INSTITUTION THE OF ENGINEERS, SRL LANKA PROFESSIONAL REVIEW ~ MARCH 2007 - SECTION “B” — THE ENGINEEER IN SOCIETY Date: APRIL 8, 2007 Time Allowed: 3 Hours Before you start answering the question paper, read the instructions given below _—_—eoOoOoOoOO Answer FOUR questions only including the question in SECTION I, ‘The question in SECTION I carries 35 marks and each question in SECTION Il, 20 marks. Five marks are assigned for neatness and adhering to instructions, ‘The answers to SECTION I and Section II should be written in separate answer books. Ensure that you write your index number. clearly on both answer books. Answer books to SECTION I and SECTION Il will be collected separately. Write the question number/s to which you answer in the relevant box of the cover page of the answer book and at the left margin/s of answer book/sheets appropriately. Pay attention to legibility, grammar, spellings and organization and Presentations of facts when presenting your answersSECTION I Question 1 Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow: ~ ‘The reputation that the public accords to a particular university combines various factors. First, in most countries, there is a strong correlation between the reputation of an institution and its age. Second, people tend to equate quality with exclusivity of access. Third, universities with lavish resources are assumed to be better. Fourth, educational systems with small classes and plenty of human interaction are well regarded. These traditional elements of reputation challenge any attempt to renew universities. Institutions can do nothing about their age, except wait for time to pass. However, even young institutions will already have developed strengths, which contribute to their public image. Change can be tisky. Newish universities that have been unusually successful may find change particularly difficult Gaining a reputation as a good university is, rightly, a slow process. Fortunately, losing a reputation takes time too, so institutions should not be overly cautious about the risks of innovation on this count. Exclusivity, the second popular yardstick of quality, must be challenged head on. Increasing’ the volume of access to universities is driving the renewal of higher education in the developing world, Increasing the variety of access is still important in the industrialised countries. It is an imperative of academic renewal that more should not mean worse. This is where technology can help, for in most aspects of life people now assume that more and better technology means higher quality. Better technology usually means greater cost-effectiveness as well. This must be a central purpose of academic renewal. It is the most difficult challenge of renewal for universities to accept, for two main reasons. First, there has fee indeed been a good correlation between available resources and the rankings ~ of universities in quality assessment exercises. For example, a report by the UK’s Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE, 1995:34) on its first round of quality assessments of teaching showed that, with one notable exception, the number of excellent ratings that a university received broadly matched the funds available to it. The exception was the Opea University. Public expenditure per full-time-equivalent student at this institution is about the lowest in the UK system, yet it was one of only 13 of the 70 universities offering a comprehensive curriculum to zeceive excellent ratings ia more than half the subjects assessed. The significance of thisexception is chat the Open University has developed a technology-based teaching system. ‘The second factor that makes academics reluctant to give priority to cost effectiveness is the monumental function of universities. The noble ideals of the academy have always attracted the support of the wealthy: kings, queens, bishops, merchants and industrialists, who wanted their memories to live on in the names of campus buildings and professorial titles. In medieval times Europe built cathedrals, to the greater glory of God, whose dimensions and splendour went far beyond the simple requirements of worship. In the last century, most especially in America, the wealthy have built and equipped university campuses far beyond the basic needs of teaching and research. Who can blame university staff for enjoying the civilised environments of these well-endowed seats of learning and for being reluctant to exchange them for organizations that are less extravagantly over-engincered? Although some of the mega-universities also offer pleasant working conditions ¢o their staff, they pose a stark challenge to the popular quality criteria of age, exclusivity and wealth. These young institutions were set up with the express purpose of breaking the perceived link between quality of education and exclusivity of access. Their enrolments are huge. The fourth common yardstick of quality is the intensity of contact between teachers and students. Although some of the mega-universities give closer persorial tutorial attention to students than is available ont campus the sheer size of the mega-universities, as well as the term ‘distance leaning’, make it hard to communicate the reality. Students on campus may fear that their interaction with staff would be the fisst casualty of the development of technology-based teaching, The agenda for university renewal challenges popular concepts of academic quality. This is one reason for exploring carefully the contribution that technology can make to the implementation of that agenda. We define technology as the application of scientific and other organised knowledge to practical tasks by organisations consisting of people and machines. The significant elements of this definition are: its recognition that there is more to technology than applied science, Non-scientific knowledge (design, managerial, craft, tacit) is involved; the explicit assertion that technology is about practical tasks (as compared to science, which is mainly about understanding); technology always involves people (social systems) as well as hardware.