Failure is painful and costly for students, teachers and the universities as well
University life is different from all others like school, college. It is the journey of hardship and difficulties. Besides being the journey of hardship and difficulties, it has fun, and joy too. It’s the journey of self-reliability, commitment, consistency and perseverance. In that journey one works by himself, like making notes, assignment, presentation, quizzes and speech. It means that students pass into different critical situations.
University Life is committed to student’s growth and success in everything students do. It provides services and resources to help students succeed and offers activities that instill a sense of belonging and pride.
But have you ever thought why do majority of students fail in our universities or higher institutions? Why a number of students sit at home without any job or work? Even some M.Phil. PhD scholars are among them. There are some factors which lead to this fatal failure. Actually enormous number of students think degree as certificate of excellence or superiority – this is one of the great cause of our failure. By chasing degrees and work for degrees, we lose excellences, skills, and importance of knowledge, and due to frequent fluctuations in dreams and goals, we don’t stay on right way. We change our direction and this is another great misstep in university life.
Failure is painful and costly for students, teachers and the universities as well. Recent studies have mentioned multiple factors that contribute to student failure. They include personal factors such as self-confidence, study habits and attitudes; life circumstances such as health, employment and family responsibilities; and institutional factors such as policies, procedures and the curriculum.
Universities shouldn’t make students completely responsible for removing the obstacles in their path to success. Universities need to work with students to assist them face the tide of failure. The universities’ role has remained strict towards students. Despite being simple, failure is rarely mentioned to universities and is mostly attributed to students’ laziness or not caring. But study explores that students were often deeply disappointed about failing a subject. Many students have been reported feeling exhausted showing their lack of understanding of expectations. Students have identified with heavy work burdens outside university such as physical or mental health problems and financial strain as the main factors in their failure.
Once a student said, “The more units I fail the more I have to pay […] Sometimes I am so overwhelmed about what I have to do and what to do if I fail. I just cry in the middle of the night until I fall asleep.”
Some other factors beyond their control were family matters, poor curriculum or assessment design, lack of support from teaching staff and inflexible university rules. If universities want they can control failure rate at some extent, but the response given by university to the students considered as last. Universities should take their responsibility and must help the retard students, and provide them with a suitable environment and advance learning methods. Universities can offer positive suggestions, helping out students to mobilize their own resilience strategies through gaining perspective, addressing health issues and seeking social and academic support. Universities have a responsibility to help students who have failed. The way students make sense of, and recover from, their experiences will influence their likelihood of persisting, adapting and succeeding.
Ashfaque Ali Zardari
Student of English Literature and Linguistics
Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University Nawabshah Sindh
