With masks covering our faces and sanitizer bottles cluttering our bags, we entered college in November, 2022 in a strange fit of uncertainty and excitement. While the world was still figuring its way out of the pandemic, we were figuring out our preference lists, fixated on trying to get into our dream colleges after two years of disrupted schooling. For the undergraduate batch 2022-25, the last five years have been quite a roller coaster ride on the educational front. From navigating the unprecedented division of our 12th board exams into two terms to grappling with the newly introduced Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for university admissions, to now embarking on the uncharted territory of a fourth year in undergraduate programs, we have truly been the official lab rats for experimenting all new educational policies rolled out and implemented in recent years. As the first batch to fully experience the complications arising through the CUET and the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020, our journey through higher education has been one of a kind, and it reveals the immediate need for critical examination of these reforms.
Our initial encounter with the brunt of CUET was through the complete reliance on the NCERT syllabus as the foundation for the entrance exam. Earlier, university admissions would be based on 12th board exam cutoffs - a system that had its own demerits. But its new alternative did very little to counter its initial issues. Students from state boards and other non-CBSE curricula found themselves at a significant disadvantage, as their syllabi diverged sharply from NCERT content. After spending months mentally exerting themselves for their board examinations, scoring well in which they believed would secure them a good college, students were notified about this drastic change in the admission process only two months prior to the CUET entrance dates, hence compounding the issue by limiting their preparation time. But even if we keep the hasty transition to CUET aside, the ripple effects of this reform extended beyond just the entrance exams. After two years of on and off lockdowns owing to Covid, things were finally starting to fall into track. Our board exam results were out by July, but due to considerable delays in the admission process because of the test’s rollout and the technical mishaps surrounding it, our academic calendars were greatly disrupted. Our first semester concluded in barely four months, starting in November and ending in February, and a three year degree was forcefully compressed to merely two and a half years, with hardly any breaks or gaps in between.
The introduction of the New Education Policy- 2020 was done with the promise of a holistic and multidisciplinary approach at the higher education level, but little was known about how this would be carried out. In an attempt to increase focus on vocational courses, the weightage of honours degrees diluted through regulated syllabus cuts and reduction in depth of rather important topics, deemed otherwise essential for specialized honours programs. For a student picking a program like physics honours to gain expertise in that particular field, spending four semesters studying Hindi Grammar for their ‘Ability Enhancement Course’ (AEC) or papers like ‘The Art of Being Happy’ for their ‘Value Addition Course’ (VAC) has proved to be highly counter productive. One moves from school to university hoping for this exact change - a ‘choice’ in picking the subjects they want to study. Somehow in university, we ended up having to study more papers than we had to in school. There is perhaps an illusion of choice that NEP gives you, it just is extremely limited in its scope, which makes students crowd papers that are easy to score in, really messing up the student - teacher ratio, and hence this choice doesn’t end up culminating into something substantial. This shift in focus from one’s degrees to other courses like the AEC and VAC has been highly detrimental, eroding the value of our honours degrees to a large extent.
The ‘Skill Enhancement Course’ (SEC), taught for all six semesters of our program, was another cornerstone of the NEP’s emphasis on vocational education and holistic learning. However, the ground reality told a different story. Most colleges lacked the adequate infrastructure, resources, and facilities required to effectively teach these papers. Educators openly admitted to being made to teach papers that they lacked formal training and background in. If this has been the case of a top college in Delhi University, one can only imagine what kind of challenges other institutions, mainly those in tier three cities might be tackling. This gap in the intent and execution of vocational training has made these programs little more than theoretical exercises, failing to equip students with the practical skills they were meant to impart. Moreover, these additional courses meant jam packed schedules for students, leaving little to no room for extracurricular activities. The relentless pace of coursework owing to the introduction of marked ‘Classroom Activity’, that was often graded based on regular assignments and attendance, robbed students of the opportunity to engage themselves in activities beyond the classroom, which are essential to the university experience. NEP advocated for moving away from summative assessments towards methods of continuous evaluation, but this process has instead become a futile exercise in valuing quantity over quality, where students are expected to mechanically churn out eight to ten assignments per paper each semester, shifting focus from meaningful learning to meeting arbitrary submission quotas. This increased burden on students through the SEC, VAC and AEC, along with the CA assessment pattern has stifled critical thinking and creativity, overturning the intent that the NEP was rolled out with.
One of the most frustrating aspects of our academic journey perhaps was the lack of clarity about the syllabi for upcoming semesters. We were not provided with a consolidated curriculum for our degrees in the beginning, and our syllabi were drafted as and when we moved to the next semester, leaving students and faculty in a constant state of uncertainty alike. Even as most students transition now into the newly introduced fourth year of undergraduate programs coming into force from this session (2025-26), no official syllabus has been provided yet, forcing us to navigate unfamiliar academic frontiers without a proper roadmap. This is nothing but a lack of planning and communication, accentuating a broader failure in the policy’s execution.
As a batch that has been the testing ground for policies implemented with little preparation and no foresight, we understand the intent of equity, accessibility and holistic development behind these reforms. But the systematic shortcomings behind their execution underscored by our experience also cannot be overlooked. There needs to be better planning, investment in infrastructural development, and focus on formally training educators before such rushed imposition of reforms, no matter how great they sound in theory. Through our unique perspectives as ‘lab rats’ for these policy implementations, we henceforth advocate for an urgent need to ensure that future batches are not subjected to the same chaos and uncertainty as us.