Teaching Science Badly – and Well

A normal, intelligent and curious child – particularly if he or she is Pakistani – must think science to be the most wretched of subjects at school. A few lucky exceptions aside, this is the fate of most. Very
few children will actually encounter science in a manner that they enjoy and deserve.

This is sad. Science is taught in schools for a good enough reason – we owe the modern world to it. The prosperity or poverty of nations, and of individuals, has become contingent upon their ability to understand and control science. Take its products away, and we would be back in the dark days of our ancestors when a child at birth was more likely to die than live.

But there is another excellent reason to study science. Far from being a cold and soulless collection of facts, it is delicately beautiful with principles that are amazingly simple and precise. Yet, they are also incredibly powerful and universal. Exactly the same laws explain why stars shine, the blue of the sky, the beating of the human heart, and the flight of birds. Science grips the imagination and fascinates endlessly. It has certainly engaged me for most of my life and I, like most scientists, will never tire of it.

If it is so wonderful, why then do only a few students in Pakistan want to become scientists? The problem is the prevalence of false notions of science. This, in turn, leads to teaching that ranges from bad to terrible, and thus to students who despise what they must study and memorize.

In contrast, a recent survey in India revealed that a majority of school students see science as the most glamorous and interesting career to pursue. Many go on to becoming the world’s top scientists. This is a key factor in the emergence of India as a major world power, in scientific as well as economic terms.

A science-phobic younger generation in Pakistan is bad news. This must change else we shall be stuck with low technological prowess, small potentials for future economic growth, and perpetual dependency. These are inescapable penalties for any country without a large scientifically trained workforce. It would be a terrible mistake to dismiss the term “knowledge economy” as a mere clich.

But what is it exactly that we do so wrong? And, what needs to be put right? To answer these questions needs a clear understanding of what science is. We must also know how it functions, and what it values. Pedagogical style and techniques will follow naturally once we properly clarify and define.

My definition: science is a body of knowledge, together with a very definite way of accumulating and validating that knowledge. Note the phrase “a very definite way”. This indicates that science must be distinguished from art, humanities, religion, etc. Their definitions of acceptable knowledge, and the paths leading to it, are totally different.

Science has no place for subjective experiences and, instead, to distinguish between true and false it relies exclusively on logic, reason, and experiment. Hypothesis, theory, fact, observation, and experiment are at the roots of what is known as the “scientific method”.

All this sounds a bit abstract, so back to plain talk: science demands proof using things that we can measure. There cannot be airy-fairy discussions of things. Science refuses to offer an opinion on things that are unobservable, or whose existence is impossible to verify even in principle. What you cannot see may still actually be there, but science is going to be mum about it. It’s as simple as that.

Every discipline has values and norms. Science certainly does too. Its central tenet is that one’s evidence, logic, and claims will be questioned, and that one’s experiments will be subjected to replication. Therefore a high premium is put upon skepticism and there is a deep distaste for dogmatism. Successful scientists, mathematics, and engineers are valued because of the institutionalized skepticism they imbibed during their education.

With all this philosophy now behind us, we can now ask what constitutes good pedagogic content for science, the teaching style, and the mistakes that are commonly made. Most importantly we need to ask: what are good science teachers actually supposed to do in class?

I. First, they should help students to simultaneously acquire scientific knowledge of the world, as well as cultivate scientific habits of mind. These are two completely different things. One is providing data and information about the physical world, the other is creating a mindset needed to properly interpret this data.

Therefore, science education must begin with simple things such as exploring the chemical properties of common substances, plants and animals, and systematic observations of the social behavior of humans and other animals. This requires that teachers show students to dissect, sort, count, collect, catalogue, compute, graph, and make sensible notes. Use of simple equipment like rulers, lenses, thermometers, cameras, etc. is important. Many students are fearful of using laboratory instruments and other tools. This fear is often from the lack of opportunity, but girls also suffer from the mistaken notion that boys are naturally more adept at using tools.

II. Second, good teachers must emphasize learning rather than teaching. The two are different. Learning is a process that progresses from the concrete to the abstract as cognitive abilities slowly improve. But students first need to get acquainted with the things around them such as devices, organisms, materials, shapes, and numbers. They must observe them, collect them, handle them, describe them, become puzzled by them, ask questions about them, argue about them, and then to try to find answers to their questions. Abstractions develop after these experiences, not before.

Good teaching starts with using tangible things. One does not need a Ph.D in cognitive studies to know that young people learn best when they deal with visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic objects. As their experience grows, they learn to understand abstract concepts, manipulate symbols, reason logically, solve theorems, and generalize. These abilities are destroyed, or left woefully undeveloped, by rote memorization.

