The Cost Of Haste In Engineering Education
Dr S Sivasegaram
I appreciate Elijah Hoole’s comment in the Colombo Telegraph (January 5, 2016) on the crisis of the engineering degree programme of the South Eastern University of Sri Lanka for bringing to light several of the underlying issues. I wish to add further relevant information which I believe would give a fuller picture of a situation that is located somewhere between a whimsical farce and a tragic misadventure, mainly in the hope that such mistakes will be averted in setting up new university faculties and starting degree programmes in the future.
The Background
As far as I know, the South Eastern University of Sri Lanka (SEUSL) had no plan for an engineering faculty until after the GCE (AL) 2011 fiasco, although there may have been the wish to have one sometime in the future. The UGC, as already known, messed up admissions based on GCE (AL) results by abandoning commonsense when it decided on a procedure for evaluating the Z-scores for students sitting the examination in any group of subjects, but with different syllabi for one or several of them. When the Supreme Court ruled against the procedure adopted by the UGC, the UGC was initially defiant and sought to defer the day of reckoning until finally yielding to legal, public and political pressure. It thus unnecessarily delayed university admissions by several months and forced universities to curtail some of the programmes for new entrants. The UGC faced the problem that the number of students qualifying for admission to engineering degree programmes was a few hundred more than usual, with the three regular state universities offering engineering degree programmes already bursting at their seams with much larger numbers admitted than they could satisfactorily cater for. Yet the universities responded to the appeal by the Ministry of Higher Education and the UGC to increase admissions as best as they could for that year. But, there were a hundred or so left out with a right to admission.
Pressure was brought on the University of Jaffna (UoJ) to start its planned engineering degree programme promptly and admit the surplus of students. The UoJ wisely turned down the request, but braced itself to admit a modest number of students the next year, as it anticipated stronger pressure from the government to increase admissions. But the SEUSL rushed to solve a problem, which it was least prepared — and even less suited — to address. I will first place before the readers some of the experiences of the University of Ruhuna (UoR) and the UoJ before presenting the chaotic process adopted by the SEUSL to establish its Faculty of Engineering.
