How to bring this number down and create a skilled workforce is no small challenge. And, the fact that higher education in high-value fields like engineering and medicine is fairly expensive makes the problem even harder. University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, one of the premier public-sector engineering schools in the country, spends roughly Rs. 200,000 per student per year (not including the cost of developing new infrastructure for future expansion). Add to that the cost of living that is usually borne by the student himself or herself, and the price tag of producing one engineer runs well over a million rupees. Multiply that with the need to produce tens of thousands of engineers and scientists to keep pace with developing countries like Turkey, Brazil, India and China, and it is easy to see how daunting the math simply is. To illustrate the point, Chinese universities graduate roughly 350,000 engineers each year. If we were to aim at producing 50,000 engineers at the cost of Rs. 0.25 million each (borne by the state), it would add up to Rs. 12.5 billion just to run the engineering programs nation-wide. The entire budget allocation for HEC for the fiscal year 2011-12 is Rs. 14 billion.

The important question, which to my view is not getting enough attention, then is this: How do we create a system where we are able to train tens of thousands of engineers every year without going deeper into debt? And, perhaps more importantly, how to do we create a system where the engineers our universities produce are job-ready? Because, after 16 years of education, if it takes an engineer another two years (or more) to add value to the society, it simply adds to the burden.

A one-of-a-kind experiential education program in the Iron Range region in northeastern Minnesota in the United States offers an worthy model. The Iron Range region is rich in multiple distinct bands of iron ore, and houses mining, paper, and energy industry. Faced with the challenge of finding engineers who are ready and willing to work in the local industry, a consortium of local businesses and universities have banded together to design a unique engineering programmed called Iron Range Engineering (IRE).

IRE is an upper division engineering program (3rd and 4th years).  Students graduate with a B.S. in Engineering, with an emphasis of their choice (e.g., Mechanical Engineering) from Minnesota State University. Students join the Iron Range Engineering program after spending two years taking foundational courses in maths, programming, and engineering sciences at area community colleges or other universities. Specifically, the program requires that incoming students complete 51 credits, including the following courses:

General Physics (calculus-based), 10 credits
Calculus and Differential Equations, 16 credits
Introduction to Engineering, 2 credits
Engineering Mechanics (Statics & Dynamics), 6 credits
Electrical Engineering (Circuits, including lab), 4 credits
Chemistry, 5 credits
English Composition, 4 credits
Computer Graphics Communication, 1 credit
Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing, 1 credit
Introduction to Problem Solving and Engineering Design, 2 credits

The distinguishing feature of that program is that at IRE, students do not take any classes. They spend 20 hours per week working on projects at local manufacturing plants under the direction of practicing engineers. The remaining 20 hours per week are devoted to learning engineering theory and discussing its application with the faculty. As  a result, students and faculty spend a tremendous amount of time interacting on the learning of the technical knowledge, the professional skills, and design processes. This unique method of instruction completes them as engineers, while keeping them firmly grounded in the context of the local manufacturing industry.

Students in the program blog about their experience on irengineering.blogspot.com. Their posts provides a window into the program and what kind of projects the students are engaged in. For example, on April 7, a student blogged:

After multiple meetings with the engineers and mechanics, we have narrowed our design down to hydraulics. The team has been working to complete two different mounting designs for the hydraulic system for installation. When the designs are finished and our price estimates are complete, we will then present our final work to Hibbing Taconite. We are nearing completion, even though we planned on having our final deliverable done by Friday, April 15th. We set our finish date early so that if we ran into issues or had delays, we could still finish before the end of the semester. Also, we set our end date sooner so that Hibbing Taconite could install the lift system as soon as possible because they are ready to get it installed

Iron Range Engineering is a program in its infancy. Started in 2009, there are currently only 25 students in the program with the first graduates expected in December, 2011. So, it may be a while before we can judge the success of the program. But, that does not mean we cannot learn from it and build from its example.

A program like IRE offers several unique benefits in the context of our own education system:

• First, by allowing students to take foundational courses at local colleges, instead of national universities which are concentrated in major metropolitan cities, the cost of both tuition and lodging can be reduced significantly for students in rural areas or residing outside major metropolitan cities like Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Karachi. In addition to lowering the financial cost for families outside major cities, this option can be especially attractive for girls whose parents might be reluctant to send them to major cities at a young age.
• Second, by teaming up students with professionals in the industry, the time spent in the engineering program contributes directly to job-readiness of the students. Since students have access to the faculty at the university during this time, they are not reliant entirely on their industry mentors for help and guidance in technical matters. In other words, it allows industry to off-load part of employee training to the university.
• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a program like the IRE creates a true symbiotic relationship between the local industry and the academia. The industry benefits mainly by having a ready supply of qualified engineers who can not only meet the technical needs, but are also familiar with the work environment. And, the academia benefits by offering the faculty an organic collaborative relationship with the industry — a true win-win for both sides, and especially for the students.

It may be that IRE model is an idea far too radical, and far too demanding to work in Pakistan. Many times, when it comes to education policy, what appears like a sound idea on paper does not translate well in the real world. So may be the case with IRE. My point, however is that the cost of traditional higher education is simply far too great on the individual and the societal level to work for a populous and debt-ridden country like Pakistan. We have no choice but to think of creative ways to leverage precious resources to benefit the greatest number of students. The traditional four-year programs offered at our top engineering universities like the UET Lahore, NUST SEECS, and LUMS SSE simply cannot be scaled to large enough a number. We have to come to terms with this basic reality, and chart a different course rather than try to replicate the same model of education but with inferior resources.

“If people in universities, who have the rare ability to convert research into products are not rewarded, and their careers are stifled, they will leave the country and go to the developed world where such abilities are very highly valued and rewarded. As a matter of fact this has already been happening for a number of years, and the country has suffered badly because of it.”

In our view, professors or students who have the ability to convert research into products are rarely, if ever, rewarded by universities anywhere in the world. Rather, it is the marketplace that rewards them: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were college drop-outs who did not make their mark in the cocoon of a university fellowship program. Rather their ideas and innovation took off in the competitive environment of the open market.

Thus, while we agree that entrepreneurial individuals are sorely needed in the country to transfer the benefits of research and intellectual output at universities, we contend that it is not the mandate of the Higher Education to focus on incentivizing them directly.

HEC is not the panacea. It is one government agency, with limited clout and a shrinking budget. HEC’s focus must remain on allowing our universities to hire and retain the best and brightest researchers and educators that are available, and giving them the opportunity to reach their full potential. That in itself is a formidable task, and executing it well requires making difficult choices. HEC does need to “return to Pakistan” and focus on areas of research and inquiry that are more suitable for Pakistani researchers given our limited resources and our unique developmental needs. To this end, HEC can nudge researchers into areas that are most relevant to Pakistani context.

Government agencies and organizations, like the Ministry of Science and Technology and Pakistan Software Export Board, as well as public-private R&D funds, like the National ICT R&D Fund, need to play the leading role in commercializing research coming out of the universities. Organizations like the National ICT R&D Fund not only have the necessary funding base but their very structure as a public-private partnership makes them ideally suited to carry out this risky but essential purpose.

HoD Ahmad rightly points out that we need a sustained effort to invigorate the industrial base and subsequently create employment. Yet, it’s not the job of university professors; it will be an error to evaluate their worth from a task that is not theirs. Instead, alternative avenues should be provided to support people who have the “rare ability to convert research into products” to thrive and to do what they do best, while not distracting HEC from it core and vital purpose.

One reason so few Pakistani students are able to receive a quality education abroad is a lack of college application guidance in Pakistan. Each year, Pakistani students who are highly qualified and should be accepted to excellent colleges and universities abroad are unable to capitalize on their potential because they cannot navigate the increasingly complex college application process. Thousands of students each year receive either no counseling at all, or pay inordinate amounts of money to for-profit counseling companies that do nothing more than provide a copy of the free American Common Application. Most of these students are at a serious disadvantage when trying to continue their education.

In April 2009, a team of Pakistani and American undergraduate students studying at renowned universities around the world decided it was time to change this state of affairs. Together, they created Possibilities Pakistan, a free, equal access college counseling service available to all on line. The goal was simple – level the playing field.