Parsimony is essential. A good teacher picks the most important concepts and skills and concentrates on the quality of understanding, not on the quantity of information presented. In some expensive private O- and A- level Pakistani schools lots of scientific drilling exercises are given for exam grade improvement. Even when successful, this does not necessarily create mindsets for doing good scientific work at a later stage.

Similarly, overemphasizing vocabulary can be dangerous. Understanding is the main purpose of science teaching but many teachers think that their job is to make students learn big words. This detracts from science as a process and jeopardizes learning, particularly in a linguistically fractured country like ours.

III. Third, good science pedagogy happens when the spirit of healthy questioning is deliberately cultivated in the classroom. The scientific mindset starts developing naturally when students encounter questions that engage their mind rather than memory.

It should therefore be normal practice for teachers to raise such questions as: How do we know? What is important to measure? How to check the correctness of measurements? What is the evidence? How to make sense out of your results? Is there a counter explanation, or perhaps a simpler one? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such questions and framing answers.

Dogmatism kills science. Students should therefore experience science as a process for extending understanding, not as unalterable truth. Never should the teacher say X or Y is true just because that’s what the textbook says. (I grind my teeth whenever a student in my university class gives me this argument! But this is what these over-grown children have inevitably become.)

Equally importantly, teachers should never portray themselves as absolute authorities whose conclusions are always correct. Of course, there has to be a delicate balance here. As a teacher, I do know more than my students and I should not hide that. Was this untrue, my salary should rightfully be stopped. But the point is that I am occasionally wrong, and do make a mistake in class now and then. This can be turned to excellent advantage, as I have often discovered.

How? In traditional societies like ours, the student is told that his teacher “tumharay baap ki tarah hai”, an autocratic and tyrannical figure whose word is the law. This attitude is simply incompatible with the relative student-teacher equality that science teaching requires. Therefore I use the occasion provided by my mistake – if it genuinely is one – to prove that my authority is not absolute. It gives confidence to the student who points out my mistake and strengthens the spirit of scientific inquiry in my class.

It is wrong to say that science requires no faith. It does, albeit of a certain kind. Personally, I have never seen the 60 moons of Jupiter but am willing to accept their existence on faith because I know that, at least in principle, someone else can do it. In general, science teachers must help students achieve a delicate kind of balance between this kind of faith and skepticism. Teachers must also be able to explain coherently what caused the overturn of accepted scientific beliefs, and what to make out of disagreements among scientists. It is extremely important to keep an open mind and challenge when necessary.

Such open-mindedness is good not just for science pedagogy, but also for changing the stultifying cultural conditions of our society. The inability to deal with, or comprehend, scientific and technological matters has steadily lead to its dangerous “loser” mentality and a lurch towards extra-scientific, magical, and hodge-podge solutions.

Examples abound. Through programs produced and popularized by scientific illiterates, a virulently anti-scientific Pakistani television culture has emerged. It bashes science without knowing what it is about. Flipping through the channels, you can see TV programs trashing evolution, discussing strange fiery creatures in the sky, ascribing earthquakes and calamities to divine retribution, and containing laughable mish-mashes of science and religion.

Bad science teaching in our schools and wide-spread scientific illiteracy has made the siren song of unreason ever more sonorous and attractive. In older times the idiocy of the “aamils”, pirs, and mullahs and assorted soothsayers was accepted by just the ignorant and illiterate. But today college graduates, as well as the rich and powerful, now calmly accept this as high wisdom.

Good science education alone can change this. The demons of superstition can only be chased away by those who have learned science the correct way. But for that we may first need a major cultural and attitudinal change that permits real science to be taught in our schools.

General Pervez Musharraf's regime boasts of its successes in science and education at home and abroad. Recently, I saw Pakistan's successes trumpeted by a large official delegation headed by Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, the chairman of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) at a conference in Trieste, Italy. They came to address a special session on science development in Pakistan - the only country that had requested and paid for such special treatment at the conference. Those who did not know about the state of science in Pakistan were amazed by the claims made. Those who knew better were stunned by the flood of self-serving lies, half-truths and deceit.

The claims made were several. A 300 percent jump in research publications shows that academic activity in Pakistan has vastly increased; nine new engineering universities with European teaching faculty will soon be established; the 3000 Pakistani students sent overseas for higher degrees will revolutionize the university system upon return; Ph.Ds produced annually from Pakistani universities will soon approach the spectacular figure of 1500; mathematics is now a strong discipline in Pakistan; and so forth.

