Links

1. Heidi Ledford in Nature News: We dislike being alone with our thoughts. "Many people would rather endure physical pain than suffer their own wandering cogitations."

   Here's my cynical take: A fun study makes bold claims in psychology, and gets published in Science. How long will it survive before it gets retracted?

2. Patricia Fara in Nature: Women in science: A temporary liberation:

   The First World War ushered women into laboratories and factories. In Britain, it may have won them the vote, argues Patricia Fara, but not the battle for equality.

3. Casey Miller and Keivan Stassun in Nature: A Test that Fails.

   Universities in the United States rely too heavily on the graduate record examinations (GRE) — a standardized test introduced in 1949 that is an admissions requirement for most US graduate schools. This practice is poor at selecting the most capable students and severely restricts the flow of women and minorities into the sciences.

   We are not the only ones to reach this conclusion. [...]

Links

1. Now that the UGC has issued guidelines for foreign universities to set up shop in India on their own (i.e., not necessarily with an Indian partner), a reality check.

2. Japan debates reforms in its system of entrance exams. [Previous posts on Examination Hell: 1, 2].

3. 25 nerdy jokes from many fields. Example: "There are 10 types of people in this world. Those that know binary, and those that don’t."

Links

1. Ram Guha on intellectual dadagiri:

   By tradition and temperament, Indians are extremely deferential to those older, richer, and more powerful than themselves.

   This is so even in the realms of science and scholarship. Once an intellectual has achieved a certain status, he uses it to mark out a clear hierarchy between himself and those younger or less well known. [...]

   Accustomed to displays of loyalty and servility, India’s most distinguished intellectuals often fall prey to self-love. When CV Raman left the Indian Institute of Science to start a new research centre, he named it after himself.

   Thirty years later, a distinguished agricultural scientist did exactly the same thing. India’s most celebrated chemist presided over the naming of a scientific centre and even of a road junction named after him. India’s two most famous economists have allowed the naming of fellowships and prizes, and even professorships, after themselves.

   Guha does talk about a couple of truly exemplary leaders: Prof. Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS, and Prof. V.K.R.V. Rao at the Delhi School of Economics.

2. Anubhuti Vishnoi in The Financial Express: For the new IITs, IIM faculty, the question: what will our spouses do?

3. Seema Singh at The First Post: How IIT-JEE is becoming the stronghold of CBSE, urban students.

4. Akshaya Mukul in ToI: Now, collegium of scholars to select higher education institute's chief:

   To deal with this chronic problem, the HRD ministry has decided to establish a collegium of scholars that would prepare a directory of academics for leadership positions like vice-chancellors or heads of institutions of central educational institutions. There are more than 100 autonomous educational institutions under the HRD ministry. Earlier, the provision of having a collegium was part of the National Commission for Higher Education & Research Bill. But since it looks improbable that any of the HRD bill would get Parliament's nod, the ministry had decided to take the executive route.

Links

1. Ashok Thakur, Secretary to the Government, Ministry of Human Resource Development: Despite teething troubles, new engineering admission process represents much-needed reforms.

   First, let's remember what the previous system meant for students and parents. At a personal level, my first realisation of the devaluation of school education came more than a decade ago when my son asked me if he could stop attending school classes and instead concentrate on coaching classes for the IIT-JEE exam.

2. Seema Singh: How we forgot Bhargava vs Padmanaban in the Bhagwati vs Sen spat:

   ... it could have ... benefited one and all if we had a “scientific” debate on the subject by some senior scientists. How about the most respectable pro-GM scientist G Padmanaban, professor emeritus and former director of IISc pitched against one of the founding fathers of biotechnology in India, Pushpa M Bhargava who is now one of the most ardent critics of the use of GM technology for solving some agri issues. Incidentally, the American journal Science organized a debate between the two a few months ago, conducted by editor Bruce Alberts. Alas, such debates don’t carry much charm for mainstream Indian media, both newspapers and magazines.

