Saturday, March 17, 2007

JEE blues


The notoriously brutal -- and also non-standardized and noisy -- Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) is just a few weeks away. Now that the board exams are over, preparing for the JEE becomes the chief -- only ? -- occupation for hundreds of thousands of hapless aspirants with hyper-competitive parents.

What with numerous distractions during daytime, coaching class tutors feel students get little time for a lengthy, uninterrupted session of study.

Many of them, therefore, prefer to call them in at night for some long and intensive sessions. Praveen Tyagi, who runs the IITian's Pace coaching centre, is among those who prefers this method. [...] The institute conducts five to seven [classes] in a month which run from 9 pm to 7 am with breaks every three hours.

Sometimes, if a student starts to doze off, he either gets a light whack from his neighbour, or has some water sprinkled over him. [Source].

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Here's something that made the news last year. And here's something from 2003 [with bold emphasis added]:

The heavy demand for IIT admissions has spawned a number of institutes and tutorials offering coaching for the JEE. One preparatory school, the Ramiah Institute in Hyderabad, which claims an extraordinarily high rate of success in sending students to the IITs, has gone so far as to conduct an entrance exam for students to gain admission into its own training course! An IIT hopeful who attends the year-long preparatory course at the Ramiah Institute goes through a punishing process. A typical day at the Institute is reputed to begin at 4.30 a.m. and go on till 8 a.m., when the students leave for regular school. After school, students undergoing the course need to spend long hours completing the homework assigned by the Ramiah Institute.

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On a lighter note -- oh, maybe not! -- Cosmic Voices (who would make an excellent Minister for Wars, Takeovers and Other External Affairs -- for Andhra Pradesh!) has a plan for how Andhra can annex IIT-M in exchange for a few TMCFT of Krishna water.

4 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    The funny thing is -- dunno what comes over the same people once they do join IIT ... life's a roller coaster with all fun and no work for many!

  2. Cosmic Voices said...

    Actually there are coaching classes for the Ramiah entrance, where kids enroll from eighth class. This was long time back. I don't know if there is any upward revision to fifth class.

    One friend of my father, with the noblest of intentions, took me to one such coaching class. It was during the summer holidays of ninth standard. He very casually asked me to complete the whole tenth standard maths syllabus of ISCE, CBSE and the state boards before the school re-opened. I made such a vanishing act that would put harry houdini to shame. I wonder how many kids like me got so scared and never ever even thought of giving the JEE a shot.

    In any case, I don't think these coaching classes trigger the real interest in students. If they did, why would we have such a crunch in pure sciences with so many who are brilliant in Maths, Physics and Chemistry.

  3. Vivek Kumar said...

    The Bansal Classes in Kota has had an entrance exam to join the coaching classes for JEE *at least* since 1996.

  4. Pratik Ray said...

    Entrance exam for entrance to Ramiah coaching classes!!
    Wow! Lets not kill the IIT JEE. See, it has the beginnings of a 'food chain" type of look.

    coaching class for entering a coaching class for entering a coaching class ... (at last) for enetering Ramaiah coaching for making it to IIT.
    :-)