Sunday, June 21, 2009

Higher Ed links


These links come to us via the University World News.

  1. Pervez Hoodbhoy on recent developments in Pakistan: How Greed Ruins Academia:

    Each professor gets paid a few hundred thousand rupees (a few thousand dollars) per PhD produced, with a current maximum of 10 students per supervisor at the university.

  2. Simon Schwartzman: Student Quotas in Brazil: The Policy Debate

  3. In Turkey, 1.3 million students take the national entrance exam.

1 Comments:

  1. Pratik Ray said...

    One of my labmates is from Turkey, and he studied from METU, Ankara. Sometime back we had an interesting discussion about entrance exams. 3 key points of difference emerged -

    1. Unlike IIT-JEE or even some of the state JEEs, almost no question in the Turkish entrance exams carries more than 2% (maybe the IIT-JEE pattern has changed these days? I dont know; I am referring to 1999-2000 era)

    2. Unlike IIT-JEE, where very few students end up crossing 50% mark (< 1-1.5% at an estimate pre-2000), a fair number of students end up crossing 50% in the Turkish entrance. In fact the 50% limit for IIT is more like the 75-80% in the Turkish entrance exam as a guesstimate. In other words, the level of the question paper is not as hard.

    3. Unlike India where there are multiple entrance exam, as far as i recall him saying, Turkey has a single large exam.

    Another point of interest - both exams spawn coaching institutions, and he had in fact taken an year off to prepare for the entrance.

    Of course, keep in mind, I have been out of sync with the JEE since I started undergrad in 2000, and it has been the same with him with their entrance exam