3. Ezra Klein on sexism in high places: Funny how gender never came up during Bernanke’s nomination. Or Greenspan’s. Or Volcker’s.

   See also Krugman's op-ed: Sex, Money, Gravitas.

4. Prof. Sukant Khurana: A Personal Tribute to Prof. Obaid Siddiqi.

5. MIT releases the report on Aaron Swartz case. See >The Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed for a summary of its contents, and links to reactions.

Links: Indian Higher Ed

1. The biggest news of the week: the Supreme Court scrapped NEET, the medical entrance examinations for UG and PG admissions. In doing so, it appears to be going against its own earlier views. See also Arun Mohan Sukumar's strong critique of the verdict: A hatchet job, NEETly done.

   Here's another relevant piece of info pointed out by Ramya Kannan in The Hindu:

   Tamil Nadu was among the first few States to oppose the conduct of NEET. Subsequently, as the Central Institutes, AIIMS and PGI, stayed out of NEET, conducting their own entrance examinations and admitting students, the chorus of dissent against NEET grew more vociferous.

   Soon, the National Board of Examinations, which awards the DNB qualification, also conducted its own examinations.

   In effect, then, it turned out that what was not good enough for the Central Institutes was considered good enough for the States. Naturally, the States objected; slowly, their voices grew louder. A number of cases were filed across the country by medical institutions and States objecting to the implementation of NEET. States also reasoned that they would have to have a control on PG admissions if they were to be able to retain professionals in the State's medical services cadre.

2. In an interview Prof. Amartya Sen reveals some of the plans for Nalanda University (including his hope to "advertise the [academic and research] posts this summer, and ... [start] in a small way 2014". Other highlights [bold emphasis added]:

   We hope we will get large sums of money. We have some money initially from the government of India to survive the core plans that we have at the moment. We will start with six faculties, and as and when we have the money, we will expand. We have to make sure the quality of education in those areas is extremely high.

   The six faculties are environment, information technology, economics and management, history, linguistics, and international relations. One of the problems many newly created universities face, especially in India, is this idea that you have to begin with absolutely every department.

   That’s not the way we have to see it. We have to expand faculty by faculty to be financially comfortable. Within the finances we will try to provide curriculum reach and coverage as we can, subject to maintaining the highest quality of experts that the world can offer.

3. Shame on our Central Universities for doing such a shoddy job of their entrance exam this year. Seriously:

   And then were puerile queries, some relating to soap operas that had garnered eyeballs but very little critical acclaim.

   One question sought to test potential students for doctorate degrees to identify which channel ran the “Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’’ serial and which telecast the serial “Mowgli”.

4. UGC to establish chairs on 7 Indian Nobel Laureates; 31 more on 9 ‘illustrious’ persons.

Links

1. Jennifer Carpenter at Science Insider summarizes yet another study whose results would appear to blame women for their low status in science: Study Finds Women Biologists More Likely to Avoid Spotlight at Conferences. Here's the study itself.

2. Rod Smolla has a great essay in Inside Higher Ed on The Legal Future of Affirmative Action in the US.

3. UGC announces a set of norms for what our universities can and cannot do -- mostly the latter. Among the cannots: offer distance education program for MPhil and PhD degrees, courses through franchisee institutions, courses outside the state in which they are established.

4. Trouble in CAT-land: results of some students have been tampered with -- not at the IIMs, but on the website that dishes out CAT scores to students and institutions. Private institutions that admit students using CAT scores are crying foul.

5. Finally, xkcd has put together a very informative document on how modernity has destroyed humanity affected, among other things, people' ability to connect with each other.

Entrance Exams Elsewhere

Brazil:

Access to higher education: One exam, one door

Last week, 7 million Brazilians participated in a two-days marathon exam to assess their secondary education achievements in language, natural sciences, humanities, mathematics and writing. This test, known as ENEM (Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio, the National Exam of Secondary Education in English) serves in part as an entrance examination to all federal higher education institutions in the different parts of the country. In the past, each university had its own selection procedure.