Possibilities Pakistan is a non-profit project that aims to extend free guidance facilities for undergraduate education to all Pakistani students. It is a network of over two hundred dedicated students studying in stellar universities around the globe who are working together to help Pakistani high-school students applying to college find and apply to the right schools for them.

There are two halves to Possibilities Pakistan, a guidance service offered by those who have already succeeded at the application process, and a magazine that steers a prospective college student through applying to college. Both can be accessed at www.possibilitiespakistan.org.

The guidance service is run via email. Applicants send in their queries to possibilities.pakistan@gmail.com. Each applicant’s questions are put through to an appropriate member of the team, one who has faced a similar circumstance to the applicant and can appropriately answer his or her question. This ensures that applicants are never left out in the cold, unsure of how to manage confusing technical details of college applications like transcript deadlines and letters of recommendation. To date, over 200 students have taken advantage of this service, and many have received excellent placements at foreign universities.

Possibilities Pakistan also provides a free, 150-page online magazine which has been compiled with the help of high school guidance counselors, college students, and admissions office representatives from renowned international universities. The magazine starts off with a guidance section, which breaks down and discusses the complicated elements of the application process. Detailed subsections are dedicated to recommendation letters, transcripts, college essays, personal statements, SAT scores, college rankings, financial aid and pretty much anything you might need to know about getting into a foreign university. It also includes a ‘University Perspectives’ section, which has been compiled with the help of the extensive team behind Possibilities Pakistan. In this section, each of members of the Possibilities Pakistan team reviews his or her school in a manner designed to address the interests and concerns of Pakistani applicants. University of Pennsylvania, Caltech, Wesleyan University, College of Wooster, University of Nottingham, University of Glasgow, Mcgill University, University of Toronto, National University Singapore and Nanyang Technological University are all reviewed, along with many others. To date, the magazine has been viewed by thousands, and the organization is currently in the process of trying to print the magazine and distribute it to schools across the country.

Possibilities Pakistan isn’t about beating the system; rather it’s about laying bare the entire application process and helping to guide prospective students to acceptances at the schools of their dreams. It is free, high quality, and available to anyone. As a weak education system and socio-political problems pull Pakistan down, the need for a bright new class of young people ready to bring new ideas to get Pakistan back on track becomes more apparent by the day. However, the unfortunate reality is that to be the movers and shakers that Pakistan needs, our youth will need to receive a quality of education that is often not available at home and that is becoming increasingly difficult to begin abroad. Possibilities Pakistan hopes to change this reality. Ultimately, the aim is to bring about a revolutionary change by establishing free educational guidance for all Pakistanis.

Anyone interested in taking advantage of Possibilities Pakistan’s services, or in helping to further the mission, can email us, or join us on Facebook.

The author is a student at the Lahore School of Economics and the Director of Marketing and Outreach for Possibilities Pakistan.

As students and researchers of Pakistani origin abroad, we often wondered how we can help the Pakistani universities in fostering the tradition of academic colloquia in the face of challenging security issues faced by Pakistan which may prohibit researchers from visiting Pakistan even if the financing was available? Could technology help? Could we invite researchers to give talks to Pakistani universities and interact with students over video conferencing?

Born out of this desire was the STEP Lecture Series initiative started in October 2009. The lecture series brings interactive talks by distinguished researchers, academics, and entrepreneurs to universities in Pakistan via video conferencing. The aim of the lecture series is to foster the tradition of academic colloquia, and help bridge the ‘knowledge divide’ by introducing university students in Pakistan to the emerging trends and cutting edge research, and in the process, inspire these students to take on challenging problems.

In the academic year 2009-2010, we organized seven talks in the areas of computer science, electrical engineering, and entrepreneurship. Our last speaker for the 2009-2010 lecture series was Prof. Jeanette Wing who is the President’s Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She shared her vision about computational thinking to Pakistani students and encouraged them to think out-of-the-box in addressing problems. In February 2010, Aristedis Karalis from MIT gave a highly interactive talk on wireless electricity to approximately 400 students and faculty in attendance. Thanking the speaker, one of the faculty member in attendance wrote “last evening it was around 150 students who listened to your lecture at FAST-NU, Islamabad. Your talk stimulated a lot of of-camera discussion yesterday.” Other speakers included Prof. Derek Chiou of University of Texas at Austin who spoke on the challenges in simulating computer systems; Prof. Adrien Treuille of CMU who talked about modeling and controlling complex dynamics; Dr. Sonesh Surana from University of California at Berkeley who discussed the challenges in enabling wireless telemedicine; Saad Fazil from VentureBeat who expressed his thoughts on technology blogging and entrepreneurship; and Kellee Santiago from University of Southern California and a TED2010 fellow who articulated about her passion of game design.

The idea of a lecture series using video conferencing cannot be successful without the active participation of the students and faculty in the universities. We have found that for maximum participation and enthusiasm, it is necessary to have a faculty contact at the participating universities, who can publicize the talk in his or her respective university. Nevertheless, we have seen increased participation by Pakistani universities and students in the seven talks we have organized so far. The average total attendance is over 200, and it exceeded 400 for the talk on wireless electricity. More than 15 universities across Pakistan have participated in at least one of the talks. The list of participating universities include Air University, AKU-IED, Bahria University Islamabad, BZU Multan, FAST-NU Islamabad, GIK Institute, IBA Sukkur, IMS Peshawar, King Edward Medical College, LUMS, NUST MCS, NUST SEECS, University of Gujrat, University of Sargodha, UET Taxilla, and SZABIST Islamabad,

When we were brainstorming to organize the lecture series, we weighed the possibility of live video talks versus the lectures already available on the Internet. We went for the live lecture series because live lectures create an atmosphere of group learning and thinking which is not easily replicable when watching stored video streams. Further, since multiple universities will participate in the lecture series, we hoped that it would generate interaction among the students in these universities, and we have seen it happening.

Logistical Challenges

The organization of the lecture series posed challenging timezone, technical, and logistical issues. The time difference between the US east coast and Pakistan is 9 hours (during daylight savings). Since many of our speakers are based in the US, the time difference means that the speaker on the US east coast should start the talk by 9am EDT (which is 6pm in Pakistan). Even then, some universities expressed us their reservation that they do not prefer to have students stay on campus in the late evening due to security reasons. Therefore, we usually request our speakers to start their talk preferably by 8am EDT or latest by 9am EDT. However, the early morning talks can be a bit taxing for the speakers.

In the last few years, the Government of Pakistan has invested in deploying a high speed network backbone linking major universities in all four provinces. The network is known as the Pakistan Educational and Research Network (PERN). The PERN network also connects to educational network backbones in the Europe and the US. The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has also installed video conferencing infrastructure across public sector universities in Pakistan, and has setup a highly available video conferencing server that can allow a high quality video conference of up to 40 participants. We use this video conferencing infrastructure for the STEP lectures. The speaker and the participating universities ‘dial-in’ to the HEC’s video conferencing server, are able to view the speaker and other participants, there by creating a live experience. Occasionally, there are issues with the noise, but HEC’s video conferencing staff has become increasingly adept in managing these glitches. Another issue is that some universities do not have adequate backup facilities for power and can get disconnected during a power shutdown. We have requested HEC to setup an audio bridge for this purpose.

When we started the lecture series, I was cautious and apprehensive about its success. Now, with a successful year behind us, I am greatly optimistic. Live video lectures to multiple universities across different time zones and countries are unheard of in the academic world, but STEP lecture series has proven that it is possible. Moreover, a live video talk by researchers and entrepreneurs and an interactive Q&A session exposes students to new areas and new ways of thinking and is a great way to bridge the knowledge divide. Such an interaction helps students overcome the language barriers and shed their shyness, and it also exposes the speakers to students across the world. I hope that such interactions can be expanded to include other countries. It is my belief that such interactions will make this world a better place.

How can you help?

We are in the process of finalizing the speakers for the 2010-2011 lecture series. We will like to expand the scope of the lecture topics and invite speakers in areas of physical and astronomical sciences, economics, arts, and international relations. You can help. If you know of a potential speaker, who will be willing to give a talk, please contact us at editors@nextstepforward.net. Especially, if you are a Pakistani student, researcher, or academic studying or working in the universities, you can help establish the initial contact with the speaker and contact us to set up the video talk.

