"Change is the only constant"
While the world paces towards the new era of technology, or in a situation where it's there already, institutions parting education seems to have forgotten to get on the bus to the 21st century. The millions of assignments that are being submitted everyday in colleges throughout the country, remains to stick to the age old method of handwritten submissions. In the age of artificial intelligence, sticking on to this system of educational practices has been doing nothing in favour to the students but has instead created a lacklustre in shaping the young minds into careers that demand more. What companies seek today are smart, enthusiastic and digitally well versed candidates who would ensure quick delivery of progress. Yet, an alarming number of colleges, including the professional ones, still stick to norms that are not just outdated but have become ancient. The legal fraternity in the state of the most literate people, seems to be much of a joke.
The state with only four government law colleges that come under various universities apparently still follows the rather primevel system of assignment submissions. The purpose of assignment submission in each semester has a very basic objective of making sure that a student gets thorough with a certain part of the syllabus on which they're supposed to research and submit an assignment on, which will henceforth help them during the semester examinations. The objective is not only blatantly ignored, but the the students are seemingly being overburdened with a task that has no end goal to achieve but only harm one's mind and time. Perhaps in an unknown world, but on Earth it is indeed weird to make an entire class write about 600 odd pages on just one side of the paper for an assignment on environmental law. When courts are becoming paperless and with the Supreme Court pushing the initiative everyday, it is indeed very much confusing for an average person to understand as in why do educational institutions stick to the idea of handwritten submissions. The illogical reasonings are getting only more stupid as every other day passes. Spending an average of Rs.350 on records per semester, the current system is not just burning time but also the thing that a student needs a lot but has the least, money.
The idea behind considering the Constitution as a living document is to ensure that the Constitution accepts the necessity of modifications according to the changing needs and lifestyle of the society. Amendments have been made and are still being made to make sure that the adaptive feature of the constitution is used to provide the people with the necessary changes they crave to happen in the society. What seems to be a curse today could be a boon tomorrow and vice versa. Therefore, change is a must that shall happen in the course of time. To overcome a problem, one must understand the situation that is creating the problem and when required, a new method should be applied at all costs or else development will come to a standstill. Social changes happen due to numerous reasons and necessity remains to be one of the paramount reasons for it to happen. Only when there is necessity will there be an invention. With the increasing number of students and in the number of paper submissions, it started to put a hard time on the rather outnumbered faculty to summarise and identify whether a paper was originally made or not. Hence, the plagiarism check software was introduced in 1997 by Turnitin. The system developed and became more user friendly since the early 2000s and institutions have been using the same to segregate research papers from plagiarized to original. Not to mention, but the system of submitting reports in typed format started prior to '97. While most of the National law schools have adapted to this methodology, it is flabbergasting to know that state sponsored law colleges are still behind in providing the students with the needed change and it's almost a decade late.
Perhaps, what is sadder is that the effort put in by students and the sleepless nights they engage themselves in for completing these assignments and records on time are blatantly ignored by the faculty by throwing it all away without even providing a glance. An insult to not just the student community but to the whole concept of physical labour that students have invested in the completion of one such project. Of course, not everyone puts an effort to do so. With the attitude of the faculty not going through the written works, what increases is the tendency in the minds of the students to plagiarize the work as there is simply no way on god's green Earth, where a faculty would decide to type down the whole 600 pages of assignments into a software and check the content percentage of each student. This, in turn proves the point that the very idea and objective behind making the concept of assignments mandatory is nothing but an absolute failure and an enormous waste of precious time.
If there is no benefit, if there is no achievable goal, if there is no respect but only harm, then why are we wasting over a few million tonnes of paper every year in the name of handwritten assignments and projects? When the world goes a little bit more 'e' by every second, why are we forcing our students to become any less efficient? Technology can become the wings for the educational world, but only if we allow it. With 75 years into independence, why are we still following norms that are 75 years old in our education system?
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