Objectives: The "Quality First" Week, conducted at the start of academic semester, engages students, faculty, and staff to enhance student discipline, teacher dedication, and campus behavior. Its key goals are to promote knowledge about quality and professional standards, instill values, enhance efficiency, establish discipline on campus, and enforce a zero-tolerance policy for student indiscipline and rule violations
Context: Professional colleges aim to maintain quality and standards. Students are expected to maintain punctuality, discipline, politeness, and dignity. Faculty and staff are expected to maintain punctuality, interact politely, keep records orderly, and fulfill academic duties.
Key Challenges: Challenges include addressing student indiscipline, violations of dress code and conduct, instilling good habits and practices among students, and raising awareness about quality requirements and standards among both students and faculty/staff.
The Practice: The ‘Quality First’ Week is observed at the beginning of academic semester, involving a committee of senior faculty members. This committee, in coordination with the "Academic Quality Advisor," formulates an action plan for the week. The observance includes wide publicity through banners, notice boards, messages, and circulars,
Key Issues:
Discipline: Faculty squads enforce campus discipline regarding dress code, mobile phone use, and ID card compliance, with violations resulting in warnings, counseling, and advice for the students involved.
Professional Dignity & Behavior: HODs/Senior faculty visit classes to highlight the requirements of professional behavior and emphasize the significance of maintaining dignity on the campus.
Rules and Regulations: Banners spread awareness about rules and regulations, and students are cautioned, advised, and informed to follow them.
Teaching – Learning Process: Faculty receives guidance in department and institution-level meetings, focusing on the teaching-learning process and quality maintenance.
In the Context of Indian Higher Education: ‘Quality First’ Week stands out in Indian higher education as it uniquely centers on quality, engaging all stakeholders to achieve overall quality improvement.
Constraints/Limitations Faced: Stakeholders tend to show slackness in enforcing quality measures after the completion of the week. Another limitation is the lower percentage of students attending college at the beginning of the semester.
Evidence of Success:
Annual "Industrial Summit"
The institution's Training and Placement Cell
Challenges faced include time constraints
‘Quality First’ Week has been instrumental in ensuring quality in all aspects of the institution's functioning, resulting in improved student discipline, faculty record-keeping, and adherence to rules and regulations.
Improvement in Discipline: Student discipline has significantly improved, with fewer cases of rule violations and code of conduct breaches over the last five years.
Teacher-Related: Faculty members have grown accustomed to maintaining quality records, updating documents, and files.
Campus Initiatives: Maintaining entry and exit rules has improved faculty punctuality and reduced unnecessary departures from the campus during working hours.
Awareness Creation: Student awareness has created a well-behaved, disciplined campus with minimal rule violations.