If you are a researcher or entrepreneur and will like to donate your time to motivate young students and help them think innovatively and creatively by giving a talk, please get in touch with us.

Acknowledgements

The STEP lecture series would not have been possible without the active support of Dr. Shahab Baqai and Dr. Abdullah Sadiq. We are also very grateful to Dr. Saad Qaiser and Dr. Naveed Rao for advertising the talks in their universities and for being enthusiastic about this idea. Lastly, we are very grateful to the video conferencing team at the Higher Education Commission in Pakistan, who work behind the scenes to ensure a smooth delivery of the talk.

Whenever there is an advertisement for jobs in the scientific discipline in public sector research and development organizations with Special Pay Scales (SPS) for sixteen-year degree holders, one of the requirements is that the educational career of the potential candidate must be 1st Division throughout, with the exception of one second division in any degree excluding the final degree. These job opportunities are open for everyone who has completed at least sixteen years of education, whether they are Bachelors or Masters. Candidates who have completed a sixteen years Bachelors degree have a tangible advantage over candidates who have a sixteen years Masters degree, because for a sixteen year Bachelors graduate there are only three degrees, i.e., SSC (Secondary School Certificate), HSC (Higher Secondary Certificate) and B.Sc. (four-year Bachelors), to satisfy the requirement listed above. For a sixteen-year M.Sc. graduate there are four degrees, i.e., SSC, HSC, B.Sc. (two-years Bachelors) and M.Sc. to satisfy the grading requirements for SPS jobs. The sixteen years M.Sc. graduate has to produce desired results in four degrees, while a sixteen year bachelor has to produce desired result out of only three degrees.

While applying for jobs in the international market, many students in my situation don’t know what to write on their resume — Bachelors or Masters. If I write Masters, the prospective employers expect me to have completed 18 year of education. And, if I write Bachelors, I find myself having a Masters degree in my hand and people wonder why I did not mention the word Master on my resume.

Interestingly, HEC also had this requirement for a certain number of 1st Divisions that I mentioned before, for granting scholarships. One of my friends told me that Dr. Atta Ur Rehman, former HEC Chairman, replies to students’ emails so I wrote to him about this problem. He acknowledged my arguments and appointed Dr. Inayat to resolve this issue. As a result, this requirement was discarded from their scholarship criteria and it was replaced with “1st division in terminating degree with no 3rd division in the entire education career.”

Today, we are using the abbreviations B.S. and B.Sc. to denote the 16-years bachelors and the 14-years bachelor, respectively. Same is true with MS (which holds for 18 years Masters) and M.Sc. (which holds for 16 years Master). This, I would say, is a poor attempt to hide the prevailing state of senselessness. All over the world B.S. and B.Sc. stand for the same degree, as is the case with M.S. and M.Sc.

If we look at the world around us, we can easily see that bachelor-level education is equivalent for all subjects and disciplines. We need to implement the same, i.e., four year bachelors for every subject, in Pakistan. It would make our educational and employment system more harmonized, understandable and practicable. It will also create sensible understanding about our educational system inside and outside the country. We can introduce something like HNC (Higher National Certificate) for people who want to terminate their education at 14 years of education.

Majid-ur-Rehman holds an M.Sc. and B.Sc. both in Physics from Government College of Science, Wahdat Road, Lahore. Majid currently works in a Dubai-based organization as Country Manager – Pakistan.

The sky shall come, present itself, beneath your humble feet.

(Rahman Baba, 1650 – 1715 A.D)

In 1993, Greg Mortenson stumbled his way across Korphe – a village high up in the Karakoram mountains after a failed attempt to climb K2. The villagers took him in and nursed him back to health over a few weeks in which he came to learn more about his benefactors and their harsh lives. His encounters with the village children, watching them practice their school lessons by writing with a stick in the dirt motivated him to help in his own way. A trauma nurse by profession, Greg treated the impoverished villagers on occasion for their minor ailments – thus earning himself the name Doctor Greg. The village chief, Haji Ali acted as his main host and over the course of his stay they developed a friendship based on mutual respect and the desire to improve the lives of those around them.

Towards the end of his stay in Korphe, Haji Ali explained the principle behind the ‘three cups of tea’ that form the basis of relationships in their land:

“If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways. The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die. Doctor Greg, you must take time to share three cups of tea. We may be uneducated but we are not stupid. We have lived and survived here for a long time.”

Greg promised to return one day and build them a school, which planted the seed for one of the most incredible and effective campaigns of our time – Greg Mortenson’s mission to building schools for girls in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. His first book, “Three Cups of Tea” captures the nascent years of his work and the evolution of the Central Asia Institute (CAI) to an organisation that has built over 130 schools across the remote parts of Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“Stones into Schools” picks up from where “Three Cups of Tea” left off, albeit in a more personal narrative this time round. Whereas the former referred to the protagonist as Mortenson, Greg employs a first-person narrative (“not my cup of tea,” he quips) to engage the reader with his experiences as he goes through the highs and lows of building schools – often several at a time. The construction of a school in the remote Wakhan corridor forms the central thread of the book that is inter-woven with events that happened between 2001 and 2009, most notably the earthquake of 2005 that devastated the northern areas. Such was the intensity that a generation of school-children was wiped out in under four minutes as they attended their classes at school when the earthquake struck.

The opening lines immerse the reader into what looks like a scene straight out of ‘Tilism hoshruba’ (“The tales of Ameer Hamza,” if you will) featuring 14 kyrgyz tribesmen galloping non-stop for six days across the Irshad Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan as they attempt to meet Greg before he heads back to Pakistan’s settled areas. They request him to build a school at Bozai Gumbaz, a remote mountain village cut off from the world during the winter months, presenting the severest logistical challenges (sub-zero temperatures, construction materials being hauled by yaks). Greg accepts the request, not knowing the scale of the challenge. Ten years and several disappointments later the school is built – not by foreigners but by the Kyrghyz tribesmen themselves who put everything else aside to complete the construction.

Mortenson spends a considerable amount of effort in emphasising the education of women and how it counters the negative effects of religious fundamentalism. Youth who wish to join the Taliban have to seek permission from their mothers “and educated women, as a rule, tend to withhold their blessing for such things,” he writes. The benefits don’t end there, a number of studies indicate that in a community where a majority of girls are educated through the fifth grade, infant mortality drops significantly after a single generation. Paradoxically, basic education for girls correlates perfectly with lower, more sustainable population growth. The construction of each school involves considerable due diligence as Greg and his team engage a variety of stake holders often with conflicting sets of interest to achieve their aims. As word of their schools spreads, they find themselves besieged by villagers requesting them to build schools, establish vocational training centres for women and charity. The impact is two-fold, firstly there is an investment made into the community in terms of the physical assets (building, books, salaries for the teachers) and secondly there is a sense of ownership inculcated into the community as they partake in the construction and running of the schools. On one occasion, in response to threats from the Taliban to demolish one of their schools, local village elders named a respected Mullah as the headmaster. The Taliban backed off.

Mortenson pays homage to his ‘dirty dozen’, CAI’s staff in Pakistan and Afghanistan without whom, he says, “I would still be nothing more than a dirtbag mountaineer subsisting on ramen noodles and living in the back of his car”. We are also introduced to Sarfraz Khan, who is the CAI’s point man in the areas straddling the Pak-Afghan border. A modern-day adventurer, he rides, drives and hitch-hikes across rugged and vast terrains supervising the construction of schools – often sleeping in the saddle during his journeys. Mortenson also highlights his interactions with the US military, acknowledging their support (“Three cups of tea” has been made required reading for intelligence training by the Pentagon) – though he makes it clear that CAI does not accept financial assistance from the Department of Defence.

“Stones into schools” chronicles Greg Mortenson’s and his CAI’s ongoing journey very lucidly, offering the reader a glimpse into the workings of a successful team that is changing the world – one school at a time. The style is candid and free-flowing, and the narration captures scenes that represent the physical and political landscapes of both Pakistan and Afghanistan effectively. If nothing else, the book serves to reinforce the idea that sheer determination and the will to serve (with a little luck) can go a long way in achieving incredible goals.

