The recent news about Infosys laying off freshers shocked higher education circles. The company said the graduates were trained and given three attempts to clear the evaluation and, in spite of all that, they failed. | iStock/Getty Images
The recent news about Infosys laying off freshers caused outrage in higher education circles. The justification of the company was that these graduates were trained and given three attempts to clear the evaluation and, in spite of all that, they failed; and hence they were fired. Reports often say only a small fraction of Indian computer engineers have basic programming skills. This makes us ponder upon this question – are Indian graduates incompetent at programming?
Like Mathematics, programming excellence comes with practice. Unfortunately, not only are the engineering institutions’ syllabi outdated, they don’t have a culture of coding practice. Most engineering institutions offer less than 20 programming exercises per lab, and the same exercises come in the final lab exams as well. Students memorise them, instead of understanding.
Some private universities have invested in cloud-based coding practice platforms for running their lab courses. However, using such software alone wouldn’t guarantee the intended outcomes. With GenAI tools readily available, students find creative ways to bypass learning, easily escaping detection in traditional assessments.
Beyond automation
While machines handle repetitive tasks, humans pursue intellectual work. Today’s tech industry thrives on this human-machine synergy. Programming education must reflect this reality.
Higher Education Institutions must adopt a hybrid approach. While coding platforms provide the foundation, significant weightage must be given to viva-voce and one-on-one sessions. These evaluations should go beyond simple conceptual questions. Instead, students must explain their code flow and implementation choices.
When students explain their own code, the questions naturally flow from their implementation choices. Why did they use a particular loop structure? How did they handle edge cases? What made them choose specific variable names?
A student who truly wrote and understood the code can easily explain these decisions. However, those who used AI tools or copied code typically struggle to justify their choices or explain the underlying logic.
Unlike traditional viva-voce with standard questions, a code walkthrough creates a unique evaluation for each student based on their own work. This makes it an effective tool to verify authentic learning and programming competence. Code explanation is also a hiring technique used by many IT companies during their interviews.
A robust assessment framework
A robust assessment framework requires both automated and human evaluation components. Higher Education Institutions should implement a 70-30 split between these components. Automated assessment through cloud-based coding platforms should focus on timed programming tests with multiple test cases. The human evaluation should comprise rolling viva-voce sessions where students do a code walkthrough from the automated tests.
For effective implementation, institutions must maintain an optimal student-faculty ratio of 60:1 or lesser. Faculty members should ideally conduct 15-minute viva-voce sessions spread across the semester, ensuring thorough evaluation of each student. To maintain objectivity, external evaluators should also be in this assessment panel.
The framework demands proper infrastructure – secure digital platforms integrated with existing Learning Management Systems for conducting and recording assessments. These recordings, preserved for an academic year, serve as quality control measures and provide transparency in evaluation.
Fixing the root cause
The future of programming education lies in the synergy between automated assessment platforms and human evaluation. While cloud-based coding practice platforms support in practice and preliminary assessment, it’s the human verification through code explanation that ensures authentic learning. Educational institutions must act now to implement this hybrid framework, ensuring their graduates not just write code, but understand and explain it.
When implemented effectively at the academic level, students will not just secure better placements but become the competent programmers that India’s IT industry desperately needs. Perhaps then, we won’t hear about mass terminations due to incompetence – because our education system would have already fixed the root cause..
(Aasif Iqbal J is an educationist. He works as Chief Operating Officer at Iamneo Edutech Private Limited)
Published – February 20, 2025 07:33 pm IST