Apr 15, 2007 10:55 PM
8963 Views
I am an MBA student of ICFAI distance education since 2004. As I did my BSc with Bharathiar University, I had a prior experience of how a university would function, how you have to follow up for every single event. Can you believe I never got an intimation for the project viva-voce for which I had paid and later had to call up the Bharathiar university only to know that it was already over.?
Well, from such a background, stepping into ICFAI was like a reception with red carpet. Your admission is done in minutes, your course material is handed over to you then and there, you get responses within 24 hours whenever your write to their Students Service Department, and you get financial assistance to pay your fee.! They have examinations every quarter so you can plan which subjects to write and how to stay ahead.! You can do all your transactions online, check your status, pay your exam fee, follow up missing courier, what not? All that I had imagined should be provided by a distance education was there.! Including flexibility and credible customer service.!
The first set of exam that you take, I am sure every one would definitely score 70%+. They are easy and motivate you to prepare well for your upcoming exams. By this time, 3 months would have passed. The second set of exams are a little tough, but you can scrape through but you feel that you had not prepared well. 6 months gone. Third set of exams are tough to clear - You may have to write all the subjects twice. By that time, 8 months or 1 year have passed and you have paid your entire tuition fees. Now, it is a trap - you can't step out because you have paid the fees, you can't keep going because the subjects are tough and tougher.
As they rightly claim, a student has to spare at least 2 hours a day to prepare thoroughly for the exams. But the question papers are prepared in such a way that you can never pass them easily unless you remember all the pages and all the contents word by word.! They pull out one sentence from one of the 1200 pages that you would have read and twist the question such that even if you know the answer you are confused and struggle to answer. The objective section containing 30 questions need to be answered in 30 minutes.! You get 1 minute to recall the page where you have read that sentence, recollect accurately what it meant, understand the question in the right sense, browse through all the answers given and understand them clearly, choose your answer.! Close to impossible.!
I have never been poor in my academics but I struggle to pass a single subject in a single attempt. Even if I pass, there is always the other subject which pulls you down and you are forced to write the same subject again. I had lost my writing habits due to the extensive computer usage and although I know the answers, my hand simply wouldn't cooperate.!
There are no marks given to your right steps.! Your answer for a problem has to be correct to the number. Well, you will never know this and you have to simply accept whatever marks that the evaluators give you because there is no option to re-evaluate. You can either get the suggested answers and compare them with what you had written(pay Rs. 100), you can ensure that they have totalled your marks right(retotalling - which I think even kids would do right - no doubt their educated and scholarly evaluators would do wrong - you pay Rs. 100), you can get a comprehensive feedback for Rs. 400 - again suggesting what you could have done right but with no relation to your answer sheet and you can never know how many marks were given to every answer of yours. Absolutely no transparency.!
This sometimes lets me wonder if they are doing all these just for the sake of running business and not let any students clear MBA. In the examination centers in Bangalore, I am in the second stage and I am the only one writing my subject.! I do see some students who are at the third stage and I always think of asking them when they joined and how they cleared their second stage.!
The 24-hour e-mail response and the customer service is no more existing now. I have not received any responses since Sep 2006 for a number of e-mails that I sent to ssd@icfai.org. When I called them up, they said because of the overwhelming number of students, it is not possible to answer all the e-mails. Well, even the e-mails where you are asking a doubt in the subject?
What happened to ICFAI?
