BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 150 of 142

Correct — C, 1863. Patna College was established on 9 January 1863, during the British Raj, and it is the oldest institution of higher education in Bihar. The date is not an isolated fact — it sits at a precise point in a chain the paper expects a Bihar candidate to know. Wood's Despatch of 1854 laid down the framework of graded, government-aided education for India and recommended the founding of universities; the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras followed in 1857; and Patna College was created in 1863 as an affiliating-era college of that new system, teaching to a distant university's degree. The building itself is older than the college by two centuries. Its administrative block was a Dutch factory and an opium storehouse in the seventeenth century, standing on Ashok Rajpath by the Ganga, and the college simply moved into it; the western wing was added in 1871, the eastern in 1880, and the portico and the present BA lecture theatre in 1882. Almost the whole of higher education in Patna grew out of this one institution — Patna Law College, the Engineering College that is now the National Institute of Technology Patna, Patna Science College and Vanijya Mahavidyalaya all trace their roots to it. In 1917 the college became a constituent college of the newly created Patna University, established on 1 October 1917 by an Act of the Imperial Legislative Council passed that September — the first university in Bihar and the seventh oldest in the subcontinent in the modern era. Because 1863 is on the option list, the None-of-the-above option has nothing to catch, and the two wrong years are simply near misses on either side of the real one.

• (a)1861 — Two years early, and the kind of date that feels right because it falls in the same decade of institution-building that followed Wood's Despatch and the founding of the first three universities in 1857. There is nothing in the college's own record to attach to 1861; its foundation day, marked every year, is 9 January 1863.
• (b)1865 — Two years late, and the mirror image of the same guess. It is also the more tempting error for a candidate who remembers only that Patna College was founded 'in the mid-1860s'. Nothing in the college's history begins in 1865; the earliest of its later additions, the western wing, dates from 1871.
• (d)None of the above — Correct only if the true year were absent from the list, and it is not — 1863 is printed as option (c). This is worth stating because the paper offers a None-of-the-above option on a large number of questions, and the discipline is the same each time: it earns the mark only when each of the other three can be shown to fail.

Modern higher education in Bihar begins with Patna College and radiates outward from it. The colonial sequence is worth holding whole, because BPSC returns to it. Wood's Despatch of 1854, often called the Magna Carta of English education in India, recommended a graded system from vernacular primary schools to affiliating universities, introduced grants-in-aid and created education departments in the provinces. The universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were set up in 1857 on the London model — examining and affiliating bodies rather than teaching ones. Colleges were then founded across the provinces to prepare students for those degrees, and Patna College, established on 9 January 1863, was Bihar's. For half a century its students took Calcutta degrees, until Bihar and Orissa, separated from Bengal in 1912, acquired their own university at Patna in 1917. The college's later offspring mark the widening of the curriculum: law, engineering, science and commerce each split off into an institution of its own, so that the history of Patna College is in effect the history of higher education in the state.

Founding-year questions are pure recall, and the only defence is to store the year with something that fixes it. Two anchors work well here. The first is the sequence: Wood's Despatch 1854, the three universities 1857, Patna College 1863, Bihar separated from Bengal 1912, Patna University 1917. Each date follows the previous one for a reason, so remembering the chain is easier than remembering any single link. The second is the number of the anniversary, which the college itself publicises — its 150th foundation day fell in January 2013, which places the founding in 1863 without any further effort. On the paper itself, note the shape of the option list: three years within four years of each other and a None-of-the-above. When distractors are clustered that tightly, the setter is testing exact recall and there is no way to reason to the answer, so a candidate who does not know it should weigh the one-third negative mark rather than guess between two adjacent years. Bihar-specific institutional dates of this kind — Patna College 1863, Patna University 1917, the creation of the province in 1912, Nalanda University's re-establishment in 2014 — are the cheapest marks on a BPSC paper for anyone who has made a list of them.

• Patna College was established on 9 January 1863 and is the oldest institution of higher education in Bihar
• Its administrative block was a Dutch factory and opium storehouse in the seventeenth century, long before the college existed; the western wing was added in 1871, the eastern in 1880, and the portico and BA lecture theatre in 1882
• Patna Law College, the Engineering College that is now NIT Patna, Patna Science College and Vanijya Mahavidyalaya all have their roots in Patna College
• Patna University was established on 1 October 1917 by an Act of the Imperial Legislative Council passed in September 1917 — the first university in Bihar and the seventh oldest in the subcontinent in the modern era
• The founding sits in the post-1854 sequence: Wood's Despatch 1854, the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras 1857, then affiliated colleges such as Patna College from 1863
• Patna College stands on Ashok Rajpath on the bank of the Ganga, beside the Patna University campus

• Guessing between adjacent years; the distractors here are 1861 and 1865, two years on either side, so approximate recall is worth nothing
• Confusing Patna College with Patna University — the college dates from 1863 and the university from 1 October 1917
• Assuming the building's age is the college's age; the administrative block was a seventeenth-century Dutch factory long before any college occupied it

BPSC asks for the bare year and clusters the distractors within two years of the truth, which makes the item a pure recall test and a good example of when not to guess on a paper with negative marking. UPSC never asks a single college's founding year; it asks the shape of the system instead — the chronological order of educational landmarks, or which official founded which colonial institution — so the same period has to be known as a policy sequence rather than as a set of dates.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Patna University was established in which year ?

  • (a)1863
  • (b)1912
  • (c)1917
  • (d)1947

  Answer(c) 1917 — on 1 October 1917, by an Act of the Imperial Legislative Council; 1863 is the founding of Patna College and 1912 the creation of the Bihar and Orissa province.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which document, often called the Magna Carta of English education in India, recommended the establishment of universities in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras ?

  • (a)Macaulay's Minute of 1835
  • (b)Wood's Despatch of 1854
  • (c)The Hunter Commission Report of 1882
  • (d)The Indian Universities Act of 1904

  Answer(b) Wood's Despatch of 1854 — the three universities followed in 1857, and affiliated colleges such as Patna College were created under that system from the 1860s.