PATNA: Patna University (PU) has, of late, initiated necessary steps for strengthening all its self-financing (vocational) courses and enhancing placement opportunities for the passouts. The ordinance and regulations of different courses would be amended and the feasibility of starting new programmes keeping in view the present employment scenario would also be studied.
PU vocational courses’ chief coordinator Birendra Prasad told this newspaper on Thursday that the course coordinators of different self-financing courses, running both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, have been directed to examine the course intake capacity.
“They have also been asked to check the viability of old courses in the modern context and send a detailed report to the university,” Prasad said.
The chief coordinator pointed out that the various issues relating to the enhancement of utility of self-financing courses were discussed at a recent meeting of the programme directors and course coordinators with the PU vice-chancellor, G K Choudhary.
“It was decided that all the self-financing courses will frame uniform criteria of admission, examination, results, fee structure and number of papers in each semester,” Prasad added.
It was found that the students of different disciplines and faculties were admitted to the same academic programme like MA in personnel management and industrial relations (PMIR), MA in rural management, MA in social work and MA in mass communications and journalism.
“The nomenclature of the course should not be confined to one discipline. Rather the new name should be Masters in PMIR,” the chief coordinator said, adding that the nomenclature of all such courses will be changed so that students doing these courses do not suffer at the time of their placement.
However, some undergraduate students have faced problems in getting jobs due to different nomenclature of the same course as BA in computer applications and BSc in computer applications. “The nomenclature of both these courses will now be changed as Bachelor of computer applications (BCA),” Prasad said. Mathematics or statistics at +2 stage would be one of the minimum eligibility criteria for admission to the BCA course.
Meanwhile, the programme directors and course coordinators have been asked to activate the placement process.
“Colleges and postgraduate departments will maintain the record of such placement. Each college will have a separate placement cell with a placement coordinator for its proper functioning,” Prasad said and added that each department or college would conduct an academic audit of self-financing courses at regular intervals and procure students’ feedback in each session.