The truth is very different. Even though the spending on higher education has increased 15 times over the last five years, the improvements have been cosmetic. Genuine science in Pakistan has actually shrunk, not grown, over the last three decades. The trend has not been reversed. Euphoric claims notwithstanding, public university education in Pakistan remains miserably backward by international standards. Its real problems are yet to be touched.

Take the HEC's first claim: the 3-fold increase in Pakistani academic publications. Fantastically large per-paper monetary rewards to university teachers - a practice not adopted anywhere else in the world for excellent reasons - have indeed boosted publication rates. But publishing more papers is not the same as doing more research. Instead, the high rewards have caused an explosion of plagiarism, theft of intellectual property, publication of trivial results and falsified data, and publication of slightly different versions of the same paper in different journals. Most published papers are worthless academically and scientifically.

The reader can readily verify the last point. All that is needed is a computer and an internet connection. Simply type www.scholar.google.com into your browser, and then the name of any individual scientist or scholar you want. (Academic databases even more comprehensive than Google are available but not free.) A list of publications of that person, together with a count of the number of times his/her papers have been cited by other scholars, will be displayed. Remember that a piece of scientific work is important only if it is useful to other scientists, or to industry in the form of patents that lead to new products (a separate database exists for that). So, in a matter of seconds, one can see which individuals are considered important by the world of science and academia.

The results of such database searches are eye-opening. A majority of papers by Pakistani authors, even if published in international journals by some hook or crook, have exactly zero citations (once self-citations are removed). Such papers have contributed nothing. They may just as well have not been written. The average number of citations per Pakistani paper is 3.41 (includes self-citation), which is much below that in scientifically advanced countries.

Still more shocking is the citation record of some of Pakistan's most well-advertised scientists, whose relentless self-promotion at government expense would be considered a crime in another country. While they have hundreds of papers and books to their credit, most of these have zero-citations. Others in their field seem to have scarcely noticed any of their work. On the other hand the reader can check that about 25-30 other
Pakistani scientists, who are unadvertised, relatively unknown, and have published far fewer papers, nevertheless have much better citation records and a moderately good international standing in their respective fields.

Now for the HEC's nine Pak-European universities project: This is a stunning disaster. The most advanced university (in terms of construction and planning) was the French engineering university in Karachi. Named UESTP-France, with a completion cost of Rs. 26 billion rupees, it was to have begun functioning in October 2007. There is still no official explanation for why this did not happen, no new date has been set, and no account given of the money already spent.

On the face of it, making Pak-European universities sounds like a wonderful idea. Pakistan would pay for France, Sweden, Italy, and some other European countries to help set up, manage, and provide professors for new universities in Pakistan. It would be expensive - Pakistan would have to pay the full development costs, recurrent expenses, and euro-level salaries (plus 40% markup) for all the foreign professors and vice-chancellors. But it would still be worth it because the large presence of European professors teaching in these Pakistani universities would ensure good teaching. High-standard degrees would subsequently be awarded by institutions in the respective European countries.

Even commonsense said that the project could not work. Perhaps one can persuade beefy mercenaries of the French Foreign Legion to go to some country where suicide bombings happen daily and killing of ordinary citizens by terrorists is routine. But it takes an enormous leap of faith to think that respectable academics from France - or any other European country for that matter - will want to live and teach in Pakistan for a year or more. Travel advisories issued by several European governments warn against even brief visits. That the French professors did not turn up at UESTP-France is scarcely surprising. But, lost to their mad fantasies, HEC planners are now working on the vain assumption that the Germans and Swedes are made of sterner stuff than the French.

A wiser leadership would have aimed for one properly planned new engineering university, set up under the European Union. It would have sought external help for adding engineering departments to existing universities, as well as to massively upgrade existing ones. But these relatively modest goals are unacceptable to the present HEC leadership that believes, like the Musharraf regime as a whole, in grand plans rather than practical, feasible, reforms.

Showing the hollowness of the other official claims of progress would take more space than available here. Slick PowerPoint presentations by HEC officials throw one figure after another at dizzying speed giving the impression of fantastic progress. But the intelligent listener must ask many questions: does it make sense to select thousands of students on the basis of a substandard high-school level numeracy and literacy test, and then send them for an expensive graduate-level education in Europe? Will the quality of Pakistani graduates not be further degraded by pushing Ph.D production far beyond the capability of the present universities?