Ali Khattak is an engineer of sorts who likes to read books and climb munros, though not necessarily at the same time. Ali received his MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Toulouse and is currently working as a Reservoir Engineer at Shell.

As a teacher with a background in development, I am increasingly frustrated to see how education in Pakistan, nay around the world, far from “bringing up” the best talents of individuals, actually discourages any investment of time and effort into the individual’s interests. Rather, what is considered socially acceptable or economically pragmatic is assigned the greatest degree of importance. This can be seen in the hierarchy of subjects that we are all familiar with: Sciences and mathematics at the top, languages and social sciences in the middle, and arts at the very bottom. Ken Robinson, traces the genesis of this to the industrial revolution. “The whole system,” Robinson argues, “came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.” So, it is no surprise that “our educational system today, churns out students to fulfill the requirements of the Industrial Age” rather than those of the coming Information Age.

The result of this out-of-date education system, says Robinson, is that “we are educating people out of their creative capacities.” Creativity demands some level of risk-taking, but that is not what our education system values. “You’ll never come up with anything original if you’re not prepared to be wrong”, says Robinson. “Picasso once said … that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” The challenge for us, therefore, according to Robinson, “is to remain an artist as we grow up”, and not allow ourselves to “get educated out of it.”

At times the word creativity gets a bad rap in Pakistan because it is associated with the arts or music. While arts and music are two forms of creative expression, creativity is required in every field. Is there any successful scientist or social scientist who can claim that his or her success was independent of his or her ability to comprehend the world beyond the status-quo?

So, how can we create a culture that values creativity in our education system? Robinson makes the case for a revolution, not reform, in education. “I think we have to change metaphors”, says Robinson. “We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education — a manufacturing model that is based on linearity and conformity — to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which [students] will begin to flourish.”

The thrust of Robinson’s arguments is to promote an educational system that recognizes and rewards individual interests and talents and values creativity in all its forms. Students would be best served if our educational system “brought out” and nurtured their talents, regardless of what they maybe, enabling them to confront the intellectual and economic challenges of the future.

These arguments are particularly relevant to Pakistan. Over the past 20 years, curriculum reform has come to a standstill. It has been reduced to debates on whether there should be a chapter on Jihad or not, or whether the Chief Minister’s message should be inserted into text books. The proliferation of O- and A-level curricula has been viewed as a positive measure, as it offers the opportunity to study a foreign curriculum. However, the same system that we have adopted is considered outdated and in need for urgent review in the UK. We have not only divided our educational system between the have and have not’s, O-/A-levels vs. matriculation/intermediate, public vs. private Universities, even within these dichotomies we remain obsessed with the hierarchy of subjects and viewing intelligence in relation to outdated examination grades or standardized testing.

So where do we go from here? After viewing the talks above, I would hope that you would share (to some extent) my belief that we should value knowledge and education regardless of the subject concerned. That means valuing Theatre Arts with the same degree of relevance as Computer Science, or Tapestry Design with Mathematics! Why? Because in our schools we are producing students skilled for decades passed. As we can never be certain with what the future holds, we need a generation of students motivated in and enthusiastic about their talents.

So the next time your son, daughter, niece or nephew, friend or relative asks for advice or shares their aspirations – don’t recommend or reject professions or subjects. Instead, ask them “what are you really interested in”. Wait for the answer, resist the urge to pass judgment and respond “great!”

Syed Nadir El-Edroos is currently a teacher of sixth-form economics at Bellerbys College, London. He completed a Masters in Global Politics at the LSE and has an interest in education and its role in social and economic development.

In 2005, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan imposed the requirement of clearing the GRE Subject Test prior to admission in the PhD programs. Students who were enrolled in the PhD programs at the time were required to clear the GRE Subject Test before submission of their theses. This article discusses the interpretation of the word “clear” used by the HEC , the fairness of this criteria, and the deficiencies in policies regarding the GRE Subject Test. We conclude that by imposing this requirement, HEC has created problems for students living far from big cities, those who do not have access to credit or debit cards, and those who cannot afford the hefty (approximately, Rs. 14,000) registration fee. In addition, the HEC team seemed unaware of the true mechanism of the GRE Subject Test, and as a result significant confusion exists as to what “clearing” the test really means.

Much of the text is taken from the HEC official letters and the GRE guides and the letters published by ETS.

When Did the HEC Decide?

The 7th meeting of Quality Assurance Committee was held on 19th April, 2005 in the regional office of the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Lahore (see [1]). The meeting started with the approval of minutes of the last meeting of the Committee. The minutes were approved and the explanation of “international” with the Subject GRE Test used in the draft. It was explained to the members of the committee that word “international” is placed with the GRE Subject Test to draw a distinction between the GRE Type Test which is locally designed and already in practice, and the  standard GRE Test which is universally available for certain disciplines. The majority of the members and the chairman of the committee did not agree with the word “international” with Subject GRE as it does not exist in international nomenclature of the test. At last the members of the committee decided;

The word “international” will be removed from the Subject GRE-Test as Quality criteria of PhD level studies and it will be written as Subject GRE-Test, where available* with clarification at the bottom that local test will be designed for those subjects in which Subject GRE-Test is not available.

What should be a qualifying criterion?

First of all, it is useful to know a bit about the grading terminologies used by Education Testing Service (ETS), USA for GRE Subject Test. Later, we will discuss them in detail:

• Score (or scaled score)
• % Below (or percentile rank)
• Formula score (or raw score)

On May 30^th, 2006, Chairman HEC, Prof. Dr. Ata-ur-Rahman issued a letter no. 1-15/Adv(QA&LI) /2006/1394, in which he mentioned;

For admission of new students to Ph.D. as well as for upgradation/conversion of students already admitted in M.Phil to Ph.D., an International GRE (Subject) Test must be qualified (at least 50% score presently which will be increased to 60% after 3 years)

Please note that neither has the ETS yet released any document/method to find a percentage score of GRE test nor does the result card give any information about it. The GRE result card gives information about the score, percentage below (we call it percentile) and formula score.

In 2007, Chairman HEC, Dr. Ata-ur-Rahman wrote a letter [3] to the Vice Chancellors in which he asked:

Could you kindly ensure that no students currently enrolled in the disciplines of Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology, Biology, English Literature, Chemistry, Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, Psychology and allied disciplines are allowed to submit Ph.D theses in your university unless they have obtained at least a 50 percentile score in the respective international subject GRE examination. This is a rather low score presently and it will be increased to 60 percentile score in a couple of years.

In the letter mentioned above (in [3]), Dr. Ata-ur-Rahman used the term percentile score. As mentioned earlier, please again note that this terminology does not exist in the documents of ETS.

In July 2008, Prof. Dr. S. Sohail H. Naqvi, the Executive Director of HEC issued a letter [4], in which he mentioned the following criteria:

To “clear” the international GRE subject test the candidates will have to get Percentile Score equal or greater than the minimum Percentile Score which will be as follows:
i. 40% Percentile Score: Valid Until December 31, 2009
ii. 45% Percentile Score: Valid Until December 31, 2010
iii. 50% Percentile Score: Valid thereafter

So, what is a 40% Percentile Score?

If it is to be considered that Percentile Score means ‘percentile rank’ then 40% percentile rank means the 40% of 99 because the maximum percentile rank one can get is 99. Also this letter failed to clear the meaning of the word “Valid Until …”

In October 2009, Mr. Muneer Ahmed, Deputy Director (Quality Assurance), HEC issued a letter [5], to clarify the following:

I am directed to clarify that the qualifying score for the PhD Scholars who appeared in the International GRE Subject Test before 31st July 2008 is 40% (percentile) or 50%(percent) and after 31st July, 2008, percentile formula as conveyed earlier through the letter quoted above ([2] and [4]) will be applicable.

There was no need to say anything about such non-clarification. From the series of letters it is obvious that HEC was and still is facing dilemma about the criteria of clearing GRE.

