Half–baked regulations of UGC

University Grants Commission (UGC) was formally established in 1956 as a statutory body of the Government of India through UGC Act of 1956 for the purpose of disbursing grants to the universities and colleges besides determining, promoting and maintaining standards of teaching, examination and research in the institutions of higher learning. Higher education institutions adopt UGC regulations and implement them in letter and spirit with a pre-conceived notion that the regulations have been framed by the most veteran experts in the field at the topmost level after threadbare discussions and after taking a kaleidoscopic view of the various segments of teaching and research community that are likely to be affected in a positive or negative manner by the regulations.

To a very large extent these regulations serve their intended purpose and achieve their desired objectives well but in a huge number of cases these regulations have proved to be counter-productive bringing a sense of dismay, frustration and dissuasion to those affected by their ill-effects. Negative effects are produced as a result of ambiguities and vagueness of many such regulations that many a times leads to misinterpretation and misunderstanding of regulations and teachers working in colleges and universities have to bear the brunt of those disparities and discrepancies whose career is impacted adversely and irreversibly under such circumstances. New UGC Regulations were promulgated first in the year 2010 that were amended in the year 2013 followed by two more amendments in the year 2016 within a short span of two months. These regulations were then replaced by the UGC Regulations 2018 that are currently in vogue. Four amendments in quick succession between 2010 and 2016 put a whole lot of careers of the university teachers in jeopardy as a result of fast-changing regulations and requirements for their career growth and progression.

UGC Regulations so far

UGC Regulations of 2010 introduced for the first time Academic Performance Indicator (API)based scoring of teachers’ performance in teaching, research, publications and extension activities. While at the very outset, performance based assessment system (PBAS) introduced in these regulations was largely hailed as a step in the right direction towards enhancing standards of quality and promoting excellence in higher education, a large number of teachers working in higher education institutions got adversely affected by several half-baked, vague and ambiguous provisions introduced in these regulations.

One such provision pertained to the eligibility of Assistant Professors for the open posts of Associate Professors and the counting of period of Ph.D. research as teaching experience, that read, “the period of time taken by candidates to acquire M.Phil. and/or Ph.D. degree shall not be considered as teaching/research experience to be claimed for appointment to the teaching positions”. This very clause adversely affected the prospects of promotion of a large number of Assistant Professors all across India whose plea was that “the period of time taken by the candidates to acquire M.Phil. and/or Ph.D. degree” should imply the period when an in-service teacher working on substantive basis in a university was on study leave for pursuing his research degree and not the period when he was actively teaching in his parent department while simultaneously pursuing his M.Phil. and/or Ph.D.

This plea of the affected lot in spite of being genuine was outrightly rejected by the authorities at the helm of affairs back then but was eventually endorsed by the UGC and directions were passed on to the university authorities not to deduce active teaching period from the total experience gained by teachers while applying for the open posts of Associate Professors. However it took them almost three years of spine breaking, disheartening and frustrating struggle moving from door to door, table to table, one official to the other, explaining their grievance to them and seeking a just redressal of the same. In the mean time selection process continued unabated and many a teachers suffered set backs since they were declared ineligible and were not called for interviews for these posts. Damage caused to them was irreversible that could not be undone even by the UGC clarification later. Now even the leave period availed for obtaining Ph.D. is being considered by the UGC as active service for the sake of promotions of teachers.

Similarly second amendment of UGC Regulations brought out in 2013 that included capping provision created a lot of confusion as a result of their misinterpretation by the Universities. Then the fourth amendment brought out in 2016 led to a lengthy and cumbersome process of counting the teaching, extra-curricular and research activities on hourly basis. Many teachers working in universities did not even apply for their promotions owing to these exhaustive, spine-breaking and time consuming requirements under which each and every activity had to be substantiated by documentary evidence. Whether the faculty had attended some meeting or seminar anywhere, supervised some examination, delivered some extension lecture or simply appeared in a television or radio programme, they were supposed to produce documentary evidence for claiming API score against the same. 

API score based performance assessment

When Performance-linked Assessment System (PBAS) based on API scores was announced by the UGC in 2010, it was hailed by all academic circles as a concrete measure to arrest decline in the academic standards of higher education to some extent and infuse some semblance of accountability in measuring teaching and research performance of teachers quantitatively. However today it is widely believed that the PBAS based on API scores has done more harm than good to both teaching and research, because of which it should have been scrapped much earlier. The quantification of teachers’ performance using such stringent criteria had pushed teachers into a ‘rat race’ for gathering points for the sake of recruitment and promotion, and had forced them to mechanically turn into score building machines rather than concentrating on their basic responsibilities towards teaching and students. This scheme had prioritized quantity over quality of teaching and research activities. 