It is time to end the fetish of buying tons of expensive scientific equipment that, at the end of it all, produce only zero-citation papers and zero patents. Curiously, after a bunch of projects were exposed as phony, the HEC broke with its past practice and now no longer puts on its website details of HEC-funded projects. It is also time to stop HEC officials and HEC delegates from gallivanting across the globe at public expense on the vaguest of excuses for "fact-finding" missions and conferences.

There must be an independent investigation of the HEC's plans and financing, a review of its programs, and a full audit of accounts. The inquiry should be jointly done by the future government through the PAC and NAB, assisted by a citizens committee. Individual whims and personal ambitions must be checked to protect the national interest. Pakistan is a poor country although, looking at the HEC’s spending patterns, one would conclude the opposite.

WHAT REAL REFORM REQUIRES
The record-setting increase in the budget for higher education – which shot up from Rs 3.8 billion in 2002 to Rs 33.7 billion in 2007 - has led to little beyond cosmetic changes. So, what can be done?

Solutions are needed at three distinct levels - determining correct funding priorities, implementing approved plans and projects responsibly, and, most importantly, inducing changes in values to promote and enable real learning.

Current spending priorities are the haphazard expression of individual whims, not actual needs. For example, most Pakistani students in higher education (about 0.8 million) study in about 700 colleges. These colleges receive pitifully small funding compared to universities. During 2001-2004, the funds annually allocated to colleges averaged a miserable sum of Rs 0.48 billion and the spending per college student was only one sixth that for a university student. Subsequently this has become worse. It is no surprise then that public colleges are in desperate shape with dilapidated buildings, broken furniture, and laboratory and library facilities that exist only in name.

Meanwhile, many public universities are awash in funds. They have gone on a shopping binge for all kinds of gadgetry - fax machines, fancy multimedia projectors, and electricity-guzzling airconditioners. But it would be hard to argue that any of this has served to improve teaching quality even marginally. Worse, the availability of "free money" has led to the pursuit of numerous madcap projects such as the HEC's hugely expensive, but failed, attempt to bring in hundreds of fearful European university professors to teach in a country where suicide bombers kill at will.

The beggarly treatment of colleges compared to universities is often justified on grounds that universities perform research while colleges do not. But, notwithstanding a few honorable exceptions, this "research" has added little to the stock of existing knowledge as judged by the international community of scholars. Nevertheless, in 2005/2006 university research funding totaled a whopping Rs 0.342 billion. Past experience shows that much of the money will be used to buy expensive research equipment that will find little if any real use.

Instead of continuing to pay for dubious research, funding priorities must shift to improving teaching quality, especially in colleges. Pakistani university and college students, as well as their teachers, are far below the internationally accepted levels in terms of basic subject understanding. As one indicator, performance scores of Pakistanis on the US Graduate Record Examinations, which test subject basics, are miserably poor compared to students from India or China. For example, of the 56 M.Phil and Ph.D students who recently took the physics exam from the best physics department in the country - that at Quaid-e-Azam University – none was able to get even a semi-respectable score in this entry-level examination.

Because bad teaching quality largely comes from having teachers with insufficient knowledge of their subject, it is important both to have better teacher selection mechanisms and to create large-scale teacher-training academies in every province. Established with international help, these academies should bring in the best teachers as trainers from across the country and from our neighbours. It is hard to see any trainers coming from western countries, although one should try to get them. This effort will cost money and take time - perhaps on the order of a billion dollars over 5 years. These high-quality institutions should have a clear philosophy aimed at equipping teachers to teach through concepts rather than rote learning, use modern textbooks, and emphasize basic principles of pedagogy, grading, and fairness. They should award degrees to create an incentive for teachers to go there and to do well.

Until a sufficiently large number of adequate university teachers can be generated by the above (and various other) means, the senseless policy of making new universities must be discontinued. The HEC prides itself in almost doubling the number of public universities over 6 years. But there is nothing to be gained from a department of English where the
department's head cannot speak or write a grammatically correct non-trivial sentence of English; a physics department where the head is confused about the operation of an incandescent light bulb; a mathematics department where graduate students have problems with elementary surds and roots; or a biology department where evolution is thought to be new-fangled and quite unnecessary to teach as part of modern biology.

Better academic planning and management at the national level - which has no monetary cost - is crucial to having higher education institutions that actually function. Major quality improvements could result from using nation-wide standardized tests for student admission into higher education institutions; teaching teachers to use distance-learning materials effectively; and designing standardized teaching laboratories that may be efficiently duplicated across Pakistan.

