In what comes as a respite for the PhD scholars, the IITs will induct PhD scholars of IITs as a faculty member aiming to increase the ratio of student-teacher interaction.
Following the IIT Council meeting held on August 28, the HRD Ministry had rendered its approval for inducting five PhD students as faculty members in IITs.
"Every PhD scholar has to teach undergraduate students for 10 hours per week. A regular IIT faculty member has a teaching workload of 40 hours per week. So five research scholars can easily be counted as one faculty member for the purpose of faculty-student ratio. Renowned institutions such as Stanford and MIT also do this," said a senior HRD Ministry official.
What prompted the Council to induct PhD scholars as faculty?
- At present, 2,600 post of academic faculty are lying vacant across the IITs
- The institutes want to enhance the overall academic performances of the students by increasing the student-teachers interactive ratio
- The objective is to improve the student-teacher ratio from the current 15:1 to 10:1
- The 26,000 PhD scholars across IITs will be considered for the addition of 5,000 faculty members
- According to the ranking in the recent Asia's 75 Most Innovative Universities report by Reuters, IIT came 71 and IIS at 72 of the 75 universities across universities in Asia
- According to QS World Ranking 2016, only IIT-Madras made it to the top 250 club, where as the other six IITs have considerably fallen from the earlier position
It is anticipated that increasing the student-teacher ratio will enhance the performance of the institutes not only for the students but also in the international ranking of universities. The IIT council will quickly notify the decision to international university ranking agencies such as Times Higher Education and Quacquareli (QS).
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