Bombshell from IIT-K: Faculty Recruitment through JEE

Bombshell from IIT-K: Faculty Recruitment through JEE

Thiruvidaimarudhoor Ananthapadmanabhan
An Interesting Times of India exclusive

In an act of defiance, the IIT-K Senate resolved in an emergency meeting this afternoon to use JEE performance as the sole criterion for recruitment and promotion of its faculty members. Experts have dubbed the latest move a high stakes grenade thrown into the low stakes subculture of Indian academia.

Sidebar

The Senate of IIT-K has also recommended to the IIT-Council that JEE should be the sole criterion for selecting IIT Directors as well. After pointing out that the current interview process is totally dysfunctional, the Senate resolution notes that the new method will have a bonus benefit of getting rid of the most hated figure in the IIT system -- the HRD minister -- from the selection process.

* * *

“This decision on faculty recruitment just spotlights what everyone has known all along,” said Prof. Arpan Roy, the Senate’s media advisor. “JEE is the main reason for our reputation worldwide, and we are determined to leverage it to add a shiny new sheen to our faculty ranks.”

“As our alumni, especially the ministerial ones, have said so often, IITs are special because of their undergrad students. Why are they special? JEE, of course!”

There may be more to the IIT-K move, observers have observed. While IIT students tell mild jokes about their teachers, said Prof. Shashibhushan Sahay, an expert on psychology of IITs students at Imsong University, Shillong, they become more outspoken as alumni in expressing their disdain. The Senate resolution, Sahay noted, may well be a cry for respect.

IIT-K media advisor had a more positive spin, though. “The JEE magic will now rub off on our faculty,” said Roy. “When the exam becomes the sole criterion for recruiting IIT faculty, we too will become famous in Silicon Valley."

"When 60 Minutes come calling, we will welcome them at our swanky new office in Washington DC!”, he thundered.

To another question, Roy responded with a candid admission that he is a great fan of not just JEE alumni, but also Kentucky Fried Chicken, George W. Bush, G.I. Joe, and Rocky IV.

The IIT-K Senate may also have had another motivation in making this move, according to Mr. Narasimhachar Thathachar, a senior analyst at the Institute of IIT ‘Tudies, a Hyderabad based think tank. The new resolution, he says, may well be to meant to impress upon the government that IIT faculty deserve a special treatment not only because they organize the JEE, but also because “they, you know, actually cleared the dreaded exam.”

When asked if a faculty applicant’s PhD and post-doc experience will be given any weight, Roy responded with a firm no. “We don’t give a shit to our UG applicants' past performance, and look how great they are! The same principle must apply to faculty applicants as well. What really counts is how a man performs when the stakes are stacked sky-high.”

To a reporter who pointed out that American universities like Harvard and Yale prefer to use multiple metrics (including whether students’ parents are alumni), Roy responded, “It’s sad to see these universities turn their back on monomaniac Americans.” He praised his Senate colleagues for choosing wisely, and echoed POTUS # 43 in sending a stern message to the other IITs. “You are either with us, or ...," he stumbled before recovering, "... you risk becoming an unknown unknown.”

Roy also informed the reporters that the Senate meeting concluded with a special screening of Independence Day.

At IIT-D, meanwhile, an emergency meeting of the Senate has been called at 11:00 a.m. tomorrow. The notice for the meeting, a copy of which this reporter has seen, states that as an institution founded on British collaboration, it was IIT-D’s duty to follow IIT-K, even if it means invading HRD Minister’s Faridabad farmhouse and yelling to his face, “You want a common exam? Here it is -- common to both students and faculty!”.

These developments have been welcomed by the cram schools in Kota and Hyderabad. Said Mr. Vinod Sharma, a highly celebrated teacher at SuperStar Academy (SSA) at Kota, “We look forward to welcoming aspiring IIT faculty, as well as helping current IIT faculty earn their promotion. We plan to open a branch in each IIT.”