But implementation of even the best plans comes to naught without good management at the institutional level. Good leaders have made a difference in their respective institutions. Unfortunately, Pakistan has a patronage system because of which unqualified and unsuitable military men, as well as bureaucrats, are often appointed as vice-chancellors, principals, and registrars. Therefore most institutional heads are inept and vital tasks remain unimplemented. These include enforcement of academic ethics, creating the culture of civilized debate on campuses, encouragement of community work, etc. The harm done by badly chosen senior administrators cannot be undone by any amount of money.

DEEPER ISSUES: Sixty years of consistent failure force us to search for reasons that go beyond fiscal and administrative issues. What sets us apart from the developed world, or even India and Iran? In Pakistan the dead hand of tradition stands squarely in the way of modern education and a modern mindset that relies on critical thinking. The educational system, shaped by deeply conservative social and cultural values, discourages questioning and stresses obedience.

In seeking change, it will be important to break the tyranny of the teacher, a relic of pre-modern social values. Closed minds cannot innovate, create art and literature, or do science. Most Pakistani students memorize an arbitrary set of rules and an endless number of facts and say that X is true and Y is false because that’s what the textbook says. (I grind my teeth whenever a master's or Ph.D student in my university class gives me this argument!)

There has to be social acceptance of modern education which, at its fundamentals, is entirely about individual liberty, willingness to accept change, intellectual honesty, and constructive rebellion. Critical thought allows individuals to make a revolutionary difference and to reinvent the future. Else they will merely repeat the dysfunction of the past.

To open minds, the change must begin at the school level. Good pedagogy requires encouraging the spirit of healthy questioning in the classroom. It should therefore be normal practice for teachers to raise such questions as: How do we know? What is important to measure? How to check the correctness of measurements? What is the evidence? How to make sense out of your results? Is there a counter explanation, or perhaps a simpler one? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such critical questions and framing reasoned answers.

Reforming higher education in Pakistan has a chance only if considers the totality of problems, such as outlined here, and if solution strategies are pursued with honesty and integrity. This task has yet to begin.

This essay was published in two parts in Dawn (Jan 2 & Jan 9, 2008)

Reckoning Time for HEC

The exit of Dr Atta-ur-Rahman as chairman of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) closes a unique period in Pakistan’s education system. His endless stories of success were accompanied by a flood of half-truths and faked success stories. But on the other hand Dr Rahman led the first serious effort to rescue a failed university system. Had a system of checks and balances been in place, some of his bold steps could have worked. In any case, it is time to make a balance sheet. What do the pluses and minuses of his term add up to?

The negatives are huge. Numerous HEC projects violated common sense and, not surprisingly, turned into costly disasters. An egregious example is the $4.3bn HEC mega-project to establish nine new engineering universities staffed by hundreds of European professors. None were built although large, but unknown, amounts were spent. Other prestige projects sucked up resources too. Many scientists, including myself, warned against buying certain fancy scientific equipment. But the opposition was futile and the whims of influential individuals prevailed. Expensive equipment was bought for which, years down the line, use still cannot be found.

The desire to show revolutionary progress inflicted long-term damage on our university system. For example, advised by Dr Rahman, Gen Musharraf declared that the annual production of PhD degree holders would be boosted from 150 per year to 1,500 per year. To support this, HEC incentive schemes encouraged PhD thesis supervisors, often of doubtful academic merit, to take on dozens of students each. Quality plummeted.

The proof is before us. One straightforward measure of a student’s achievement level is his/her performance in an international examination known as the GRE subject test. In a notification issued in July 2008, the HEC declared the passing mark required of Pakistani PhD graduates, who could take the test even in their final year, to be 40 percentile.

This announcement is shocking. It officially acknowledges the inferiority of Pakistani degrees. A web search by the reader will show that entry-level students in graduate programmes at an average US university have GRE subject scores in the 70-75 percentile range. Many Chinese, Indian and Iranian entry-level students make it to the 90 percentile bracket in the same tests. On the other hand, Pakistani students, although allowed an additional four to five years’ preparation time, can get a PhD with just 40 percentile. Worse, some university teachers, who are paid by the HEC an extra Rs 5,000 per month for every PhD student enrolled under their name, are energetically lobbying to get the pass mark reduced still further.

Strong endorsements by the World Bank and the science journal Nature were deftly used by Dr Rahman to justify his schemes. Neither conducted independent investigations, nor were familiar with the local university culture. They relied exclusively on what the HEC had to say about itself. Their partisan praise eroded their credibility.

