Former IIT-D Director Advocates 5-Year BTech Option to Ease Student Pressure

Prof Rao had served as IIT Delhi's director from 2016 to 2021 and has worked at both IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi for more than 20 years. His suggestion of five year BTech provides solution to a deeper, broader issue of how institutions respond when students encounter difficulties in learning.

Former IIT-D Director Advocates 5-Year BTech Option to Ease Student Pressure

Former Director of IIT Delhi and current Group Vice-Chancellor of BITS Pilani campuses, V. Ramgopal Rao, has suggested that the duration of BTech courses at Indian Institutes of Technology should be increased to five years.

According to his proposal, students would be provided the opportunity to graduate in five, four years or even three and a half if they complete enough credit requirements. Therefore, the idea would give the possibility to take additional time for graduating and also early exit if the student progresses fast enough.

He states that the existing "one-size-fits-all" approach does not take into consideration sufficiently for students’ different levels of background education and learning capacity.

According to his viewpoint, using one standard educational approach to students who differ significantly from each other is the main reason for many conflicts arising within the IIT system.

One class might include the students whose JEE Advanced scores vary from single digits to five digits. They come from various linguistic and socio-economic backgrounds. He questioned the feasibility of the expectation that such a diverse audience would progress equally well. He claimed that the question is about how the approach and methods of teaching and learning have changed to accommodate this variability.

He pointed out also the drawbacks of the coaching-based preparation as many students get coached classes which teach shortcuts in learning and problem-solving tasks. As a result, when they go to institutions, they cannot cope with more difficult problems.

By his intervention, the question whether the best engineering schools in India would be able to keep using the standard approach amid growing diversity of preparation, language and learning readiness is raised.

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