In January 2010, HEC commission approved that [6]

GRE (International) Subject Test will be necessary at the time of admission to M.Phil/MS Programme leading to Ph.D.
The minimum acceptable scores are as follows:
i. 40% Percentile Score: Valid for Admissions until December 31, 2009
ii. 45% Percentile Score: Valid for Admissions until December 31, 2010
iii. 50% Percentile Score: Valid for Admissions until December 31, 2011.
iv. 60% Percentile Score: Valid for Admissions thereafter.
For presently continuing students (Admissions before January 11, 2010), the candidates must pass the GRE (International) Subject Test before submission of Ph.D. Dissertation. In disciplines where this test is not available, the test will be made available locally by National Testing Service (NTS), and if the Test is not available in NTS subject list, then a University Committee consisting of at least 3 Ph.D. faculty members in the subject area and approved by the HEC will conduct the Test at par with GRE (International) Subject Test.

Please note that the term “Percentile Score” doesn’t exist, it might be % below or percentile rank. Also clause (i) of above para has already been expired with respect to this letter [6] because it has now been imposed as a criterion to get admission in MS/M.Phil. Moreover subjects for which GRE test is not available, parallel to GRE Subject Test; the university commission of at least three PhDs will form their own test. This creates an injustice in many ways like fee, quality of test, checking criteria, and scoring method.

The text of the letter mentioned in [6] is available on the HEC website and it has been modified by the HEC without any intimation (it can be accessed here and old one is included in references). In the new letter, this test is only mandatory to get admission in PhD and also the word “international” with GRE Subject has been removed.

In March 2010, on answering a query from NUST, Rawalpindi, Mr. Muneer Ahmed wrote as follows [7]:

I am directed to inform you that all students enrolled/converted into PhD programme after May 31, 2005 and before July 31, 2008 are required to qualify International GRE Subject Test with 50% (percent) score and students enrolled/converted after July 31, 2008 have to qualify International GRE Subject Test with percentile score as mentioned in letter no. 1-10/(ED)/HEC/2008/961(copy attached)

It is not possible to find the percentage score of GRE Subject Test (see [8, p. 14]) and other thing is that why Mr. Muneer Ahmad didn’t refer to a latest letter[6] issued in January 2010.

In the following table we give the 50 percent score of each subject defined by the HEC as the 50 percent of the total scaled score. Please note that the HEC defined the score at 99 percentile rank in [10, page 14] as a total scaled score.

To get the 50 percent score in Chemistry and Computer Science, one has to just appear in GRE Subject Test without answering to any question.

How should we use the GRE, according to ETS, USA?

The “GRE Guide to the Use of Scores 2008-09” gives comprehensive information about the GRE test and is the best booklet to learn about the GRE grading terminologies. It is published by the GRE board. This guide is available on the ETS website; the following sentences/paragraphs are taken from this guide.

• Primary limitations of GRE test

Any GRE test, however, has two primary limitations: (1) it does not and cannot measure all the qualities that are important in predicting success in graduate study or in confirming undergraduate achievement and (2) it is an inexact measure; that is, only score differences that exceed the standard error of measurement of a given score can serve as reliable indications of real differences in academic knowledge and developed abilities [8, p. 5].

• Encouragement of appropriate use.

All users of GRE scores have an obligation to use the scores in accordance with published GRE Board policies and guidelines. Institutions have a responsibility to ensure that all individuals using GRE scores are aware of the GRE Board score-use policies and guidelines and to monitor the use of the scores, correcting instances of misuse when they are identified. The GRE Program staff is available to assist institutions in resolving score-misuse issues. [8, p. 6]

• Use Multiple Criteria

Regardless of the decision to be made, multiple sources of information should be used to ensure fairness and balance the limitations of any single measure of knowledge, skills, or abilities. These sources may include undergraduate grade point average, letters of recommendation, personal statement, samples of academic work, and professional experience related to proposed graduate study. GRE scores should not be used exclusively. [8, p. 6]

• Accept Only Official GRE Score Reports

The only official reports of GRE scores are those issued by Educational Testing Service and sent directly to approved institutions and organizations designated by the test takers. Scores obtained from other sources should not be accepted. [2, p. 6]

To ensure the authenticity of scores, the GRE Board urges that institutions accept only official reports of GRE scores received directly from ETS. [8, p. 9]

• Avoid Decisions Based on Small Score Differences

Small differences in GRE scores (as defined by the standard error of measurement) should not be used to make distinctions among examinees. Standard errors of measurement (SEMs) vary by test and are available in this publication. [8, p. 7]

• Minority Examinees (Students outside of USA)

GRE scores, like those on similar standardized tests, cannot completely represent the potential of any person, nor can they alone reflect an individual’s chances of long-term success in an academic environment. It should be remembered that the GRE tests provide measures of certain types of developed abilities and achievement, reflecting educational and cultural experience over a long period. Special care is required in interpreting the GRE scores of students who may have had educational and cultural experiences somewhat different from those of the traditional majority. [8, p. 8]

• Confidentiality and Authenticity of GRE Scores

GRE scores are confidential and are not to be released by an institutional recipient without the explicit permission of the examinee. GRE scores are not to be included in academic transcripts. Dissemination of score records should be kept at a minimum, and all staff who have access to them should be explicitly advised of the confidential nature of the scores. [8, p. 9]

Different types of scores

It is also useful to reiterate that there are three types of grading system in GRE subject.

• Score (or scaled score)
• % Below (or percentile rank)
• Formula score (or raw score)

[ Cutout: Report of Scores ]

The range of scaled scores is from 200 to 990, in 10-points increments, although the score range for any particular Subject Test is usually smaller [2, page 11]. Scaled score is a basic analogy to compare two examinees.

Scaled scores on the same Subject Tests generally are directly comparable across years. A Chemistry Test score of 650 in 2007, for example, should be considered equivalent to a Chemistry Test score of 650 earned in 2006. [8, p. 11]

Percentile rank means the percentage of examinees in a group who obtained scores lower than specified score [9]. Percentile ranks of two examinees cannot be comparable for two different tests on same subject, while score is comparable for same subject test but not for different.

Subject Test scores should be compared only with other scores on the same Subject Tests (for example, a 680 on the Physics Test is not equivalent to a 680 on the Chemistry Test). Percentile ranks should be compared only if they are based on the same reference population. [8, p.7]

ETS writes the following about Score and Percentile rank.

Note that although a score represents the same level of ability regardless of when the score was earned, its percentile rank may vary, depending on the scores of the group with which it is compared [9].

Percentile ranks shown on score reports are based on the performance of the current reference group for each test regardless of when the scores were earned. The percentile rank for any score may vary over the years depending on the scores of the group with which the score is compared. Thus, when two or more applicants are being compared, the comparison should be made on the basis of their respective scores.[8, p. 9]

At the score of 700 in Computer Science there is a 42 percentile rank for the performance of the all examinees who were tested between July 1, 2004 – June 30, 2007 (see [8, p. 14]) and 40 percentile for the performance of all examinees who tested between July 1, 2003 – June 30, 2006 (See [10, p. 14])

One can find the following about percentile rank by flipping the “Report of Scores*”.

The percentile ranks in this report indicate the percentage of examinees who scored below your score. Note that these percentile ranks may be different from those that applied when the score were originally reported to you if the scores were earned prior to July 2009. This reflects annual updating of these data to permit admission officers to compare scores, whenever earned, with those for a recent reference group.

Formula score is the number of correct responses* minus one-fourth the number of incorrect responses rounded to the nearest whole number. The maximum formula score depends upon the total numbers of MCQs in the test.

* Result card sent by ETS, USA to the examinee or score recipient.
** Here “responses” mean questions which are usually multiple choices.

Is it an international test?

It should be remembered that the GRE tests provide measures of certain types of developed abilities and achievement, reflecting educational and cultural experience over a long period. Special care is required in interpreting the GRE scores of students who may have had educational and cultural experiences somewhat different from those of the traditional majority. [8, p. 8]

HEC officials are saying it an “international” test but the facts are against it. In the following table the number of examinees, all over the world, are given who took test between July 1, 2004, and June 30, 2007 [8, p.14].

Please note that computer science is one of the biggest fields of study and only 1870 examinees took the GRE Subject Test in a year.

General Rules for PhD Scholars

If someone gets the admission in PhD, then generally he/she has to fulfill the following requirements to get the PhD degree (no doubt, these are major requirements).

