Poor results of engineers’ exam!

After 30 months of exercises in the National Assembly and House of Representatives, a bill to amend the Nepal Engineering Council Act, 1999 get passed last year. The bill mentions that ‘to become an engineer, after completing graduation, one should get a license and for that one requires to pass the exam.’ Bringing the bill into implementation with the purpose of maintaining the standard in the profession, the 23 years old council conducted test exam of the engineers for first time in the country in last March. Engineers are supposed to play a key role in the development and construction of the physical infrastructure of the country. The result of the first exam was too poor with 71.5 percent of the examinees having failed. In that exam a total of 1981 students had appeared and only 565 were declared successful. In that exam 378 students from various international universities including from India had appeared and among them only 58 succeeded. The second exam conducted in June produced almost similar result with passing of 32.46% of total examinees. The total number of examinees are 2468 and only 801 among them were declared successful. In the second exam a total of 404 foreign university pass outs appeared and 41 were successful. The results show that the exams for license conducted by council is too tough that gives clearance to only excellent students, who are competent to work as an engineers. This means the quality of education does not match with the council’s yardstick. That means the universities operated in Nepal and engineering colleges affiliated need serious reforms. It requires to seriously diagnose the actual cause of low rate of passing the council exam. The Government also should conduct studies to find out the fault and fix at the earliest. It is also important to note if the pass outs from foreign universities and colleges need to go through any exam to get an engineer’s job abroad. If that is not necessary, Nepali students graduated as engineers from foreign universities may not get chance to get an engineer’s job in their homeland. Moreover, the Government authorities may be suggested to review the council’s role and the quality of education provided by the universities and colleges. Since, the country must get the good result from investment in the education sector for building, the policy makers also need to examine the entire engineering education systems and the authority of the council.