Less than 1% of Teachers Appeared for ARPIT Scheme Online Exams
At the Examination that was conducted under the ARPIT scheme, only 5,000 teachers had appeared. This was the first examination under the scheme that was brought in by the MHRD. Examinations for few courses were not conducted because of the lack of course content.
In 2018, the Ministry of Human Resource and Development had announced the Annual Refresher Programme in Teaching or commonly known as ARPIT scheme which was focused on providing the teachers of Higher Education Institutes (HEI) with the help of the SWAYAM platform a professional development in online mode.
A total of 75 National Resource Centres (NRC) were created for the purpose of this development in various disciplines that are found in India. Nonetheless, there were only 5,000 teachers who had registered for the first terminal examination which was held on the 30th of March 2019 in the ARPIT scheme.
The chairman of the National Resource Centre of Chemistry of MHRD, A K Bakhshi informed that there were 2560 teachers who had registered under the scheme, however, only 946 of them had appeared for the terminal examination. He also stated that there some courses in a few disciplines that did not even see more than 10 teachers being registered under the scheme. He says this is due to the teachers being unaware of such courses.
Bakhshi added in a statement that for the first terminal examination under the scheme, the turnover that had taken place was a decent one and that the there will be better results taking place in the future and on a larger scale as well.
The final terminal examination is a Computer Based Test (CBT) which is conducted by the National Testing Agency in over 100 centres all over India. The examination contained Multiple Choice Questions with 50% of the questions being of medium difficulty. The rest 50% of the questions were divided in half between easy and difficult questions.
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In a statement by Bakhshi, he says that assessing the quality of learning of the teachers is difficult through MCQs. However, a lot of effort is put through in setting the questions of the exam. He also says that teachers are facing a lot of trouble as there have been many changes in terms of modernisation and technology, hence why this scheme was introduced.
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Some of the NRCs out of the 75 NRC established under the ARPIT scheme were not able to complete the course content because of which they were not able to take part in the final terminal examination. Some of the courses that did not have a completed course content were Sociology (Karnataka University), French Studies (Pondicherry University), Architectural Pedagogy (IIT Roorkee) and Refresher course in Manufacturing in for Higher Education (IIT Ropar).