UGC allows students to pursue two full-time academic programmes simultaneously

The University Grants Commission (UGC) on Tuesday announced that students will now be able to pursue two full-time academic programmes in physical mode.

The commission has put together a set of guidelines regarding the same, which will be put up on the official website of UGC today.

Earlier, the UGC regulations did not allow students to pursue two full-time programmes and they could only pursue one full-time degree along with online/short-term/diploma courses.

The guidelines will apply to all the programmes available across the country. Students can either choose a combination of a diploma programme and an undergraduate (UG) degree, two master's programmes, or two bachelor's programmes.

If a student is eligible to pursue a postgraduate (UG) degree and also wants to enrol in a bachelor's degree in a different domain, he/she will be able to pursue a UG and PG degree simultaneously. The class timing for both the programmes must not clash.

Following the new guidelines, students will be able to pursue two degree programmes across domains such as sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities, and a wide variety of disciplines.

Adopting these guidelines is optional for universities and can be implemented only after the approval of the universities' statutory bodies. The eligibility criteria for each of the programmes will remain unchanged and admissions will be conducted based on the existing UGC, university norms.

The move allows a student to not just enrol in two physical programmes simultaneously, but also pursue two academic programmes, one in full-time physical mode, and another in open and distance learning mode.

They can also join a programme in a physical mode in a university, along with another programme in an online mode. The third choice for students is that they can pursue two online degrees simultaneously.

Since all academic programmes have minimum attendance requirements for students to be able to take the exams, universities will have to devise the attendance criteria for these courses. "UGC does not mandate any attendance requirements and these are the policies of the universities," Kumar added.