"We will teach them what to aspire to," said Mr. Sharma, who is rumored to earn upwards of half a million rupees a month. He added, however, that SSA will go strictly by merit and admit only those faculty who get high marks in SSAT -- the SuperStar Admission Test.

Sitting next to Mr. Sharma with a wide grin on his face was Mr. Rohit Singh, the owner of Star Academy, also at Kota.

On Entrance Exams

First, a couple of fairly uncontroversial observations.

1. There will always be stiff competition for entry into elite colleges -- even if India creates 50 IIts, there will still be a scramble for a seat at, say, IIT-B (going by current trends). With stiff competition, there will always be a need for some filtering mechanism.

2. A mechanism that considers many aspects of a student's academic (and even non-academic) record, skills, and preparation is better than one that relies on his/her performance in one high-stakes exam.

* * *

JEE is a bad exam in many ways -- this post from six years ago for some of the details. The most important badness is in its insistence on ranking students -- an exercise with little or no statistical basis that produces noisy results with poor reproducibility.

Unfortunately, the new mechanism proposed by the government does not allow us to move away from the statistically bankrupt idea of ranking students. Even if the two proposed national exams (JEE-Main and JEE-Advanced) are standardized, can their percentile scores be expressed with a precision of one in a million?

And, the proposed mechanism is rigid in fixing the relative weights for the three components, and using this rigid formula for ranking students. From this point on, there's no difference at all between the new mechanism and AIEEE (or JEE).

We can do better.

* * *

Here's one possibility:

Let's say there are N exams in all -- and students get a percentile score in each of them. Now, let the individual institutions choose their weights for each of the N exams.

An institution need not stop there -- it can even insist on ensuring a diverse student body by creating state-wise quotas, and quotas for students from poor families, and for women (in IITs) or men (at St. Stephen's).

Each institution can design its policy so that truly exceptional students (top rankers in National Olympiads, top athletes and sportspersons, accomplished artists, ...) are admitted (as long as they fulfill a certain minimum threshold, and as long as these special talents are backed by objective measures).

This sort of stuff would be horrendously complicated if it were to be implemented manually; with computers, it's just a matter of coding an institution's admissions criteria and let them do the hard work.

* * *

Articulating a vision for your institution's student body and devising an admissions policy that helps you get there are at the core of academic freedom and autonomy.

* * *

All our top institutions have a duty to participate in these policy debates to steer them to a broadly acceptable outcome which gives institutions a viable way to exercise their autonomy.

* * *

Ah, yes, one-handed typing is a bloody pain!

Kota: City of Cram Schools, Poached Coaches, and Consultant Guardians

Dilip D'Souza has an absorbing profile of Kota, Rajasthan, the cram school capital of India. His comprehensive coverage includes a section on the schools that admit the students enrolled in cram schools:

This is a place for schools. When students come to Kota to work towards the IIT exam, they still have to sit for their 12th Standard board exams. For that, you can enroll in a school at home, or in one of several Kota schools. Rushika, for example, was officially a student at A’s Saint Steward Morris Convent School in her hometown, Bhilwara. Her two friends were enrolled in two Kota schools, but neither could tell me their names.

Puzzled by this stuff—that Rushika was enrolled in a school hundreds of miles away, that her pals could not remember their schools’ names—I walked one morning into one such school, in Talwandi. A man ushered me straight into the principal’s narrow office. From behind a desk that seemed to fill the room, he told me all I needed to know: annual fees 35,000, admission guaranteed as long as you are admitted to one of the coaching institutes, attendance required once a week.

“Once a week?” I asked. “But even once in two weeks is OK with us,” he replied (“chalega” was the word he used).

“Dummy” schools, of course: everyone in Kota knows about them. Kids enroll not to attend, but only so they can take their board exam. At dinner one evening, a friend told me that the Talwandi school I had visited has 40 or 50 students per class until the 10th. In the 11th, enrollment suddenly swells to 500 per class. Dummy students, too.

