ON 24 DECEMBER 2012, Delhi University’s highest academic body, the Academic Council, passed a resolution to convert its existing three-year undergraduate degree into a four-year program, thereby taking perhaps the first strides towards adopting a broad inter-disciplinary pedagogy.
Under the current system, students, on the basis of their high school marks, secure admission to a particular discipline—Economics, Commerce, History and so on—which they then specialise in over the next three years. In the new, proposed structure, which will be somewhat similar to the American undergraduate system, students will be required to take a set of compulsory courses drawn from different fields, while they will also design their own degree by selecting courses of their choice.
Although the university is yet to release the details of the proposed structure, it has been announced that, during the first two years, there will be 11 compulsory foundation courses for all students. According to the Indian Express, these will include papers in science, history, environmental and public health, psychology, information technology, business and entrepreneurship, governance and citizenship, geography, social development and mathematics. Apart from these foundation courses, students will choose a major and a minor field of specialisation.
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