.::Song Of The Little Road::.

I shared nanopolitan's parody piece Bombshell from IIT-K: Faculty Recruitment through JEE on Facebook, which led to the following response:

Q. How do you decrease the number of people below poverty line?

A. Simple, decrease the amount below which we call somebody poor.

Q. How do make everyone get into IIT?

A. Simple, ...

Its a clear political agenda where they found a completely wrong solution to a problem. An institute taking a stance in what it believes to be right is nothing to be parodied about and why would you? Are we really all that bored of the poverty line jokes on the government?

I just want to jot down some of my more serious thoughts on this.

1. I have a problem with the idea of a single exam and its numerical results playing so much part in the aspirations of a student. The notion, that the JEE is sacrosanct and that its results can actually tell if a person is intelligent enough or not, is ridiculous. I know many people will cry otherwise. (I have no biases for or against the JEE. I never gave the exam, nor am I greatly familiar with its format.) This is the reason why SAT and GRE are not factored in unilaterally in the admissions process of US universities.

2. The results of a single exam cannot be a better indicator than a result that factors in a student's efforts over a two-year pre-college program. If the method of incorporating grade 12 results is incorrect, biased or political, it should be corrected. But, the idea is correct in principle.

3. With the kind of competition, the winners are not very different from the people who almost made it. If you were to administer the JEE twice to the same bunch of students, there would be major shuffle at the top ranks. It would be better to bring in some more factors to have a holistic admissions procedure similar to US universities.

4. Years of preparation lead to freshmen being burnt-out when they enter the IITs. A question on Quora comparing students from MIT and IITs had answers which basically said that there isn't much difference intellectually; it's just that MIT students are more driven and passionate. See answers to Are IIT students smarter than MIT students? Success and happiness in the real world depends on personal qualities including but certainly not limited to intellect.

5. The fact that it is a decision based on numbers makes people believe that it has to be correct. This leads to disasters. See answers to the question How does it feel like to fail IIT JEE?.

6. It seems to me that the reason for such a furore over the exam is that people know that IITs are good only because they have an intensive admissions procedure and admit the very best students. This reduces the burden of education on the professors considerably. With the due disclaimer before generalizing and apologies to the few fabulous professors I have known at IIT Bombay, professors here do not seem to do as great a job as they are capable of. I suspect this is because it is an easier task to teach a class whose selectivity surpasses that of even the best universities in the developed world, and therefore the effort that makes great teachers is not put in. I am not sure if this is true at other IITs as well.

7. Simply put, out of the two aspects of rigor and possibility that education should impart, IITs focus only on the the former. This perspective spills over into the JEE as well.

A list of MTech (CSE) alumni from IIT Bombay who have pursued a PhD elsewhere. (There are many alumni of the programme who have liked the research atmosphere at IIT Bombay and continued with a PhD here.) This list is far from exhaustive, and has been written for incoming graduate students to have an idea of academic career prospects after IIT Bombay.

Recently I came across a paper quantifying success in the intangible process of mentorship in computer science research. The work was done around 2004 at IISc by Bharath Kumar M. and Y. N. Srikant and published in Proceedings of the Fifth SIAM International Conference on Data Mining. [Technical Report] [ICDM Paper]

Not surprisingly, the paper states that "there is a recognizable deviation between the rankings of the most successful researchers and the best nurturers, which although is obvious from a social perspective has not been statistically demonstrated."

Interestingly, though the work mentions quite a few Indian nurturers, almost none of them have consistently resided and researched in India.

Every couple of months, I must suffer the (somewhat amusing) trauma of an email like this one in my inbox:


hello sir,
           hope u r fine....i m also....my name is Aaa bbb
and  I m doing my m.tech from computer science  from aaaa kkkkk
engineering college, its my 2nd sem.....i m not able to decide my
project,actually i have no interest in coding and so i dont want such
project in which coding is required...so please can u suggest me any
project.....need ur help please


Though I generally try hard not to judge people, there are any number of reasons why an email like the one above is wrong. A masters student in CS with no interest in coding?! Further, since the person is doing a masters and has no interest in coding, (s)he may end up teaching in one of our many "educational" institutions, which depresses me no end.


I cannot even begin to imagine the pain (multiplied many times over) that faculty at IITs must suffer handling such emails almost everyday. See this to know what I am talking about.