* * *

Update: After writing this post, it occurred to me that Kota has been the subject of quite a few articles in newspapers and magazines over the years; and I have linked to many of them: here (ToI, 2005), here (WSJ, 2008), here (Rashmi Bansal's blog, 2008), here (Sunday Tribune, 2009). Anand Kumar's Super 30 is probably the only phenomenon that beats Kota in media attention.

Prof. V.G. Idichandy on JEE

The Fifth Estate, the "official magazine" of IIT-M, has a wide ranging interview of Prof. V.G. Idichandy [Part 1, Part 2]. First a brief intro:

In a career spanning more than 40 years at IIT Madras, Prof. Chandy has held numerous positions in the campus administration – Dean of Students, Deputy Director, Chairman – JEE and many more. He has played an instrumental role in setting up many of the institution’s current systems and is widely known for his camaraderie with students of the institute. He retired from the role of Deputy Director in October, 2011."

The second part has a section devoted to his views on JEE:

On the JEE System

During his association with JEE, he made a general observation that a diligent student with good marks in the 10th and 12th did well after coming in to the IITs but that there was no correlation between performance in JEE and performance at IIT. [See this Indian Express report from 2005 on Prof. Idichandy's study. To the best of my knowledge, it's not (yet) in the public domain.]

It’s a 12th std boy who’s writing the exam, what’s the point in asking him to solve M.Sc. level questions? This way we were purposefully driving them towards coaching institutes.

As the way forward, a suggestion was made that every board should select their top students; that is to say, those who scored more than mean plus two times the standard deviation, and ask them to write the exam.

We also suggested collapsing the two-part examination into a single objective paper that tested your analytical skills and comprehension.

The latter proposal was accepted, but the former was not, because the minister of the time remarked that the cutoff being based on statistical quantities was not something most people could understand. Instead, it was decided to insist on a first class. So only 60% and above were able to write the test. Prof. Idichandy was still not convinced.

We weren’t very happy about that, because the purpose wasn’t served.We had also decided to curtail the number of JEE attempts to two. There were people who stayed in coaching institutes for years together, till they succeeded; at that time there were people who were admitted to an undergraduate programme here even at the age of 28. Such was the attraction towards getting into IITs!

Views on Branches being allotted based on AIR JEE Rank

Another proposal was that branches should not be allocated on the basis of JEE rank. As he put it in his own words:

I’ve been fighting for this for a long time, I have not succeeded so far.

His explanation for the same was such: once you get into IIT after several years of rigorous exercise, you’d most likely be spent and exhausted; you’d want to relax and enjoy your first year. As a result, 30% of students fail in Physics, Chemistry and Math – these are all students who have cleared JEE. So the idea was to not allot a branch on entry, but to give them time to prove themselves or earn a branch.

Admission into a particular branch need not only depend on an All India Rank.

Instead, he suggests, one could study basic engineering, understand what each branch has to offer, and then make a well thought out decision – maybe at the end of second or third semester; until then, they would all have common courses. This way they are also away from the pressures of parents as well as those of society, a society that believes only people in Computer Science and Engineering would survive. Aptitude for a branch is never taken into account at all.

The senates of every IIT had deliberated on this before, and it was almost decided upon a few years back, but then two IITs objected, and there was no consensus. This year, once again, it has come up as an agenda item, and will be discussed again.

He backed up the idea of a branch of study called General Engineering, which wouldn’t specialise in a particular discipline.

Why should every student who get into IIT go through the rigours of high funda mathematics which are required for design and analysis? Many students would be happy to choose such a stream – why should you do a specialised degree in Aeronautical Engineering if you’re intending to do an MBA afterwards?

A student undergoing this degree could choose to specialise in a suitable branch at masters level.