• Approval of Research Proposal or Synopsis (before or after the admission)
• Course work (not compulsory all over the world)
• Research paper (not compulsory in some countries but compulsory in Pakistan.)
• Thesis writing
• Defense of the thesis

If the thesis of some Pakistani PhD scholar is ready for submission then he cannot submit his thesis because of the extra imposed condition of GRE Subject Test, which is usually used as a recommended test (but not required) to get admission in the few universities of USA (see number of examinees per year as a proof). Also this shows that research paper(s) and thesis of the PhD scholar have no worth and no quality without this test.

It is also strange that if the PhD scholar has qualified GRE Subject Test then all the work (research) done under the supervision of such person (supervisor), who is usually non-qualified in GRE Subject Test, attains HEC quality standard.

Taking the GRE Subject test and other information

If someone decides to take GRE Subject Test, then the only way is online registration through ETS website by using online payment mode (by Credit or Debit card).

• Test Fee: 160 US Dollars (Rs. 14000 approx.)
• Duration: 2 hours and 50 minutes
• Conducted thrice a year (in April, October, November)
• Centers (Pakistan): Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore
• Limited number of seats in every center.
• Result announcement after 40 days of the test date.

Conclusions

1. The GRE Subject Test spans 2 hours and 50 minutes, at the price of US$ 160 (approximately Rs. 14,000). It is not affordable for a majority of the students and this heavy cost puts real extra burden on these students. In fact, many good students, who would easily pass it, hesitate to take the GRE Subject Test because of its huge fee.
2. Percentile rank is best to compare the students of same subject in the same test (in which they appeared) but it is not recommended to be used as a tool for making merit.
3. ETS recommends the use of “Scaled Score” for comparing the ability of students as they appear in the test at different schedule (three times in a year).
4. This test is not generally meant to be used for the students and institutions outside the United States.
5. Most public sector universities in Pakistan are not score recipients of ETS and it is very easy to use fake result cards to get admission, and the ETS never confirms the result to institutions if they are not score recipients.
6. It is very difficult to register for the test because many students don’t have Credit or Debit cards for payment through the internet.
7. Pakistan is a very big country and this test is conducted only in three cities, with limited number of seats at each location. This is really creating a big problem for the students living far from these cities.
8. The number of examinees per year clearly indicates the popularity of the test. For example, 1870 students in the subject of Computer Science and 2797 students in the subject of Chemistry appeared in a year all over the world.
9. Percentile rank actually is a comparison of the students of certain group taking GRE Subject Test in a period of last three years with respect to the test date. In eight subjects, Pakistani students are compared against a small community of students from all over the world, and for the remaining subjects the criteria is totally different.
10. The HEC team was unaware of the true mechanism of the GRE Subject Test. Yet, they decided that a PhD scholar must appear in this test, just to meet international standards no matter what he/she will score.
11. There are a lot of deficiencies in the HEC letters regarding GRE Subject Test. Against the decision of 7^th meeting of Quality Assurance Committee of HEC, the HEC officials are still communicating it as an international test.
12. All the grading terminologies used by the HEC don’t match with the ETS standard terminologies.This clearly shows that HEC officials are unaware of the objective and mechanism of the GRE Subject Test.

References

[1] Minutes of the 7th meeting of Quality Assurance Committee dated 19th April, 2005
[2] No 1-15/Adv(QA&LI) /2006/1394 dated May 30, 2006
[3] No. 4-7/CHR/HEC/07/807 dated April 3, 2007
[4] No. 1-10/(ED)/HEC/2008/96/ dated July 14, 2008
[5] No. 1-G/DD-QA/HEC/2009/45 dated October 23, 2009
[6] No. 4-7/CHR/HEC/2010/06 dated January 11, 2010
[7] DD/QA/HEC/NUST/2010/224 dated March 05, 2010
[8] GRE Guide to the Use of Scores 2008-09
[9] Interpreting Your GRE® Scores (2008-09)
[10] GRE Guide to the Use of Scores 2007-08

All the references can be downloaded from here.

Atiq-ur-Rehman is a PhD scholar at the Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan. His areas of research are difference and functional equations, real functions, inequalities in monotonic, and convex functions and he has 8 research papers. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of STEP.

Throughout my life I have hated mathematics with a passion. I hated its rules and notations. I hated the fact that I had absolutely no say in whatever was going on in the class. I just had to sit there and listen to my math teacher go on and on about formulas, notations needed to write these formulas, practice questions which would help us memorize these formulas and eventually “practical problems” which were supposed to exhibit the relevance of these formulas in everyday life although even the eight year-old me could tell that these were merely the same practice questions loosely disguised in the most unlikely of social situations known to man. And frankly, I didn’t care. I didn’t care where x was, or how much older Mary was than her brother Mark or when train A would reach London. As far as I was concerned math was an obsolete science to which I didn’t want to contribute to and which, for the most part, didn’t really want me to contribute to it anyway.

Therefore it comes as a surprise to many people that I am currently a Computer Science major focusing on theoretical computer science, which is basically a branch of mathematics. I, who had once famously given a speech to my seventh-grade math class about the pointlessness of mathematics, am now the one trying to explain to other people the beauty of Erdos’ brilliant proofs. And it all started with the following beautiful proof of the infinity of prime numbers:

For any finite set  {p_1,p₂…p_r} of primes consider the number n= p_1..p_2..p₃…p_r +1. This n has a prime divisor p but this is not one of the {p_1,p₂…p_r}, otherwise p would be a divisor of n and the product  p_1..p_2..p₃…p_{r ,} and thus also of the difference n-( p_1..p_2..p₃…p_r) =1, which is impossible.  So a finite set {p_1,p₂…p_r} cannot be the collection of all prime numbers.

I first heard of this proof in the first lecture of a discrete mathematics course I took during my sophomore year at university. The instructor didn’t even write the proof down, with all its messy set notation. He just told us about the idea of putting the prime numbers together in a group and showed us what goes wrong if we assume the group to be finite. At first I thought this was one of those introductory shenanigans professors deploy in the first class to get students interested. How could something so simple be counted as math? Where were the fancy symbols and the list of variables with their definitions? Where was the list of steps used to reach the conclusion? Where were the ten similar questions I needed to solve at home for practice? This was simply a clever idea used to solve a problem. Surely, this couldn’t be math! But, as I have learnt in the past year, this is basically what math is: a set of simple ideas used to solve problems. Sometimes the problems can be simplified to older problems for which people have already come up with solutions. Sometimes ideas which have been used to solve a certain problem can be used to solve an unrelated problem. But the simplicity of the process remains intact. It is the ‘idea’ which is at the heart of all mathematics, and to come up with ideas you just need creativity (and maybe a pencil and a notebook).

If a course can change the path of a person’s life, then this discrete math course changed mine. In the course of nine weeks, I was introduced to the kind of math I hadn’t even known existed. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like a robot while doing math. I actually had to think about the problems and figure out strategies for solving them. While I was introduced to techniques like induction and graph theory, for the most part my assignments and exams required me to come up with my own strategies based on these techniques and my own logical arguments and common sense. Math was like an elaborate game and finally I felt like it actually wanted me to take part.

So, this brings us to the central question: why did I, and countless other students, hate elementary and high school math? What needs to be done to make mathematics more interesting to students? Although I do not have any experience teaching mathematics, I do remember the reasons why I hated it so much and know exactly what eventually made me realize that I wanted to study a branch of mathematics as my major. For the sake of this article, I am going to ignore factors which affect all subjects alike and focus on why math has become such a hated subject.

Looking back at my years of struggling with high school math the first word that comes to mind is boredom. And this was not caused by a lack of interest in school because I was generally a very enthusiastic kid. I loved studying languages, history, and science. It was just math that I dreaded. And looking back at the way math is taught it comes as no surprise. While all other subjects are taught as an amalgamation of the history, foundations, rules and applications of the subject, math is mainly limited to the rules of the subject. Take a typical sixth grade science class. I remember learning about the effect of different factors on the rate of evaporation by placing different shaped beakers filled with water all over the school campus. What followed was a memorable class in which we all had mock “evaporation races” as we timed the beakers to see which one would lose its water first.It was only once we had made our own conclusions about which factors affected evaporation, that our teacher explained Brownian motion to us. She also mentioned factors such as surface area and wind-speed, which most of us had been able  to conclude for ourselves based on the observations we had made.

