UGC’s new guidelines have asked colleges to devote at least one full semester to internships and evaluate students on the basis of their internship experience.
Students seeking regular degree courses such as BA, BCom, BSc, among others, will now be able to embark internships as part of their course, just like their counterparts in professional courses like engineering and management.
The University Grants Commission (UGC) Friday published the apprenticeship/internship guidelines for degree programs, under which they have allowed courses from any discipline to offer internships as a part of the programs. These courses will be called ‘Internship/apprenticeship embedded degree programs.
Presently, only students pursuing professional courses like journalism, engineering, management, and others are asked to undergo mandatory internships, but the same chance is not extended to a student pursuing, for example, BA in English (honors) or BCom (honors).
Need to modify Academic only approach
According to the guidelines, any degree program will be eligible for an embedded internship/apprenticeship program.
Programs that have an internship as a part of the curriculum will offer a kind of a traineeship, which will be undertaken not on the campus, but on the premises of the workplace where a student is pursuing an internship. It could be a commercial or a non-commercial organization.
The higher education institutes will have to sign a previous Memorandum of Understanding with discipline-specific commercial and non-commercial organizations for giving apprenticeship/internship, before introducing the embedded degree programs. The courses will be scheduled based on the facility and infrastructure available.
The guidelines stated that pupils will be assessed based on their internships and the ultimate scores will reflect in their mark sheets.
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Universities will carry out the evaluation along with the organization, which is offering the internships. For example, if a student is interning with a media organization, editors in the organization will give a certificate to the student and it will be a part of the student’s final outcome.
