Farcifying Education (part I )

Accreditation - the act of granting credit or recognition (especially with respect to educational institution that maintains suitable standards);

Okay, so Accreditations are a big thing in Engineering colleges, at least so our college would have us believe. Having noticed that almost every damn course in scandalously random and out worldly colleges seemed to have the tag of being accredited (In the DTE prospectus and website), I naturally had come to form the opinion that accreditation was just a superficial farce and was extremely skeptical about the whole fuss being made about it when the honorable committee came to my college.

It all began quite inconspicuously; the preparations for the impending ‘Quality –Control-check’ that is. Having cramped an entire Engineering college literally into two floors, sharing laboratories with the neighboring Bsc. College or with the Diploma section (equally cramped in the two floors below ours)., word was around that we had no chance.

The college had filed applications for accreditation for four of the offered five courses.

We joked about the impossible optimism of the college authorities, the hope of acknowledgment; that we thought would remain only that-a hope. Little did we know that this was business, and the college was going to play hardball.

A few weeks into the news, everything around slowly but surely began to change.

The effort took no time to shift straight into the 5^th gear before we knew what was happening.

Peons and clerks were all of a sudden working over time, gathering files and readying accounts, the teachers progressively began looking a lot harassed, even more than us.

Cheesy sounding Quotations started cropping up all over the place, in the library, the laboratories, the notice boards, even the damn corridors.

“ Do your best, leave the rest” , “ success is 99% perspiration and 1 %inspiration”, the chart papers shouted out their expert comments at us.

Professors started bugging the unfortunate aesthetically proficient folk in our batches to come up with equally cheesy sounding quotations, formulae charts, schematic diagrams etc. etc. to decorate the laboratories.

The attempt would have been decently inspirational had it not been all so obvious in its overzealousness. The only place that gave us overawed folk some respite from all the philosophy thrown at us was probably in the toilets, which thankfully didn’t tell us to “Pee to your fullest, leave the rest” or “ one man’s dagger is another man’s sword” or “ Success is 99 % masturbation and 1 % ambition” etc. etc.