There are multiple levels of educational bodies in Riyadh which are either partnered or authorized by international universities and colleges. The educational bodies are blessing for those who are not willing to travel abroad and study, or those who are not eligible financially to do so. In fact, the activities held at university campuses cannot be held or provided by partner colleges in remote locations or partner colleges and institutes in different countries. Let’s focus on undergraduate programs, what happens is that these partner colleges and institutes hire teachers, at first who are not even eligible to teach bachelor level students, secondly they lack solid teaching techniques which a real professor from any university can offer, third, even if a student is nerdy, he/she will not gain much knowledge from the books which are provided or assigned to a specific module. From my personal experience, all the books which are provided in these institutes are either out of date or totally not related to the overall undergraduate program.

First year always passes easily because most of the modules are fundamentals with topics which students are already aware of from previous high school studies; second year becomes hectic due to large modules and very less knowledge on the topics being discussed, those students who can really survive the nervous breakdown are successful in passing the second year and those students who give up, usually leave the whole program saying that they cannot continue as it’s just waste of resources for them. Final year is the real game and main topic of this post, in final year only those students usually study who are really serious to get the program done and get the degree, but by the time they reach final year, things are harder than previous years, teachers might be there but they are not efficient enough for these students and their modules, somehow they cover the material assigned by the university but when it comes to the final year project, 99% of students don’t even know how to complete or even start that particular project which usually resides as 30 to 40% of your overall program grade, at this stage students are in great stress, they try their best to do things at their best but unfortunately no one succeeds this attempt because all these years they did not get that knowledge which is required to execute last year’s project, I’ll give you an example of well-known university here in Riyadh, final year students got a small project of developing a dynamic website and they are not studying software engineering!

Now you did not teach these students any of the web development languages whole 3 years and at the end you hire some guy who is a web developer and he teaches them the basics in 1 month and tell the university that you completed your part now it’s up to the students how they proceed. Holy Lord. Do you think students can really complete or even make that web development project? This is the great deficient in teaching techniques of regional educational bodies since many years, until today this problem is bold and administration is not bothered at all, after all it’s just business for them right? No libraries, no labs, no proper training and you expect good grades, universities keep giving authorization and partnerships to institutes because they also look at the profit part, it seems like everything is revolving only around money these days.