On the other hand, some of Dr Rahman’s initiatives were fundamentally sound. And, to his credit, he did put his finger on some key problems in Pakistan’s higher education sector.

It was a positive achievement to have increased access to higher education in a country where enrolment is abysmal. The number of public universities nearly doubled between 2002 and 2008. Unfortunately, there was no way to provide an adequate number of properly qualified teachers and as such they were largely ineffective. One feels that similar resources spent on vocational or college education would have yielded greater dividends.

Sending students overseas for graduate work also goes to Dr Rahman’s credit. Although the cost was enormous, around 3,000 were sent. Surely some good can come of it. But the flawed selection mechanism, which amounted to a simple numeracy and literacy high-school-level test, permitted large numbers of academically unprepared students to slip through into advanced graduate programmes. Perhaps only a quarter of those sent should actually have been sent.

Low salaries for university teachers needed raising, and Dr Rahman did that. Today a public university professor, provided he successfully finagles himself into the higher-paying (tenure track) position, can make as much as Rs 350,000 per month. Unfortunately, the jump lacked proportion. If money grew on trees and bushes it would be wonderful to give such raises. But it is not right to pay university teachers huge salaries in a country where primary school teachers make a miserable Rs 10,000 a month, and college lecturers only Rs 25,000.

There are important lessons to learn from Pakistan’s flawed experiment. Large financial inputs did not work, nor were good ideas without adequate implementation mechanisms sufficient. The record-setting increase in the budget for higher education — which shot up from Rs3.8bn in 2002 to Rs33.7bn in 2007 — did not remove basic weaknesses. Today, with the national economy almost bankrupt, more money is not an option. So what should be done to save higher education?

In the tiny space available here, only a glimpse can be given. Solutions are needed at three distinct levels — determining correct funding priorities, implementing approved plans responsibly and, most importantly, inducing changes in cultural values to promote and enable real learning.

Broadly speaking, higher education reform must now aim primarily at improving teaching quality. It was wrong to have concentrated so heavily on funding research, much of which is of dubious quality and utility. Good research is impossible without sound basics, and this will only be achieved if the next generation of researchers is exposed to knowledgeable teachers at the college and university level.

Therefore, high priority should be assigned to better teacher-selection mechanisms, and to create large-scale, high-quality teacher-training academies in every province. Established with international help, these academies should bring in the best teachers as trainers from across Pakistan and from our neighbouring countries.

The present neglect of public colleges must end. Even as many public universities were furiously wasting money, our colleges remained in desperate shape with dilapidated buildings, broken furniture, and miserable laboratory and library facilities.

Many other changes are also needed. Major quality improvements could result from using properly standardised nationwide tests for students’ admission into higher education institutions, teaching teachers to use distance-learning materials effectively, and designing standardised teaching laboratories that may be efficiently duplicated across Pakistan.

Higher education in Pakistan has a chance only if it is seen as the apex of a supporting pyramidal structure, and if solution strategies are pursued with intelligence and honesty. The new HEC head, yet to be appointed, has a difficult task ahead. One hopes that he or she will have the dynamism and eloquence of Dr Rahman, but not the flaws.

How Greed Ruins Academia

Pakistan’s university system is breaking down, perhaps irreparably so. Thanks to the Higher Education Commission’s grand plans for a massive change, a tidal wave of money hit our public universities during the Musharraf years. Although difficult financial times finally stemmed the flood, this enormous cash infusion served to amplify problems rather than improve teaching and research quality.

Naked greed is now destroying the moral fibre of academia. Professors across the country are clamoring to lift even minimal requirements that could assure quality education. This is happening in two critical ways. First, to benefit from 3-fold increases in salaries for tenure-track positions, professors are speedily removing all barriers for their promotions. Second, they want to be able to take on more PhD students, whether these students have the requisite academic capacity or not. Having more students translates into proportionately more money in each professor’s pocket.

Nowhere is this more evident than at Quaid-e-Azam University, said to be Pakistan’s flagship public university. Barely two miles from the presidency and the prime minister’s secretariat, it was once an island of excellence in a shallow sea of mediocrity. Most other universities started lower, and their decay has gone further and faster than at QAU. Some are recognizable as universities in name only.

QAU’s departments of physics and economics were especially well known 35 years ago, which is when I joined the university. The faculty was small and not many Ph.D. degrees were awarded in those days. Money was scarce, but standards were fairly good and approximated those at a reasonable US university. But as time passed, less care was taken in appointing new faculty members. Politics began to dominate over merit and quality slipped. That slow slippage is now turning into rapid collapse.

