Bilal Zafar is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California (USC) and a graduate research assistant at the Information Sciences Institute. His research work is focused on computer architecture and interconnection networks, and real passion is teaching. He has served two terms as a Teaching Assistant Fellow at USC’s Center for Excellence in Teaching, and was the receipient of Best Teaching Assistant award in 2006.
About the Author
Where’s The Money for Higher Education in Pakistan? A Conversation with Dr. Asad Abidi (Part 2 of 2)
April 19, 2010
Asad Abidi is a professor at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He served as the first dean of LUMS’ School of Science and Engineering from 2007 through 2009. In the first part of our conversation with Dr. Abidi, we talked about LUMS SSE. In this second part, we talk about the challenges faced by the higher education sector in Pakistan, possible solutions, and what Pakistanis living abroad can do to help. Read the rest of this entry »
Teaching is a Craft: A Case for Rethinking Education Programs
November 13, 2009
A 1997 study of data from the University of Delaware found that across a wide range of universities in the US “education programs were funded below the institutional average for all disciplines” and at the more prestigious research universities “education programs were less well-funded than other professional programs, with the exception of social work and accounting”. The idea that quality teachers cannot be prepared “on the cheap” is getting a renewed look and gaining significant traction in the US and there might be important lessons for Pakistan to learn from this discussion. Read the rest of this entry »
A National Admission Policy for Universities in the Offing?
September 6, 2009
The National Assembly (NA) Standing Committee on Education on Friday recommended that the government formulate a national admission policy to facilitate the students in admission process in different educational institutions of the country.
The meeting held with Abid Sher Ali in the chair discussed the problems of students in getting admission in educational institutions. It observed that there were many ambiguities in the admission policy of Karachi University. The committee asked for its thorough review.
Education Minister Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani informed the committee that the admission policy of Karachi University would be discussed in the parliament to take members input for formulating the policy.
This is a step in the right direction. A standard and transparent national admission policy will not only lessen the confusion among students, who currently may have to go though a different set of entrance exams for each university, but will also help in reducing the cases of illegal admissions in universities.
Editor’s Note: We would like to thank Mr. Salman Naveed Khan for bringing this important news item to the editorial board’s attention.
Pakistani Rescue Robot Participates in Robocup
August 2, 2009
A Pakistani robot participated in RoboCup 2009 for the first time in the competition’s history. The robot, named Saviour, was developed by a team of students from Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (GIKI). Saviour is a rescue robot designed to find survivors in a disaster situation.
The Learning and Educational Achievement in Punjab Schools (LEAPS) is a comprehensive four year survey of primary schools in Punjab that is being carried out by a team from the World Bank, Pomona College and Harvard University in collaboration with the Government of Punjab. The survey report for the first year has recently been published. The report measures learning outcomes of students, in grades I to III, by administering detailed exams on English, Math and Urdu. A major finding of the report is that the students in private schools perform better in all three subjects as compared to the students attending public school. The performance advantage holds even if factors such as literacy rate of parents and the educational qualifications of the teachers are taken into account. The public-private schooling gap is large, according to the LEAPS report. Children in private schools score significantly higher than those in government schools even when they are from the same village. Overall, the gap between public and private schools is 8-18 times that gap between different socio-economic backgrounds. It takes around 1.5-2.5 years for a child attending public school to catch up to their counterparts in private schools. Read the rest of this entry »
International Competition on Plagiarism Detection
April 30, 2009
The Higher Education Commission’s recent efforts to increase the research output of Pakistani universities has resulted in an increasing number of publications in reputed journals and conferences (a comparison of recent research output of Bangladesh, Pakistan and India is available here). However, this success has also been accompanied with increasing instances of plagiarism involving Pakistani Professors and students. HEC deserves praise for its swift and strict response to these cases.
In the last couple of years, a number of online services and software have become available for plagiarism detection. An evaluation of available anti-plagiarism services conducted by the Claremont McKenna College is available online. However, till now, the subject of plagiarism and its automatic detection was not systematically studied by the academia itself. This has finally changed, with the announcement of the first “International Competition on Plagiarism Detection“. The competition carries a prize of 500 Euros, and will be hosted by the PAN workshop under the Annual Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing 2009.
