Managing Academic Input/Output ‘Ratios and The Students’ Satisfaction

Equity the ory holds that when an individual or a party involved in certain exchange or deal is concerned that the terms of their relationships remains fair and that, a manifest dissatisfaction or similar other behaviour are responses to the felt unfairness and injustice in their 'input/output-ratios', rather than relative-depn"vation. Daniels (1912) and Walster et. al (1918) have found the theory useful in understanding intimate as well as non-intimate social relations. Based on assumptions of the above equity-theory, the behaviour of undergraduate students in science and arts of the Delhi University were studied. Analyses reveal that at the initial stage of colleges the Arts-boys are more satisfied at the beginning of the colleges while the Science-boys show more satisfaction at their higher grades of education, and in general girls show more academic satisfaction than the boys. At the beginning, they seem to perceive that the justice exists with them in terms of academic-inputs and output-ratios. But as they move up to the higher grades of formal education their such feelings appear to be disappearing however, and they seem to be prone to perceive that a little more justice is needed for their inputs in education like money, time, efforts, and parental supports etc, and quite a few percentage of them perhaps, feel that they are rather, 'under-benefited' in terms of the different educational outputs, compared to their academic input-ratios. The study explores and finds some new and interesting socio psychological dimensions of social and Distn" butive-Justice in academic satisfaction.