The pressure of accumulating cut-off points within specified time frames had led to some sort of commercialization and mechanization of both teaching and research. This system by no means promoted any free and critical thinking among teachers. Consequently it had led to the proliferation of several unhealthy and unfair practices like publishing substandard research,spurious publications, publication in paid journals, splitting one publication into two or more to get more points (salami publications), publishing books online on fast-track basis with sleazy publishers, outsourcing paper and book writing activities, to mention only a few, which in turn had led to an overall degradation in quality standards of higher education. 

Moreover there are stark discrepancies in API based assessment system too. While it envisaged to accord points for publishing papers in journals, presenting papers in conferences, publishing books or book chapters and completing research projects, there was no allocation in category-III of PBAS for undertaking peer review of papers and books by teachers, for attending a conference or seminar without presenting a paper, for being a co-author in a paper that is presented in some conference, for chairing or co-chairing a scientific session during scientific meetings, for attending expert committee meetings or evaluating research projects submitted to funding agencies. These vital academic activities had been completing ignored while fixing API scores.

While calculating the API for joint publications by multiple authors under the previous scheme, of the total score allotted to the relevant category of publication by the concerned teacher, the first/principal author and the corresponding author were supposed to equally share 60% of the total points and the remaining40% were to be shared equally by all other authors. In case a paper had three authors and it carried a total of 10 points, as per this regulation 3 points each would go to the first and second author and the remaining 4 points would go to the third author who neither happens to be the main researcher nor his supervisor but has contributed in some way in that research. Such irrational distribution of scores made a mockery of this entire system and reflected the myopic vision of the people who had designed and developed it.

Thus API based PBAS had sought to promote a score-hunting attitude among teachers. It promoted mechanization rather than creativity. Teachers working in colleges and universities all across India were feeling stressed and subdued on account of flaws in UGC regulations particularly API based PBAS since these flaws were posing a serious threat to their academic progress and were demoralizing them besides leading to unhealthy competition in educational institutions. Ultimately realizing its follies when UGC brought out new Regulations in the year 2018, API score was replaced by research score for performance assessment of teachers. This system now allows scoring of only research activities with only grades being awarded to teaching and extra-curricular activities. However the damage done in the interim by API based performance assessment can perhaps never be undone. In the second part of this write-up we would discuss UGC Journal List and Journal Impact Factors besides service length required for the promotions of college and university teachers as well as their reliability and validity in promoting research.

Journal Impact Factors

Another faux pas of the UGC Regulations has been the introduction of Impact Factors as means of evaluation of research activities of teachers. Impact factors were basically designed to assess the quality of a scientific journal by calculating the number of times the articles published in that particular journal were referenced or cited by others. Over the years it has been misused instead to assess the quality of the academicians. The impact factor is a flawed quantitative parameter as it is dependent on the number of times a paper is cited. A highly cited paper will push up the impact factor of a journal. No wonder journals that exclusively publish review articles rather than original research papers have much higher impact factors than other journals simply because they attract more number of citations. Many Nobel Laureates like Joseph Goldstein (1985), Peter Doherty (1996), Paul Nurse (2001) and Bruce Beutler (2011) have contested that impact factor is not the right measure to assess the quality of research of scientists since it is the research that counts, not the journal. They have urged that the research must go back to where it belongs i.e., the peers and experts in the field. Quality of research can best be judged by them alone.

There is another side to it. Take for instance a researcher who is working in a resource poor, under-developed setting where scientific, industrial, technological, economical or developmental concepts, processes and procedures that are outdated and sometimes even obsolete to the rest of the developed world, are still as good as innovations given their backwardness and slow pace of development. If such a researcher introduces such concepts at such a place with an aim of harnessing development, streamlining policies and procedures and organizing management activities, in different spheres, his work will hardly ever get published in a high impact international journal given the redundancy and lack of novelty of his concepts in rest of the developed world even though his research and extension work might bring radical changes locally much to the benefit and respite of millions of people inhabiting there. 

Further, the number of citations a research paper will get is dependent upon its life span that increases with an increase in the number of years after its publication. Thus, a far more reliable way to appropriately evaluate a research paper is through peer review by well-known experts in the field who can assess its standards. Let the research assessment go back to where it originally belongs, that is in the hands of peers and experts in that field. Further the API and Research Score, Impact Factor and other Journal Metrics have reinforced the policy of publish or perish reiterating the notion that only good research is publishable research whereas fact of the matter is that research quality has essentially to be judged by the quality of new knowledge that it generates and not by journal metrics or the like. Today perceived publishing value of the research topic and the extent to which results of the study will be cited around the world is subduing and overtaking the fundamental role and responsibilities of a researcher which is to raise pertinent questions, arrive at reliable answers, generate new and innovative ideas, solutions, perspectives that significantly enhance the prevailing knowledge base and lead to the creation of new knowledge.

The backlash against the journal impact factors is not restricted to India alone. It has led to the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) which was signed by members of the scientific community during the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology on May 16, 2013. Specifically, the signatories have recommended that the journal impact factor should not be used as a measure of scientific success in funding, appointment and promotion consideration. Instead they recommend that the research should be evaluated on its own merits. Therefore there is need to promote independent, balanced, and objective approach to the research problems with transparency and use of appropriate methodology rather than worrying too much about journal metrics like citation index.