Unified entrance examination:

The pool of students writing AIEEE and JEE are almost the same; at least for the first five lakhs. He further questions the need for two separate entrance exams. A more important change that has come about is the adequate weightage given to 12th standard performance. The fact that a 90% in different boards may mean different things is being compensated for by calculating percentile instead of using the absolute marking – a lot of analysis is being done in this regard.

“2013 students have been given sufficient notice regarding 12th standard marks weightage”, he concludes.

Manu Joseph on the "Mother of All Exams"

He's talking, of course, about the JEE. Here's the concluding paragraph:

It is improbable that the I.I.T.’s will ever regain their old glory. The circumstances of the nation have changed, and the smartest Indians do not need an engineering degree to find a place in the world or to make a decent living. Also, the government has not invested enough in the I.I.T.’s, and the most talented scientific minds have the option to enroll in genuinely outstanding centers of learning in the West instead of being stuck in a place that has derived its prestige largely from the fact that only one in 50 cracks its entrance exam.

The Hindu interviews IIT-M Director Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi

In the U.S., an engineer can do a literature course and earn credits. Why can't an Electrical Engineer in IIT do an elective in the humanities department? Is the system here constricting?

That is where we should head towards. Today, we do have a system that has electives. But, it is not the same as in the U.S. The problem is that you can give the freedom to students to do what they want, provided you can then declare what they are in the degree. How to do this is a question that we have been asking ourselves.

Some of the older IITs have for sometime wanted to remove the branch allocation at JEE. The problem is the newer IITs are not ready for that. Actually, giving a branch at that young age is a terrible thing to do. But that's the reality. Besides, the public wants that. Public will prefer if you give the branch in LKG itself. But I think what we'll do is try to loosen up, give some options, and make sure the degrees are branded right. Instead of creating departments that function like silos, we must try and liberalise. We'll probably move towards that in the next few years. [Bold emphasis added]

More here.

What It's Like to Attend IIT ...

Apparently, that's something that someone at Quora was terribly interested in, and a revealing tell-all happens. Here's a sample:

Academic Life

While the students that enter the IITs may be fairly assumed to be the best produced by the country, the same cannot always be said of the professors. There is a structural reason for this : over the 70s and 80s, all the academically inclined students in the IITs went to the US for PhDs and became professors there. From a lifestyle and financial point of view, there is little reason to come back and work/teach at the IITs. Thus, the professorial ranks at the IITs are often heavily populated with PhDs from the IITs (ie, those who came to IIT for grad school) or less prestigious foreign universities.

As you can expect from young undergrads with enormous chips on their shoulders (having surmounted the JEE), IIT grad students – who enter through another rather less highly regarded exam – are looked upon with derision, even pity. That these very students become TAs and later IIT professors is galling. Thus, in my experience, the relationship between professors and students is always somewhat tense. It is a very transactional relationship – students go to class because they have to (grades are docked for poor attendance), submit routine homework, take exams and move on to the next semester.

But things are not so bad. Here's the next paragraph -- and note the square brackets!

[This is not to say that all professors are second-rate. Some are truly terrific, and a few have been very inspirational to me, personally].

* * *

And here's a bonus mystery link!

High Tech Cheating

The scamsters targeted one of India's most high-profile exams: the national entrance exam for admissions to PG programs in medical colleges, and the details are fascinating:

The police say two of the men – recent MBA grads – pretended to be candidates and went in to write the exam with Android cellphones strapped to their forearms, hidden beneath their shirt cuffs. They used the cameras in the phones to scan the exam questions through holes in their coats, and images of the pages were sent automatically and wirelessly to an email address.

In a bedroom a few blocks away, a recent computer science graduate downloaded the images and printed out the exam paper. He handed it over to the scam kingpin, a second-year medical student, who sat surrounded by textbooks and some friends, and solved the problems.

He then sent the answers back to at least six candidates writing the exam; they had Bluetooth devices stitched into their shirt collars that sent the answers to microchip earplugs the men were wearing.

