,^t 2026. The university opened on 2 January, 2026.

Such a schedule is unnecessarily grueling and provides no respite, especially for students who do not live in the Capital. Even for those students and teachers who live in the city, braving bad weather, toxic air, and dubious water sources, this remains a thankless schedule.

University administration is of the belief that the kartavya of the student is to suffer while the kartavya path of the teacher is to be illuminated by uploading, reloading and adding to cyberwork on a daily basis.

The belief that more paper work and entry of data is the hallmark of university life is now optimal. Towards that heaven of delusion, dear Indians, university administration now tirelessly stretches its arms, steering higher education into an abyss of ever-widening darkness.

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 Dr Ratna Raman is Professor, Department of English, Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi University.