Problems with Current Style of Education - In Universities

I am teaching for couple of years and I strongly feel about following aspects should be improved. (Please note, these are my personal opinions and nothing to do with my current employer. No offence intended.)
  1. In classroom of mostly private universities, some students are highly motivated to learn and go an extra mile what is taught to them, but teacher waste their energy and time by teaching them same material that is taught to whole class. I strongly believe, 10-15% students in class can learn same stuff in 1 month that a teacher teach them in 5 months. Model sections or video based training may be more beneficial for these motivated folks). First tier universities don't have such issue as because of higher merit that attract same level students or who differ with at lower degree.
  2. Same issue hold with students who need to put more energy to absorb the delivered content. Mostly teachers instruct keeping the average student in mind or expect an good enough level of prior understanding. It again causes an issue, the students who require slow pace or greater explanation of the topic, left behind in few lectures and some even don't catch up by the end of semester even. There is nothing wrong with such students, we are humans and humans are not same. Some learn slow and others learn fast but nature has put more energy to do hard-work in them. Or may be they are fighting at wrong front and may had perform much better in other fields. Whatever the issue be, such student deserve the attention they need.
  3. In programming courses, lab work is given less credit hours. In fact, in skill based degrees, theory should be given 1 credit and lab should be given 3 credit, in 4 credits course for example. Its only way, to put student focus on doing practical stuff instead of learning theory, definitions, concepts, or cramming slides etc. In lab course, teacher must create a complete software project programming in front of class that involve all major concepts of the course, instead of teaching basic and expecting students to make professional projects.
  4. Education objective should be to strengthen students on at least 3 fronts i.e. economics (i.e. learning whats required to make good living), personal/religious/spiritual development, cultural/society awareness and ownership. Unfortunately, from the curriculum perspective, economics seems main focus. Though there are some teachers in all universities who talk things related to character but its unofficial and low in numbers. In real life, success or maturity on family matters, ethics, physical, emotional and mental health and personal relations are equally important as success in professional career. One may argue, Islamic and Pakistan Studies are taught for 12 years then why to repeat again. I believe, the human mind at undergraduate level is mature and better able to learn such stuff at this level compared to teenage. Only balanced education can produce responsible citizens and leaders of their profession.
  5. Most of students join university to learn to better work in industry, very few come to continue further studies or to do research. Mostly even don't know what the research is when the join university. I believe faculty with good industrial experience can better prepare students for industry instead of those PhDs who themselves have not worked for a single day in industry. So what happens? The faculty pull students to research & publications and students are naturally inclined towards development (or they should be). I value the research aspect too but there must be a balance. In reality, there is no or extremely less faculty in universities who has good industry experience (Visit faculty profiles of public and private universities at their websites). Now the question is, how it is controlled that people from industry do not come to universities to teach? By setting pays. When a university give fresh PhD. 130K/Month and a professional with almost 5 years industrial experience get 60K, then who would come university to teach?HEC do focus on motivating students on making real products and to strengthen industry/academia partnership through ORIC etc but their ground policies on salaries are against their vision. Students ask why the university do not offer elective courses that are required in industry today e.g. Search Engine Optimization, Network Programming, Web Services, Web Security, Front End MVCs, Android Development, iPhone Development, Game Development, Big Data, and Information Retrieval ... I think its because of 2 reasons: University vision is not to prepare ready-for-industry professionals and nor they have faculty to instruct these in-demand courses.
  6. I am writing from my own experience when I was student at 2 universities, some of non-faculty staff of registration branch, admission office, department coordinators, lab staff, accounts, etc. treat students in very disrespectful manner when students approach them for help or to followup applications related to courses or fee etc. Actually when you mistreat someone, specifically when they can't do much against you, it destroy their self-esteem. High self-esteem is very important to remain in continuous motivation state. No matter what is the nature of student application, they deserve highest self respect being humans. If we really want to make them leaders of tomorrow, we must have to treat them like leaders today. If you treat someone like animal (in fact animals should also be not treated like this), then what you can expect from them. The feeling of low self esteem makes people frustrated and worried. Its difficult for a frustrated person to out-perform. It take not much resources to deploy an online system to process all such queries, facilitation software already exist e.g. Redmine, JIRA, etc. If fee collection can be computerized then definitely such things can also be computerized. But the issue is, accounts causes better earning and monitoring but student facilitation systems do not increase earning directly.


  1. Very much agree with the final point. I always had a problem with the PhD faculty because they could never deliver the knowledge effectively and failed to make their lectures interesting for the students. The teachers who did not have PhDs but had a few years of industry experience were far more qualified to deliver practical knowledge of their courses, but unfortunately, there were very few teachers who had industry experience. Today when I look back at my four years in university, the only thing that helped me get a job was my own interest in learning web development. I remember I struggled a lot during my FYP because we were never taught courses in Android or iOS development. We had to acquire all the practical knowledge by ourselves.

    I personally think the universities should have a policy that all programming courses should be taught by people with at least 5 years of industry experience. And obviously they should get paid more because they are more valuable to the institute than the PhD faculty in terms of producing quality graduates.

  2. University teacher totally waste our Intelligence

  3. truly expressed our reservations,concerns and the problems we faced during our stay at univ. the suggestions are excellent too. I wish the concerned authorities at least at COMSATS will read it and take some measures to rectify the pointed problems.


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