Thursday, May 19, 2005

MCA for Computer Educated Clerks

On the last day of college at Department Computer Science, University of Pune, our Professor Dr. Shankar gave a talk on our courses. The Government of India had asked him and another famous CS Professor (known for his language books) to formulate a PG curriculum for computer Science. Dr. Shankar created a course to create computer scientists, that was the curriculum we had. (Though not many from our Department went on to become Computer Scientists, even the students at the bottom of the class were good programmers even by the standards 15 years ago.)

The other professor created the curriculum which is now popularly called 'MCA'. In Dr.Shankar's opinion - that curriculum would create sophisticated clerks. What a prediction!

Of the current crop of MCAs coming out of every college hardly 1% is capable of writing decent programs; In addition to the street corner colleges, we have universities offering distance education (affectionately called as karas - for correspondence) and open universities offer MCA - of very questionable quality.

When you see an MCA in a resume, subtract 5 points; if you see distance education or open university subtract another 5; Conduct tests and evaluate based on experience. In the final score (out of 10), add this -10. That's what the person is worth.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I agree with your perception of state of computer science education in India.
However, your statement on the MCA course is a over-generalization of sorts, and I dont agree to that.
What is true for MCA, is also true for even IITians, etc. I have worked with duds from IITs and I know how they are.
The key take-away here is stop ranting about state of education here and find a innovative ways to find good people.
College interns are great to start with.
Also ignoring educational qualifications is another thing that has worked for me
With Regards
Harsh

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