Credit System

Although the reason behind the credit system is quite clear and now a days almost all the universities follow this system but I was surprised to know that there are quite a large number of academicians and authorities who don’t know the real meaning of this system, not to talk of students. There are institutions who have adopted this system and have assigned a number of credits to all the subjects they offer. But when it comes to marks, they don’t differentiate between 2 credit subject and 4 credit subject, all are treated same. These institutions use the credit information of the subject only for the time it needs for the class.
With apologizes from all those who know and have grown up with credit system, I would like to through little light on this system. Credit system has actually been designed to increase the affect of core subjects and to decrease the influence of non core subjects on aggregate %age of the semester. As an example, suppose in a certain semester of BE/BCA course, five subjects namely “operating system”, “Networking”, “Database management system”, “Environmental Science” and “English” are offered. First three subjects, being core subjects of the said course are assigned 4 credits each and environmental science and English are assigned 2 credits each. Exams are held from 100 marks in each subject. Suppose Mr. Haseeb scores 80, 80, 80, 40, 40 respectively and Mr. Vinod scores 80, 40, 40, 80, 80 respectively. Although both of them scored 320/500 (i.e. 64%) but this is not what the credit system is all about. Unfortunately some of the institutions calculate in this way which is wrong. Actually score of each subject is multiplied by the number of credits assigned to it , this way Haseeb’s overall score will be [(80* 4) + (80* 4) + (80* 4) + (40* 2) + (40 * 2)] / [(100 * 4) + (100 * 4) +(100 * 4) + (100 * 2) + (100 * 2)] which is 1120/1600 (i.e. 70 %) and Vinod’s score will be 960 / 1600 (i.e. 60 %). So the student who has performed better in his core subjects gets better results.