Last month, at a formal meeting, QAU professors voted to make life easy for themselves. The Academic Council, the key decision-making body of the university, decided that henceforth no applicant for a university teaching position, whether at the associate professor or professor level, could be required to give an open seminar or lecture as a part of the selection process. Open lectures were deemed by the Council as illegal, unjust, and a ploy for victimizing teachers.

This is mind-boggling. Public presentations allow an applicant’s subject competence and ability to communicate to be assessed by the academic community. [For the record, the author of this article insisted that requiring open lectures from candidates is standard practice in every decent university in the world. This prompted angry demands for his dismissal as chairman of his department!]

A second major decision also dealt a stunning blow to the future of QAU. The Council voted 25-12 that QAU’s PhD candidates did not have to conform to international standards. It decided to overturn its earlier acceptance of the HEC’s requirement that the international GRE subject tests must be passed by a candidate prior to the award of a Ph.D. degree. Some professors gleefully noted that the HEC had been mortally weakened by the removal of its chairman, Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, and argued that good advantage needed to be taken of this happy fact. Those who wanted international testing were labeled agents of foreign powers.

This horrible mess comes from a misguided HEC policy that emphasized numbers over all else. The number of PhD students registered at various universities, including QAU, was purposely made to explode. But many PhD students, perhaps because of their poor schooling, are not good enough as PhD material. Under pressure to maintain a minimal standard for PhD students, the HEC finally decreed a pass-mark of 40 percentile in the international GRE subject test.

The GRE test is fairly elementary and pitched only at the bachelor’s level (i.e. 16-years of education). It has, however, proved to be too difficult for many Pakistani PhD students even at the end of their PhD studies. In spite of several tries, most cannot meet the 40 percentile pass mark, an extremely low level. But it is common for Indian, Chinese, and Iranian students to score twice as much at the beginning of their studies.

Why the urgency for eliminating international testing? This is easily understood. Each professor gets paid a few lakh rupees per PhD produced, with a current maximum of 10 students per supervisor at QAU. Lifting the GRE requirement removes a threat to the additional income of their supervisors. To keep up appearances, from now on a token internal test will be used instead. It is hard to imagine that any student will be allowed to fail.

While the decision of the professors to do away with international testing has been greeted with relief by many enrolled Ph.D. students at QAU, among better students there is a sense of foreboding of an endless downward slide.

Many students recognize that international tests are difficult but they also know it is a real measure of what they have learned. Although students in all other departments have reportedly failed, the fact is that even average students in my department have done reasonably well. Over the last year, a total of 9 students in the physics department have cleared the 40 percentile requirement. Three students, who the department subsequently honored, secured over 75 percentile. All students, whether they do well or otherwise, say they learned a great deal of subject matter in preparing for this challenge and felt more educated. The problem is their teachers seem to think the test is impossibly difficult, or perhaps they are insufficiently equipped to help their students prepare for it.

The involvement of teachers in running QAU’s non-teaching affairs is another bad sign. A weak university administration appears unwilling or unable to resist the growing power of professors who seek personal profit at the expense of public good. There is even resort to violence – some professors had physically kicked the former registrar, the second-most senior university administrator, out of his office. This action drew no comment from the head of the university.

To be fair, the threat to QAU is not just from inside. The campus contains some of the prime undeveloped public land in the capital. This land is being encroached upon by surrounding villagers as well as political influentials. University administrators, supposedly on behalf of the public interest, plan to sell off bits and pieces of university property to commercial interests. The sale of a piece of campus land to make a gas station on Murree Road is currently under negotiation. But the university’s land was given to it for educational purposes. It rightfully belongs to future generations of Pakistanis.

Published in Dawn, 9 May 2009

Pakistan’s Universities: The New War Within

Dark clouds are gathering over Pakistan’s universities, portending a conflict that is likely to be long, bitter, and uncertain in outcome. On one side are those who say that individuals to be awarded PhD degrees must have, at the very minimum, undergraduate level knowledge in the relevant discipline. On the other side are PhD aspirants, together with their supervisors, who demand unearned degrees. They hold that passing examinations and taking courses is unnecessary and an affront to their dignity.

The first volleys have already been fired. Earlier this month about one hundred students, registered for the PhD degree at Quaid-e-Azam University, angrily mobbed the executive director of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) as he entered the campus. Their demand: cancel the current requirements of passing the international Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) as well as taking and passing graduate level courses. They say that producing research papers entitles them to receive the highest degree in their chosen discipline.

