New Delhi: The University Grants Commission (UGC) announced that students will now be able to pursue two full-time academic programmes in physical mode. The commission has put together a set of guidelines regarding the same, which has been put up on the official website of UGC today. The guidelines will apply to all the programmes available across the country.
Students can either choose a combination of a diploma programme or 2 bachelor’s programmes, or two master’s programmes. Following the new guidelines, students will be able to pursue two-degree programmes across domains such as sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities, and a wide variety of disciplines.
Adopting these guidelines is optional for universities and can be implemented only after the approval of the universities’ statutory bodies. The eligibility criteria for each of the programmes will remain unchanged and admissions will be conducted based on the existing UGC, university norms.
They can join a programme in a physical mode in a university, along with another programme in an online mode. The third choice for students is that they can pursue 2 online degrees simultaneously. Since all academic programmes have minimum attendance requirements for students to be able to take the exams, universities will have to devise the attendance criteria for these courses.
“UGC does not mandate any attendance requirements and these are the policies of the universities,” UGC Chairperson M Jagadesh Kumar said. “With the rapid increase in demand for high-quality education and the limitation of only enrolling about 3 per cent of students on physical campuses, there have been many developments in the fields of open and distance learning, as well as online education. Many universities are now offering both offline and online programmes,” Kumar added.