And how did the scam get busted?

It appears that this plot was busted after a disgruntled fellow candidate who knew of the service but couldn’t afford it tipped off police. ...

Academic Scam of the Year

It was only a matter of time, and this should not be surprising at all to those who have been watching JEE toppers being claimed by several different cramschools as their students [link, link]. I heard about the scam from a highly cited researcher from India a while ago, and it's great to see some fabulous reporting by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee of Science on the audacity of it all:

At first glance, Robert Kirshner took the e-mail message for a scam. An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU's campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his name on the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI's) list of highly cited researchers.

“I thought it was a joke,” says Kirshner, who forwarded the e-mail to his department chair, noting in jest that the money was a lot more attractive than the 2% annual raise professors typically get. Then he discovered that a highly cited colleague at another U.S. institution had accepted KAU's offer, adding KAU as a second affiliation on ISIhighlycited.com.

Kirshner's colleague is not alone. Science has learned of more than 60 top-ranked researchers from different scientific disciplines -— all on ISI's highly cited list -— who have recently signed a part-time employment arrangement with the university that is structured along the lines of what Kirshner was offered. ... [Bold emphasis added]

Department of "Awesome-if-true": 37 % of those who got through JEE didn't use "specialized coaching'"

A good catch by commenter Raj:

Candidates appearing for JEE prepare either through “self study” or through “specialized teaching (other)”. Data (Table A8) for JEE 2011 shows that 295618 out of 468280 (63.1%) have prepared using “self study”. Out of the 13196 candidates who qualified, 4912 (37.22%) have used the “self study” mode.

What are the odds that the sociological data collected by JEE is just deceptive fluff? [And, yes, this probably means the income effect is tainted as well].

Stats for JEE-2011: Income Effect

Just skimmed through the report on JEE-2011. It has all kinds of sociological data (though not fine-grained enough for us to perform our own analysis). Here's an interesting set of data on the candidates' parental income.

According to parental income

Table A13 shows the zone wise distribution of candidates according to annual income of parents. Out of the 468280 candidates who appeared, 146882 (31.36%) had a parental income of less than 1 Lakh. 195220 candidates (41.69%) had a parental income between 1-3 Lakhs. Another 19.3% have a parental income between 3-6 Lakhs, while 4.87% have parental income between 6-10 Lakhs. 12520 candidates (2.67%) have parental income exceeding 10 Lakhs. The percentages for qualified candidates for the five slabs of parental income are 17.1%, 31.7%, 30.47%, 11.86% and 8.86% respectively. The income slabs used in JEE 2010 data analysis was more or less similar. However it is observed that a large percentage of appeared as well as qualified candidates belong to the low to middle income groups.

The report doesn't tease out the implications on the income effect on JEE outcomes, but we certainly can. When we do that, we find a clear trend:

Income	No. of JEE Takers	No. of JEE Qualifieds	Pass %
Less than 1 lakh	146882	2258	1.54
1-3 lakhs	195220	4183	2.14
3-6 lakhs	90560	4021	4.44
6-10 lakhs	22835	1565	6.85
More than 10 lakhs	12520	1169	9.34
Total	468280	13196	2.82

In other words, a candidate from the top income slab is 6 times more likely to get through JEE than one from the lowest slab. This advantage is "only" 4 times when the comparison group is from the second lowest slab (which also has the largest number of candidates).

Quality of Students at the IITs

The BusinessStandard has published two responses to a recent allegation by N.R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys that IIT students are not as good as their seniors, and his identification of the cramschool culture as the main reason behind this deterioration in quality. The responses are from big hitters from the IIT system: Prof. Gautam Barua (Director, IIT-G) and Prof. S. Prasad (former Director, IIT-D). NRN gets results!

