Am I a qualified PhD if I paid someone else to write my thesis?

HEC Sindh doesn't care that hardly any students from universities outside Karachi qualify for scholarships every year.

If you were to imagine a PhD student, what would you think? Well-educated? Well-versed in the language of instruction? Well-spoken? Well-read? Well, some problems become worse than you initially expect them to be. To detect this problem, you don’t have to look any further than at the present lot of PhD degree holders in most of the private and public universities in Pakistan.

PhD holding faculties exists in several universities, in big and small cities, where the incumbents can hardly even construct one correct sentence in English. The Higher Education Commission (HEC) seems to be emphasising on inducting raw MS and PhD degree holders simply because they have undergone 18 or more years of education on paper. It’s appalling to note that some of the new entrants to the PhD club do not even know what their theses are about.

Why?

All their dissertations and so-called articles had been plagiarised from websites or written by ghost writers (with A Level certification at the most) and printed in journals which are hardly ever read by anyone.

There are online sites in large cities that charge between $1,000 to $1,500 for providing theses written by hired content writers who are experts in composing, via copying and pasting, material off Google and elsewhere.

The matter is made worse by certain pseudo journals that charge from $100 to $200 for publishing any plagiarised article on any subject, which is then submitted to a varsity head by the plagiarist teacher as an original piece of work to comply with HEC requirement. Online mail of faculty personnel is flooded with messages from unknown universities soliciting articles for their journals on payment of a processing fee.

The leaders fleecing raw and gullible MS and PhD degree holders in this scam are mostly from out-of-the way places, such as, University of Azores Island in Portugal, University of Cape Verde (erstwhile Portuguese colony near Senegal), or the University of Burkina Faso (once the poorest country in the world, according to United Nation statistics) and so on. Much like the Axact fiasco in Pakistan.

The spill-over effect, as a result of the above facts, has been disastrous for imparting knowledge to current students; most of the present lot of charlatans masquerading as professors never bother to improve their lectures or properly check the work of their pupils. Their only concern is to look for opportunities that will add to their perks and benefits in the system. The students soon realise this and adopt an indifferent attitude towards their studies. Some choose to engross themselves in their smart phones during classes. Seldom will anyone find them in a library reading a classic or even looking at a map.

Their lack of reading reflects in their lack of progress when it comes to obtaining knowledge. After interviewing a total of 50 second year BS students recently, it was concluded that not a single one knew where the Suez Canal was located. An applicant for a lecturer’s position with a first class MA degree in English from a university in interior Sindh had neither read nor heard of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot”, one of the most popular poems in the English language.

Regrettably, those who are in charge of improving the education system are least concerned, because they are the ones who have effectively politicised the education departments and ministries, ensuring that only their favourites go abroad on scholarships, regardless of merit. Even the American sponsors of various scholarships were shocked at the appalling standard of these so-called scholars, mostly recommended by politicians in power.

Hence, these sponsors have now made it compulsory for all prospective applicants to qualify in a GRE test before their applications can be processed. This has effectively cut down the number of incompetent applicants recommended by plutocrats and those that to manage to qualify are from accredited institutions such as LUMS or IBA, where teaching standards are much higher.

Yet, the Sindh chapter of the HEC is least bothered that hardly a single student from universities outside Karachi can qualify for the Fulbright Scholarships and has no qualms over the fact that several scholarships for Sindh remain unused by default every year.

On the other hand, we continue railing and lamenting over the general low standard of education in Pakistan without looking into the actual roots of the problem – they originate at the teacher level, whether high-school or above. How can one expect teachers in Pakistan, who are not well read themselves and show no hope of a promising future, to serve as role models for their students?

Have you noticed that most of these degrees are from countries where English is neither spoken nor understood? When a Pakistani with a doctoral degree from Latvia (of erstwhile USSR) was asked what language the classes he attended were taught in, he specified they were in Russian. What a genius. He should be asked to conduct his classes in Latvian or Russian rather than in Urdu, which he studied only during his days at a local high-school in Karachi.

In a recent article in DAWN, Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, the great physicist and author of Islam and Science had this to say about the abundance of mostly incompetent PhD’s in our universities:

“Our universities need even more drastic reform. Desperate to show evidence of improvement, government organisations such as the Higher Education Commission and Pakistan Council for Science and Technology have institutionalised a reward system that has led to armies of cargo PhDs — with wooden pieces sticking out of their heads — as well as mountains of cargo publications. Serious de-weeding is needed else academic fakes will crowd out the few genuine academic scientists around.”

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