An extra helping

Engineering students spend long hours at college, but now many of them take coaching in specific subjects to gain an edge.

Engineering or medicine? The reduction of study choices to this binary has resulted in stiff competition for seats in good colleges for these disciplines. As a result, study at school is supplemented by hours of coaching — for exams and entrance exams. Now, however, this saga does not end with school. Many engineering college students are now continuing with the practice of attending coaching classes or taking home tuitions to supplement the training they get at their institutions of learning.

The reasons are varied: lack of proper attention from the faculty, the need to clear arrears, the need to improve expected grades and more.

Backlogs and brainwork

Senthil (name changed) had some arrears when he finished four years of his engineering course. Disheartened, he left for a stint abroad and worked for a few years. Something pulled him back and he came back to Chennai. Staying in a hostel, he joined a tuition centre and with this support, cleared all six papers within a year.

This is not an uncommon occurrence, according to Mr. Paul who runs the Vidhyodaya Academy in Chennai which coaches students for their B.E. and M.E. exams. “With the teaching in colleges not being up to the mark, students flock the tuition centres,” he adds. Faculty in his tuition centre are highly qualified, with M.E., M.S. and Ph.D. not being uncommon. “They are mostly young faculty from colleges who can come down to the level of the students,” he remarks.

That is not to say that only students with arrears come for tuitions. Many students come because they want to score more, or because the faculty in the colleges they study in do not “connect” with them.

Vignesh, who is in the third year of engineering at a private engineering college, takes up coaching in Maths-3. “In the college, we are taught one or two problems in a unit and we end up mugging them up. But in the tuition class, we are taught many problems in each unit, which helps us grasp the concept better,” he says.

In his tuition class, he is taught several ways to approach the problem. “This is more helpful than the two problems that we are taught in college, because definitely the exam paper will not be from those two problems! I feel I have learned a bit of Maths-3 only after joining the tuition class,” he says.

Kalaiarasi Karthik Kumar is a permanent faculty member in a tuition centre in Chennai, which caters to B.E., Diplomas and M.E. After getting her M.E., she worked in various engineering colleges before joining this centre. She says that the students get more personal attention there. “In contrast to a classroom (in college) where there are fifty students, here there are just two or three. I explain by writing in the notebooks of the students. They are free to clear their doubts. Also, the problem sessions are two hours long, and I make them do problems and then give a lot of homework so that they get good practice.”

Intensive sessions

Mallika (name changed), who is a final-year student of Computer Science Engineering in a private engineering college, is confident of scoring in her “home subjects,” but when it comes to Digital Signal Processing, she panics. “It is an electronics subject, and I felt I needed a boost. So a tutor comes home to teach me just this subject,” she says. It is a two-week intensive dose of the subject so that she can skim through the exam which will be held next month. She too talks about how the particular faculty member at her college is not able to do a convincing job of teaching this subject. The advantage of having a home tuition is personalised learning and intensive coaching.

From needing regular support to bridging over arrears to concentrated mini-programmes, tuitions seem to be complementing college teaching, and, at times, even making up for lacunae in the latter. The need for personalised attention, problem-solving and scoring in exams seems to be driving this trend. Would this end up repeating the phenomenon sometimes observed in school — of having first rankers without the capacity to practically apply their knowledge — or would it just improve education in general? The answer is, probably a bit of both.

Keywords: engineering education, medical education