Students Can Now Pursue PhD After Completing 4-year Graduation, No Published Research Papers Required: UGC

The University Grants Commission (UGC) is set to permit undergraduate students to join PhD programmes directly after completing a four-year degree. Students will now be able to get themselves enrolled in a doctoral programme following a four-year bachelor’s degree course with a minimum of 75 per cent marks in aggregate or its equivalent grade. Those with a one-year master’s degree are also eligible after finishing a four-year bachelor’s course.

The UGC is presently drafting the regulation in this regard. It will likely be announced next week, reported a leading news daily. The commission maintained that PhD programmes will not be offered through online mode. Presently, a master’s degree is compulsory to seek admission in a PhD programme. Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) can also admit students, who qualify for scholarships in UGC- NET, UGC-CSIR NET, GATE or CEED and other similar national-level tests, based on their performance in interviews

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The UGC, in another significant step has eliminated the compulsory publication of a research paper prior to thesis submission. UGC conducted a study including 2,573 research scholars from a prestigious central university and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). The study concluded that mandatory publication has decreased the quality of Scopus-indexed journals in 75 per cent of the central varsity.

On the other hand, IIT, which is not under UGC’s control, published most of the research papers in quality journals. The UGC conducted this study over a period of three years (2017-2019). “In the university, because of the mandatory condition to publish a paper before PhD thesis submission, during the three-year period, nearly 75% of students are forced to publish in journals which are not Scopus indexed journals,” states UGC’s analysis.

The study showed that on average, approximately 79 per cent of IIT students published Scopus-indexed journals and 73.4 per cent of them published more than one journal paper. Whereas, in the central university roughly 25.2 per cent of students published Scopus-indexed journals and about 19 per cent published more than one journal paper. Scopus index is the largest abstraction and citation database for peer-reviewed literature.

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