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.