Here's Barua:

So how do we improve the “quality” of IIT graduates? Based on the points above, the obvious answers are to increase the numbers of those who are really interested in a career in engineering or science, and to reduce the cases of mental fatigue. As far as the latter is concerned, the IIT Council has been discussing this issue and it has been decided in principle to do away with the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) and instead use school results and the results of an aptitude test to decide admission. The wide variety in school board exams is sought to be handled by using the percentile rank of a student as the absolute marks of the school result. This will mean that the marks a student obtains will depend on her rank in her Board and on the size of the Board in which she is appearing.

And here's Prasad:

It is nobody’s case that the admission processes of the IIT system are perfect. Having reduced the question paper to a multiple-choice, objective test, imperfections have crept in, which the coaching institutions have exploited. Therefore, it is impossible to guarantee that everyone who has cracked the Joint Entrance Examination is brilliant. There is no doubt that there is great scope for improving our admission processes and factoring in more information about the candidate than performance in a single test. Perhaps factoring in school results, as is being considered, will help. Perhaps we need to include a component of subjective testing, as used to be done in the past. There are many dimensions for bringing in such improvements.

In other news, the IITs announced their most serious attempt to address the issue of student quality: students now need to score 10% in each subject (and 35 % in the aggregate) in JEE-2012.

(Some) IIMs Want a More Diverse Set of Students

And they are willing to take appropriate steps [via Dheeraj Sanghi] to get more women and more non-engineers in the next incoming cohort:

For years, every class at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) was boringly uniform. Students were mostly boys, with only a sprinkling of the other sex. In class, these young men thought similarly, used identical logic and took decisions that were alike, for they were all hardwired to behave in a certain fashion at the engineering campuses they came from.

In a strange correction to break the monotony of these two singularly large constituencies that cornered seats for years at the IIMs, the management schools have decided to award special marks to girls and non-engineering students.

All the six new IIMs and the ones at Lucknow and Kozhikode feel it`s time to rebalance the gender scales in office spaces. So while IIM-Rohtak will give 20 marks to each girl and another 20 to a non-engineer, IIM-Raipur will add 30 marks to the overall scores of each girl-non-engineer. IIM-Lucknow has decided to grant five marks to each girl and two to non-engineers. [Source: this ToI story by Hemali Chhapia]

The bit about non-engineers is interesting, but I'll restrict my observations to the issue of gender disparity in our top institutions:

1. This is a great move by these eight IIMs, and I can't think of a better application of their autonomy. After articulating the need to promote gender diversity, they have done well to tailor their admissions policy towards that goal. It looks like the older IIMs (and, of course, the IITs) will be flaunting their studly smugness for some more time.

2. This real, meaningful attempt by (some) IIMs to promote diversity should be contrasted with the recent announcement from the IITs that they have abolished the JEE application fee for women [Update: link, link].

3. Leaders of our leading institutions keep talking about their desire for greater diversity; but they plead helplessness by pointing to their system of entrance exams -- as if that procedure is so sacrosanct that even thinking about changing it is a crime against the Constitution.

4. Note also how Hemali Chhapia's ToI article tries so hard to de-legitimize (some) IIMs' steps to ensure a more diverse cohort: the headline talks about "Grace Marks for Girls" and the text talks about "a strange correction" by awarding "special marks." I guess we should be grateful that Chhapia refrained from use of the word 'crutch' ...

5. It's not funny at all to see some people blame Big Bad Society (and its lousy attitudes) for the under-representation of women in the IITs; they urge parents to shed their gender bias (!) and send their daughters to the best cram schools -- even if it means the said daughters should spend endless weeks and months ruining their adolescence at Kota.

   What these guys (and it's almost always guys) are saying, essentially, is this: "Our institutions are perfect, and so are our entrance exams! Now if only the stupid people can be goaded into doing the right things, ..." I think a good response would be this [said in a different context]:

   ... [A} system that for good outcomes requires that people act in ways people do not do is not a good system — and to blame the people rather than the system is to commit a major intellectual error.
   -- Brad DeLong [via Cosma Shalizi]