How H.I can help us improve?

Mohammed Ammar Bin Yaser

On 13 July 2010, our very own Sir Humair Istiaq, wrote a bitingly sarcastic article in Dawn’s Education page about the shabby state of public university education. He didn’t name Karachi University’s Mass Communication department in the whole piece, but we know he only talked about us to prove his thesis. In the article, H.I quoted some of the answers that students of third year, wildly, attempted in their semester exams. After reading it, one is convinced that the article couldn’t have been named more aptly: Hilarious Answers.

I remember, many of us shared the link to the piece on our Facebook profiles - ‘liked’ it, and exchanged comments like ‘hahahaha’ and ‘God! How embarrassing’.

In the article, Sir Humair, in his notoriously witty style, identifies a crucial problem that most of us overlooked because of whining embarrassments and giggling mockery over its publication. But soon the issue became stale and got buried in the archives.

Here’s what he said: people are always grumbling about government’s lack of efforts in the education sector, which is true to some extent. But, we should also look at the other side of the equation. Then he quotes outrageously funny answers from the answer-scripts of third year students that amply show how clueless these students are about the world. Bottom line: perhaps the government is not doing enough on the education sector, but we, the students, are no good- we suck too!

Now the question is who is to be blamed for this utter inaptitude of students? I think the answer lies with the person who questioned our aptitude in the first place.

Like any other associate of the faculty of Arts, the department of Mass Communication of Karachi University is host to students who never intended to be here at the first place. A significant chunk of students never choose Mass Communications as their major. They just copied the name of the department from the brochure as a filler to complete the ‘preference’ column of the form that asks to specify a list of departments in case the prospective student didn’t make it to his/her preferred major. But, to their sheer horror, many of these students found themselves dumped here.

Hence, it’s no wonder that our department is replete with Shaboranis who never unfolded a newspaper in their life except to mat their wardrobe or cupboards with papers; or read a book outside the purview of their syllabus.

I don’t blame them. They are like the IDPs. Folks without choice who decided to cling to their last hope of acquiring a bachelor’s degree, while swallowing the harsh fact that they failed to enter their desired field of interest e.g. Pharmacy, Microbiology, etc.

These students were literally disoriented on the orientation day, but soon learned the not-so-tough art of persistently scoring good marks in the exams. They soon learned the trick: download the content related to your topic from Wikipedia, submit half of them as assignment and memorize the remaining half for the exam day. Simple!

This is the bitter truth.

So how can we get over this sorry state of affairs?

We can’t, but Sir Humair can. All he has to do is provide the students with a thick handout and set questions from within the content of the handout. Avoid being clever and keep the questions straight.

A slight change of method on his part can at least transform the overall quality of education being imparted in the department of Mass Communication of Karachi University if not all the public universities of the country.

Sacchi mein!