Education at a Price

The new batch of students appeared to be sincere, if not interested. Eight of nine students posted in my unit were there on day one. That was unheard of in recent years. The ninth guy had gone home, they said. I was quite happy with those eight and taught them with interest for two days. During the second day’s teaching, in a minor break, they informed me that six of them were going to attend a workshop on emergency medicine for three days and would not attend the teaching sessions we held for them. I had not received any such letter from the medicine department, and was curious. “You six must be planning to go to the USA” I said, “such things are considered important for gaining entry into that country”. They kept quiet. I was right in my guess. “Is this a paid thing?” I asked them. “Is the charge something like Rupees 1000/-?” “Rupees 1500/-” they corrected me. So here were undergraduate students paying such a princely sum for learning emergency medicine that should have been taught to them in the course of their standard undergraduate teaching without any extra charge. And they wanted to miss the standard teaching in Gynecology and Obstetrics that they had already paid for as part of the fee paid to the college. “But I cannot stop education of the remaining two students because you will be away for three days” I said. “We will continue to teach them, and you will miss that. I would like you to meet the course coordinator and ask him to send me a letter with the Director’s approval, so that we don’t mark you absent on those three days. If you cannot get that, we will mark you absent. Then you will have to deduct three days from the number of days you have bunked for your personal reasons including personal happiness.” They kept quiet. They had understood exactly what the rules were. “You seem to know the basics of Medicine, since you plan to do a course in emergency medicine, which is not included in your curriculum. Shall I ask you two questions? If you answer them correctly, I will let you go without being marked absent.” I knew I had no authority to any such thing, but I wanted to test them. I had a feeling they would not be able to answer those two simple questions I had in mind. Nobody said no. I distributed six pieces of paper to them as answer books, and asked the questions. “The first question is on the treatment of malaria with chloroquine. Why is the dose funny, like 4 tablets stat, followed by 2 tablets after 6 hours, and then two tablets a day for 2 days? Why is it not something like 1 tablet three times a day, as most other drugs are given? The second question is how is brain death diagnosed?” I sent them away to write their answers and come back. I was confident that they would not cheat by copying one another’s answers, not because I knew of their integrity (I hardly knew them) but because I knew they would not know the answers and there was no one nearby who would tell them the answers. They came back dutifully after 5 minutes. “Give me the answer books” I said. They hesitated. “Have you written your names and roll numbers on them? If not, please do so. Otherwise I will not know which answer book belongs to whom”. They hesitated further, but made no attempt at writing their names on the answer books. “Are they blank?” I asked. They nodded. They were right. There was no need to distinguish between the answer books when all of them were blank. I collected them and said, “I will keep them. They will prove useful when you take another test later.” They kept quiet. “Considering the fact that you have been unable to answer two basic questions in Medicine and still propose to take a course in advanced Medicine, I have nothing further to say. I rest my case.” They permitted me to rest my case and did not put up any fresh arguments. I was upset because of many things. There was nothing wrong with them wanting to do a course in advanced Medicine. But they should do it when they learned Medicine, not in the time allotted to another subject. They also had to know basic medicine before taking advanced courses. They should be doing courses because they loved that subject, not because it would help them go to USA or some other exotic destination. But if they loved the subject, they would have answered at least one of the two questions asked by me. They were spending their parents’ money, which some of them could afford, but perhaps some did not and still somehow managed because the parents believed that was essential for their wards’ education.