Now compare this to a typical sixth grade math class. Looking back, sixth grade was when some of the most wonderful mathematical concepts were introduced to us. It was in the sixth grade that we first encountered the idea of a variable and started to really analyze shapes. Statistics was introduced, and we started manipulating probabilities to get results which even now give me the feeling of being able to predict the future. But in the midst of all these amazing ideas, this is how a typical math class would go:

Teacher: An isosceles triangle is a triangle which has two sides of equal length. Okay?

Students: YES!

Teacher: So what is an isosceles triangle?

Students: A TRIANGLE WHICH HAS TWO SIDES OF EQUAL LENGTH !

And you can bet one of the questions on the progress test would be: “What is an isosceles triangle?”. In such a situation who would be interested in math? And these are not just two extreme examples I have mentioned to prove my point. Science that year continued to keep us hooked: we grew plants in inky water, caught insects in jars, experimented with mirrors and discovered the material we were supposed to learn, while in math we moved on to triangles which had no sides of equal length (I honestly don’t remember what they were called, though I think it begins with an s) and other lexical atrocities.

You may argue that science is an extreme example and that math just doesn’t have the exciting material needed to keep students hooked. While science teachers can use models, take their students outside or perform simple experiments to demonstrate their material, math teachers have nothing to interest a group of thirty kids. Not only do I disagree with this, I actually claim that it is the other way round and that it is the math teachers that have it good. While science teachers need extensive (and often non-available) funding to buy lab equipment and take their students out on field trips, all a math teacher needs are thirty pencils and notebooks. And how does he keep them interested? Well, he actually asks them to do some math. Do you remember the puzzle we probably all tried as kids in which we had to draw a house without lifting our pencils. That is just a simple example of a Eulerian path. And those complicated strategies for winning card games that our older siblings tried to explain to us were mostly simple applications of probability. The tower of rings of increasingly small diameters which we had to shift to another peg is the most common example given for recursive algorithms. The list of interesting mathematical problems which we solved willingly as kids is endless. Nim, Hex, magic tricks, and riddles in which we had to find loopholes in logical arguments are all example of the math we enjoyed as children and it is these problems which should be bought to the classroom to make math classes more interesting.

Another issue which I find with the way mathematics is taught, which is closely related to the first, is the extreme and almost exclusive emphasis on the utterly mundane aspects of mathematics. Take the isosceles triangle example above. Would it really have mattered if we had called the triangles, “triangles with two equal sides”? Maybe shortened to TWTES (pronounced tevtes). What’s important are the properties of these triangles. Instead of asking a child to spend time trying to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of this weird word, she should be asked to think about how they are made, and how the angles inside this triangle are related to each other. I am pretty sure if a child made a dozen different TWTES’ she would figure out most of their  properties for herself and she would actually enjoy the mental excursion of discovering these properties instead of hastily be given a list of them in the last fifteen minutes of class.

Admittedly, there are some terms and jargon that a student of mathematics must learn in order for the classes to be held smoothly and for the students to eventually take part in the wider mathematical discourse. But no other subject puts even half of the emphasis that math places on its lexicon. Take the example of chemistry. If a subject has the right to focus on terminology it is chemistry, with it’s multitude of  symbols, chemical formulas and specific reactions. But not once do I remember a chemistry teacher reciting the names of the elements along with their atomic symbols. Instead, we focused on the elements and their reactions and any time we needed help deciphering a symbol we could simply look it up on the huge periodic table taped to the classroom wall. Maybe that is what mathematics needs: a periodic table of shapes and functions which would be taped to the wall of every classroom. Then, children all over the world could forget about mathematical terminology and actually do some math.

And by ‘doing math’ I don’t mean the mindless repetition, or solving exercise problems at the end of every chapter. As a result of school mathematics, most people end up believing math is the application of known rules to problems that we know the rules can solve. That is the job of an accountant or a cashier or an insurance planner. A mathematicians  job is much simpler. He must come up with the rules that other people are to use. When faced with a problem, he is not told that it can be solved using the second trigonometric identity; that is what he must figure out. And while this is harder than simply applying a set of rules, the result of coming up with a solution is infinitely more rewarding. You can compare the two as the difference between the joy a child feels in having an adult place him on a bike and push him along, and the joy he feels when he races through the park himself. It is hard to teach him how to ride and it might take him ages to learn but all parents understand that the end result is worth it. Math teachers should definitely do the same with their students.

And if difficulty was such a major barrier, why doesn’t it stop teachers of other subjects from trying to get their students to appreciate the beauty of their fields? By the end of high school most of us have faced the toughest aspects of most of the other subjects. We have read Iqbal’s poetry and critiqued it with our peers. We have a deep understanding of how the major systems of the body work. We have built electrical devices and have made original pieces of art in a range of different mediums. Then, why is it that most of us only experience the joy of coming up with a true mathematical proof well into our undergraduate programs? Surely there is something wrong going on here.

Perhaps equally impressive was the faculty that LUMS was able to assemble for this nascent school. It was a small — perhaps too small — group of promising young researchers, brought together by the project team to set the standard for LUMS SSE. Leading this group at the time was Dr. Asad Abidi, a professor at the Electrical Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Professor Abidi was born and raised in Pakistan and moved to England at age 16. After earning his B.S. from Imperial College London, he went on to complete his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. Following a brief stint at the Bell Research Labs in New Jersey, in 1985 Professor Abidi joined the faculty at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.  An accomplished researchers and a pioneer in the field of RF CMOS design (the stuff that’s at the heart of our cell phones), Professor Abidi has won numerous honors, culminating with his election to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional honor accorded to American engineers for their life-time achievements.

In the summer of 2007, Professor Abidi went on leave from UCLA and joined LUMS as the first dean of SSE. There he played a pivotal role in setting the direction of the school. But, less than two years later, Professor Abidi was back at UCLA and at his home in the beautiful Pacific Palisades, California. That is where STEP Editor Bilal Zafar sat down with Professor Abidi to talk about LUMS SSE (Part 1), and much more (Part 2).

STEP: You were leading LUMS SSE when the first batch of students was admitted. In so far as the science and engineering universities are concerned, SSE’s process of student-induction was unique in Pakistan. What sort of students was LUMS SSE looking for in that first batch?

Asad Abidi (AA): We wanted to bring in students who could be groomed to be future leaders in science and technology, and who could influence hundreds of others. So, we handpicked the few who had a combination of things; academic excellence was not the only thing. Do they, for example, have passion? It’s too early to have passion for science – although some of them already demonstrated that – but do they have passion at all? Do they have leadership skills? Do they have a personality that could influence others? Do they have breadth in their intellect? So, we were looking for a personality and a total character that suggested entrepreneurship, leadership, and so on.

LUMS SSE is an intellectually elite institution and that was the basis for our selection criteria. Our aim was to focus this kind of very intellectually elite education on people who will have a 10x impact when they come out.

STEP: One popular criticism of LUMS SSE is that it might turn out to be a great institution, but it will be an institution for a few hundred people in a nation with 25 million people of university-going age. Can an institution like this really have an impact?

AA: It is too early to say, but it has a very clear precedent and model. And the model is institutions in the US like MIT or Caltech.

The idea was that each one of the students would be educated broadly and deeply in math and science or engineering, hopefully go on to do PhDs, then return to Pakistan or engage with it somehow to influence hundreds of others. That’s why we handpicked the few who had a combination of qualities.

At the first orientation, we told all the students, and their parents were sitting with them, that every one of you is going to make a significant change to Pakistan in the end.  You don’t know how yet. You may turn out to be a technical entrepreneur, start a high-tech company, you may turn out to be a world-renowned professor … we don’t know. But every one of you is going to have an impact, because that is our mission — to produce an entire generation of scientific and engineering leaders.

I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with focusing this kind of elite education on a small group of students. We cannot have every institution that is egalitarian; it’s just not possible.  There are many other universities in Pakistan that are egalitarian, and they do a fine job. Our argument is that there is room for one elite institution; a place at which people look and say, what are they up to? How do they teach the such-and-such subject? So, in terms of curricular innovation, bringing in research, and even administrative things like selection of undergraduates, LUMS SSE can be a trendsetter in Pakistan. So, I think there is room for one such institution.