To his credit, the HEC officer stood his ground. He pleaded that removing essential graduation requirements would make their degrees meaningless, that they really did need to know subject basics before doing research, etc. But these obvious and sensible arguments cut no ice with those who believe that PhD degrees are a birthright. Rhythmic cries “hum nahin mantay zulm kay zabtay” (we will not tolerate tyranny!) reverberated across the campus. This leads one to wonder: for how long can the HEC withstand such pressures? What if the floodgates give way?

Some background: a tidal wave of cash hit Pakistan’s universities between 2002-2008. The 10-12 times budgetary increase set a new world record while the accompanying hype touched the skies. Advised by the HEC’s newly appointed chairman, Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, General Pervez Musharraf grandly declared that the annual production of PhD degree holders would be boosted from 150 per year to 1500 per year. Incentive schemes encouraged teachers – often of doubtful academic merit themselves – to take on PhD students by the score. Academic quality, already low, nose-dived.

In 2006, pressed by persistent critics to include at least some minimal quality checks, the authorities finally made the right decision. They declared that a PhD candidate must “pass” the international GRE undergraduate-level subject test administered by the Education Testing Service, Princeton. But the meaning of “pass” was a hot potato that was not touched upon for another two years. Finally, in 2008, passing was declared as achievement of 40 percentile or better in the subject test.

Even this ludicrously low pass mark drew howls of protest. PhD students saw their degrees endangered while their supervisors saw their incomes threatened: every single registered Ph.D. student was a cash cow worth Rs 5000 per month. The money went into the teacher’s pocket. Banded together by common interests, teachers and students lobbied to get the pass mark reduced still further. Others demanded that if testing was to be done at all, let it be done locally. Proponents of international testing were dubbed as "foreign agents" and passionate arguments of national ghairat (honor) being at stake were thrown around.

But international tests of subject competence are simply indispensable. First, science is a global enterprise and rules for assessing competence in a particular discipline are universal. Local evaluations and testing mechanisms cannot compete in validity and quality. Second, in a society where ethical standards in the teachers’ community are no higher than among politicians or shop-keepers, the impartial and cheating-free nature of international testing is absolutely vital.

There is nothing particularly difficult about these international tests. As some readers may know, they are pitched at the bachelor’s level (i.e. 16-years of education). Chinese, Indian and Iranian students easily score in the 80-90 percentile range. American universities use them as entrance requirements, with medium-quality universities requiring results in the 70-80 range and the very good ones in the 80-95 range.

But achieving even 40 percentile has proved to be too difficult for most Pakistani PhD students even at the end of their PhD studies. This is especially alarming since they have had the advantage of 3-4 years of additional study. The pathetic quality of undergraduate education in Pakistan is surely responsible for this unfortunate fact. The intensity of the opposition to testing becomes understandable.

Better equipped Pakistani students, however, welcome international testing. Faced with a meaningful challenge, some of our students have labored long and hard – and increased their scores spectacularly. About 15 students from my department have cleared the 40 percentile hurdle, and the best have scored around 80. This shows that Pakistani students too can compete – if pushed in the right direction.

For the first time in their lives our students are being confronted head-on with a hard fact: science is all about problem solving. They have to shape up if they want to play ball. For a change, cheating in examinations is impossible and cramming does not help. The heartening thing is that most students, whether they do well or otherwise, say they learned a great deal of subject matter in preparing for this challenge and felt more educated. Surely this by itself is enormous success.

After years of criticizing trends in higher education and the shenanigans of the HEC’s former leadership, I feel that the HEC is now doing the right thing. Now it needs to stand by its guns. Of course, there is much more to be done than to merely raise the bar from time to time. A different direction is badly needed.

Broadly speaking, higher education reform must prioritize improvement of teaching quality, particularly in colleges. Numbering about one thousand, they are in a desperate condition. Instead of pampering universities, the government must help colleges improve their infrastructure and teaching quality. The previous model of rewarding so-called “research” in universities must be drastically revised. This policy has resulted in a flood of papers, the bulk of which are worthy of the trashcan even if published in some “international” journal.

The fact is that students need sound basic knowledge of their subject if they are to benefit from higher education, as well as to do meaningful research. Genuine research must not be confused with data gathering; it requires strong skills and solid comprehension. For this, the next generation of university students must have good teachers at the college and school level. This, in turn, needs improved teacher recruitment and training.

Hence there is an urgent need to create large, high-quality, degree-awarding teacher-training academies in every province. Established with international help, these academies should bring in the best teachers as master trainers from across the country and from neighboring countries. Rather than waste precious resources on frivolities, this is the direction to go.