UGC Journal Lists

In the year 2016 UGC came out with its own list of almost 50,000 journals that were to be considered for awarding API score to research publications of the faculty members. Initially the list contained only journals included in Scopus, Web of Science and Indian Citation Index. The list was later expanded to include recommendations from the academic community and the universities were allowed to upload their recommendations, based on specified filtering criteria, on the UGC portal twice in 2017.The UGC-approved List of Journals is considered for recruitment, promotion and career advancement not only in universities and colleges but also other institutions of higher education in India. As such, it is the responsibility of UGC to curate its list of approved journals and to ensure that it contains only high-quality journals. However a study published in Current Science reported that over 88 percent of the journals listed by UGC in its approved list were themselves dubious. Ever since API scores were made mandatory, there has been a mushroom growth of hitherto unknown journals that are always on a prowl to persuade academicians to publish substandard research on payment basis to fetch them the required API scores. As per Patwardhan et al, more than 8,000 predatory journals churn out more than 400,000 items a year, and India contributes more than one-third of the articles in such predatory publications. These predatory journals turned to be a big challenge for the UGC which eventually revised the list removing more than 4000 journals and framing a CARE (Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics) Reference List of Quality Journals. 

However this never-ending process of updating the UGC list lead to another set of distressing problems for the teachers. The fact that a journal listed in the UGC Approved list at one point of time could be removed from the list anytime led to confusion and uncertainty. People who got themselves published in journals figuring in the list at one point of time suddenly found themselves at loggerheads once the journal was removed from the list thus making the list hardly reliable. Instead of investing so much time, money, manpower and energy in preparing and updating these ever-changing and lengthy lists it would have been a whole lot easier and wiser for the UGC to simply notify the databases like Scopus, Sciencedirect, Pubmed, Medline, Web of Science, Science Citation Index etc instead of listing the journals. Any changes in the databases made by their publishers would have got automatically incorporated in the journals too. This is what Medical Council of India followed for considering research papers of the medical fraternity in their promotions. Further the procedure followed by UGC was not devoid of any prospects of getting commercialized and sabotaged by the publishing houses. One wonders why this simply idea did not struck the high and mighty sitting in the offices of UGC.

Service length for promotion of College and University teachers

There is huge disparity and discrepancy in the service length as well as the salary packages as a teacher moves from Assistant Professor cadre to Associate Professor and then to Professor cadre. Lot of injustice is meted out to the junior cadre with a hike of just 1000 rupees from stage 1 to 2and from stage 2 to 3 followed by a quantum leap of around 50 to 100% hike in the salary from stage 3 to 4 depending upon the service length of the aspirant. Till stage 3 salary gap is too narrow and beyond that it is too wide. Opposite of this is true in case of service length. Career advancement scheme that is presently in vogue encompasses 12+3 formula as per which it takes around 12 to 16 years to move from Assistant Professor to the designation of an Associate Professor but only three years thereafter to become a Professor, which is totally inequitable, irrational and unjust. There is need to end this discriminative scheme and switchover to the more rational 9+6 formula or even better 9+3 scheme. This will bring some uniformity and remove discrimination and disparity in the scheme. Zeal, enthusiasm and motivation of an Assistant Professor gets dimmed by this unreasonable promotion system and it not only breeds inertia but corruption too. 

Anomaly and Revisit Committees

By incorporating API score based assessment and its capping, entire brunt was borne by the Assistant Professor for whom it became even more difficult even after 14 years to dream of becoming an Associate Professor since the parameters were very stringent that were only made worse by their misinterpretation.University Grants Commission itself realized various flaws in their regulations after itreceived a flood of representations and complaints from teachers, researchers, colleges,universities, associations from across India since a very large number of teachers were gettingadversely affected by them and their promotions were getting stuck for years together. Many times UGC had to frame anomaly committees and revisit committees to examine theanomalies brought into its notice and revise the regulations. 

After a lot of reluctance UGC brought out a new set of Regulations in the year 2018 that are much more flexible and prudent than the earlier regulations even though the research scores allotted to many research activities are comparatively lesser than provided in the earlier regulations. After allowing lot of damages to the research quality by way of API score based assessment finally UGC has scrapped this flawed system and replaced it by a Research Score based criteria which is expected to bring some relief to the teachers working in higher education institutions though it cannot be expected to undo the damages that it has done to the quality standards of teaching and research in the country over the past decade.

Further it needs to be clarified that no sane person can ever be against incorporation of quantitative or qualitative measures for assessing the performance of teachers but they need to be flexible, rational and just rather than stringent,impracticable, irrational and unjust. Standards that not only demoralize the teaching community but lead to unhealthy competition, infighting, dissuasion and dissidence among them cannot be termed as just and reasonable. In this manner desired objectives of the UGC regulations cannot be achieved and these regulations will prove to be counter-productive.