STEP: Just one such institution?

AA: Yes, you can’t have two simply because there’s not enough faculty.  To have two world class institutions, you need two world class faculties. You can’t even get one together.

STEP: Harold Shapiro, former President of Princeton University, argues in his book “A Larger Sense of Purpose” that, in order to have a sound higher education system, you need strong interaction between world-class research universities in the country and other, less prestigious teaching institutions. To me, as an outsider, LUMS SSE comes across as if it exists in bubble inside Pakistan. For example, there are very few joint appointments between professors at, say, Quaid-e-Azam University or UET Lahore or NU-FAST or NUST and LUMS. Why is that?

AA: I completely agree that there has to be open communication with the whole community because, all the institutions that define the (higher education) eco-system play complimentary roles.

To your point about SSE “existing in a bubble”, I think it’s a little more complex than that. First of all, there is a lot of fear in Pakistan that, unless you are on guard, you’ll become mediocre. There is a history of erosion of institutions such as GIKI that had started with a bang. But, that does not mean that you put things in a bubble.  What it means is that, first, you build a critical mass that defines excellence and exemplifies it. Once you have the critical mass of faculty, then you can start engaging people from other institutions who come in and actually feel uplifted by their experience and their interaction. So, while SSE was going through this period of defining its culture as an institution, perhaps it came across as existing in a bubble.

Then, there are a lot of other factors which I’m not sure I want to go into too much. I’ll only say this much: there was a sense of elitism amongst the people involved in developing SSE, and I suppose you could argue that as long as it is intellectual elitism, perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. But taken to extremes in the Pakistani milieu, elitism and over-zealousness can do damage. With the growth of the institution, I feel there is more maturity and less fear, less insecurity.

The fact of the matter is that the present faculty is so small that it is already stretched to the limit.  Next year, SSE would have three classes (freshman, sophomore and junior year) and at that point the faculty would have to bring in other people just to teach. So, I think that circumstances will force SSE to open up.  I was promoting some of this (while I was there), but at that early stage there was some opposition to this. My view was that you have to guard these fledgling institutions until this sense of excellence takes root, and once the institution knows where it’s going it should take others along with it.

STEP: Let’s get to the issue of sustainability. Can an institution like SSE sustain itself – financially as well as administratively — or will it be just a flash in the pan like many others?

AA: As of right now, it’s very hard to say. On the one hand, you can look at LUMS as an institution and say that it has been very resilient. Over the past 22 years it has only improved and, today, it enjoys a preeminent position in Pakistan. But that’s the business school, and more recently, social sciences and humanities; the Science and Engineering School is the newest addition. However, given the entirely different cultures, past success is no reliable predictor of the future.

The fragility at SSE, first of all, comes from its finances. Science instruction is an expensive enterprise. For science instruction you have to have building infrastructure, lab equipment, consumables and safety, etc., whereas in business instruction you need desks and computers. Also, SSE set a precedent by recruiting faculty with the promise that it could do publishable research, and that meant a lot of investment early on. This puts a large burden on the trustees to either give money themselves, or to raise large sums for SSE. They all come from the business background; they were involved with the business school, so perhaps one could argue that the trustees are still debating amongst themselves whether SSE is a good idea or not.  Or, at least a group among them feels that science can be real money drain with no short-term payoff, and I am sure this remains a subject of hot debate.

Administratively, the main issue is that of leadership. To run SSE, you need excellent leaders with great breadth of knowledge and experience in science research and teaching. The leaders must gain the trust and the respect of faculty, parents, students, and even government officials, because they have to interface with the government to get accreditation, funding, etc. They must also have the respect and credibility in the Pakistani academic community so that they can talk to their counterparts in other universities to show that SSE respects other institutions and wishes to bring everyone together as a community for mutual uplift. You need people at the top who do that job of being ambassadors and who really believe in it. But finding such leaders in Pakistan is very hard.

STEP: Just hard or impossible, at this point?

AA: It may be impossible.

STEP: Can’t you develop processes so that personalities become less relevant?

AA: I think it’s really hard to have well-impacted processes defined in fledgling institutions. There is just a lot of ad hoc stuff that you must do, and there is no precedence for what you may be trying to do. You can’t expect someone to come in and put in every conceivable process; it doesn’t work that way.  In new institutions, in my experience, you have to ‘wing it’, you have to improvise and much more importantly, you have to run it on enthusiasm more than on processes.  If the enthusiasm isn’t there at the beginning, people will just feel so fearful of their small numbers and the huge task ahead that they will slowly withdraw. So, you have to pump up a lot of enthusiasm in people; processes emerge in due course. This is why good leadership with relevant experience is important.

STEP: So, then, how can SSE make sure that it remains a strong institution without the kind of leadership you described?

AA: I think they have to become largely leader-independent. The faculty at LUMS is, on the whole, very sensible and mature. Their collective wisdom has to drive the institution, pretty much independent of who is at the top.  For example, if anyone sees a little conflagration coming up, it should be everybody’s business at LUMS to diffuse it.  That’s the only way to survive and I think there is some of that sense of ownership now developing. I think SSE’s Computer Science group, being large and having survived some adversities in the past, can point the way and say to the newly formed groups, ‘look, these little disputes or fears’ — and, by the way, all fighting within universities is over the most trivial of things  –  ‘have no basis and let’s remain focused on our bigger agenda’.

It takes a certain maturity and I worked pretty hard with the faculty to try to make them feel that as a group, as a collective decision-making body, they are very strong and that they can draw upon the traditions of LUMS — of resilience, improvement and excellence – and march on. I said to the faculty: name me the last three presidents of, say, Harvard University or some other famous university?  You won’t know them because they are in the background; what’s in the forefront is the faculty. I think they understand pretty well the need for this communal sense and shared responsibility. 

You see, Pakistani institutions are very fragile. Whether it’s a hospital or a charitable organization, they can fall apart when the right person walks away or dies or whatever.  Everything just hangs on a thread. We have to get beyond this; I mean, will the Edhi trust survive Edhi?

It shouldn’t be like that. Pakistan should take pride in its good institutions. People should say: here is an institution worth saving and we want it to get better next year, not worse. Those inside the institution should commit themselves; those outside it, the same. Parents should say, we want LUMS to get better regardless of who is it at the top, or whether its funds run out, because SSE is giving our children an opportunity we didn’t imagine was possible in Pakistan. People should say, look, of all the places in Pakistan doing science and engineering teaching and research, you guys are doing an excellent job, you must continue to do that; we are counting on it! That’s the kind of sentiment it takes to sustain an institution like the SSE.  But we have to be a little more mature as a society and understand that that’s how countries preserve their institutions. It takes a lot to keep these valuable things going.

STEP: But, a few years ago, a number of faculty members (around five) left LUMS. Do you feel that it has happened for the last time?

AA: I do not know all details, but I do have some idea of the problems that caused the departure. Basically, it was problems festering that were not tended to in time. When problems fester, they just get messier and messier. That is when leaders should step in and defuse the crises. But, I think these are inevitable growing pains in a Pakistani institution.

The important thing is that it should never happen again … because once is enough. This is why when I was at LUMS I told everybody to look at the mistakes of the past and pledge not to let them happen again… for the sake of the institution.  I very much hope that it was the last mass departure, because if the institution starts to hemorrhage its faculty, even if it loses just one or two people, things can unravel very quickly. And, that’s what I think everyone has to be on-guard for.

STEP: Final question on this topic of SSE: what is your advice to the people at LUMS?

AA: My message to the faculty at SSE is: you are the force, you are the institution. You are experienced, you are teaching at a world class university, you are doing great research in Pakistan, you just need to pull together and say, this is our institution, this is what we are fighting for and this is what we are building it for. You are the one who define this institution, and you will continue to bring fame to it. You are at the front-line, delivering a powerful tool (or, should I say, weapon) to the best of Pakistani youth to build a better future: a high quality, liberalizing, deep, higher education.

In part two of our conversation with Dr. Abidi, we talk about funding for higher education — can the current levels be sustained and why the industry is not investing more — and what Pakistanis abroad can do to help. So, stay tuned!