agnelo menezes principal st xaviers college mumbai on how the rise of various boards has colleges concerned while granting admission and morethe government is increasingly focussing on skilling indias youth how crucial do you think is it for institutes to align themselves to this new focus appropriate skill sets are a fundamental aspect of employability hence the governments focus on skills has to be lauded and supported last year we introduced a threeyear bachelor of vocation al studies bvoc course funded by the university grants commission and monitored by the university of mumbai and the sector skill councils the skilloriented course offers specialisations in two spheres travel and tourism and software development students who do not wish to complete the threeyear courses have the option of moving out with a diploma after completing the first year and with an advanced diploma after the second year apart from this we try to give students from across departments a touch of reality for instance the microbiology department conducts water testing in slum areas any plan on introducing a research component at the institute students from india tend to go into an academic shock when they go abroad for higher studies due to their lack of exposure to hardcore research as most indian examination patterns are based on rotelearning enquirybased and experiential learning is ignored to address this concern we are planning to introduce a paper on research methodology at the firstyear level across disciplines universities in delhi have decided to wait for the actual scores of students from schools following the ib and other international curricula do you face any issue using predictive scores of students from international boards we do face a problem as far as the predictive scores of the ib institutes are concerned we have come across cases where the predicted scores are much higher than the real scores the government should come up with a strategy to counter such discrepancies