University of Hyderabad.
Hyderabad: The Ambedkar Students’ Association (ASA) of the University of Hyderabad (UoH) produced a seven-page report on the ‘discriminatory grading system’ in the institution’s PhD admissions.
The report, which has gone viral on social media states that there is a pattern in the grading of PhD applicants that mirrors the caste hierarchy.
“Ambedkar Students’ Association prepared and submitted a 7-page report on discriminatory marking of reserved category students in PhD interviews. The report establishes that there is a consistent pattern of discriminatory marking almost resembling the hierarchical caste order,” ASA HCU said in a tweet on Thursday.
“The report makes it abundantly clear that caste is alive and thriving in higher educational institutions. Structural discrimination and disadvantages are chipping away the gains of reservation from OBC, SC and ST students,” it added.
The ASA report states that despite having comparable admission exam scores, students from reserved categories are marked substantially lower than those from unreserved categories in interviews.
“We, the Ambedkar Students’ Association, would like to bring to your attention the gross discrimination in marking reserved category students in the interview during PhD admissions 2023. After filing a set of RTI applications, we found that there is a clear pattern observed where students belonging to reserved categories are marked much lower than students belonging to unreserved category in their interviews despite them having similar marks in the entrance exam,” ASA said.
The students’ body further said that the findings give the impression that the students were marked in the interviews ‘deliberately’ as if to ensure that the general category seats are occupied “exclusively by students belonging to the unreserved category”.
“This is a subversion of the policy of affirmative action and turns the principle of social justice upside down. The reservation policy, which is supposed to ensure that there is a minimum percentage of students from the reserved category, is now being used in the university to limit the number of reserved category students to the bare minimum,” it remarked.
ASA further said that categorisation, which exists solely for the purpose of positive discrimination, seems to have been used ‘blatantly for negative discrimination’, which is ‘unconstitutional and a grave violation of the principle of social justice’.
“We have also found patterns of discriminatory or preferential marking from specific faculties to subvert the gains of the reservation policy,” ASA alleged.
The study provides PhD interview marks from the University of Hyderabad’s seven departments: computer science, plant science, biochemistry, physics, electronics, applied mathematics, and microbiology.
According to the report’s data, the average entrance exam score of the top five students in the computer science department for the Unreserved category is 41.4, and the interview mark is 24.6. Nevertheless, the average exam score among top OBC scorers is 40, and the average interview score is 17.2. The average admission exam score of the top five SC and ST students is 30.2 and 25.4, respectively, while the average interview score is 12 and 6.6.
According to the research, students’ grades have dropped in line with their caste privilege.
“The discriminatory marking in these departments almost resembles a structure of graded inequality where marks of students resemble their position in the caste hierarchy,” says ASA’s report.
The report also highlights eight severe cases of discriminatory grading, which include: Seven out of eight faculties giving a zero to an SC student who applied for a PhD in material engineering and an OBC candidate for a PhD in material engineering being given 2.4 marks in the PhD interview despite having a 40 entrance score.
Post making the report public, ASA’s list of demands include the formation of a committee to investigate the grading system, defining evaluation criteria, providing and recording individual grades from faculty members, holding Ph.D. admission seminars for students before admission begins, and ensuring that no student is rejected by the faculty by giving them zero points.
Faculty members in the past have marked students with zeroes and declared them unsuitable for admission, violating USC norms.
This post was last modified on April 1, 2023 4:48 am