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.

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“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.

Prof. P.V. Indiresan's Bold Idea

Quotas are bad, bad, bad, except for the rich and powerful.

... in the past week, I had come to the conclusion that the youth from rich and powerful families too have their own rights. Whether we like it or not, they will have enormous influence over how the economy will grow.

The former US President, Mr George Bush, was admitted to Yale not because he was brilliant, but because he was the son of another former US President.

Such youth need good education, particularly, good Indian education. Hence, I suggest that the IITs apply the Pareto criterion — reserve 20 per cent of seats for the very rich or powerful after charging them 80 per cent of the costs. The other 80 per cent should be selected on the basis of merit — as decided by the faculty — and get charged only 20 per cent of the costs. [Bold emphasis added]

That this stuff comes after some muddle about ownership of IITs is also revealing. I looked for sarcasm alerts around this latest brain wave, but couldn't find any.

State of our State Universities

Exhibit A: The sad saga of the Department of Crystallography and Biophysics at the University of Madras.

Exhibit B: An appeal from several scholars urging the Kerala government: Don't mess with autonomy of M.G. University.

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Bonus: This one is not about state universities, but about an obnoxious feature of our funding agencies: the clout of their finance officials [pdf].

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Michael Lewis on the Fourth Cookie

This is the best commencement speech of 2012.

On the one hand ...

This is how my left hand looks these days -- a result of a wet floor, an uncontrolled slip-slide, a broken finger, and a surgery to patch up the bone at its tip. It's going to be two or three more weeks of pecking at the keyboard and other such good stuff.

On the other hand, it's better than being featured in ads shown to your Facebook friends :

On Valentine’s Day, Nick Bergus came across a link to an odd product on Amazon.com: a 55-gallon barrel of ... personal lubricant.

He found it irresistibly funny and, as one does in this age of instant sharing, he posted the link on Facebook, adding a comment: “For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.”

Within days, friends of Mr. Bergus started seeing his post among the ads on Facebook pages, with his name and smiling mug shot. Facebook — or rather, one of its algorithms — had seen his post as an endorsement and transformed it into an advertisement, paid for by Amazon.

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Addendum: it's also better than what happened to Facts.

Links

1. Mohit Chandra, a partner at KPMG, pens an open letter to India's graduating classes. He talks about "five key attributes employers typically seek," adding immediately that "... these are often lacking in you and your colleagues." Topping his list of key attributes is this: "1.You speak and write English fluently."

2. Mitch Smith on Intellectual Ventures: Patent Protector or Pest? The question is relevant to India since quite a few top Indian academic institutions (including IIT-B, whose former director left that position to join IV) have a tie-up with the company which many see as a patent troll [see this NPR report, for example].

3. Nick Hanauer: Who are the job creators? This was a talk he presented at a TED event; but it "was deemed 'too politically controversial to post on their web site'."

IIT-K goes to America ...

... to set up a recruitment office (or something like that).

At IIT Kanpur, ... where about 350 professors are employed, about one-third of faculty positions are vacant.

Now, officials at IIT Kanpur are planning to open an office in either Washington or New York City by the end of the year to try to recruit new faculty members from the United States. Their target: the droves of IITians and students from other top engineering schools in India who end up pursuing Ph.D.s or postdocs at American universities. “This office will help us coordinate our faculty hiring much better,” [Manindra] Agrawal [Dean of Resource Planning and Generation] said. More than half of IIT Kanpur’s faculty members already have graduate or doctoral degrees from U.S. institutions, he said. In the past, the process has worked more informally -- department heads would seek out promising postdoctoral candidates. [From Call for Indian Expats by Kaustuv Basu in Inside Higher Ed].

Though this may appear to be a major initiative, it is not:

The proposed American office will employ two or three people. “We will see how it goes -- we are going into uncharted territory here. And then maybe we will increase the size of the office,” Agrawal said.

Rosling on Religions and Babies

"Religion has very little to do with the number of babies per woman," says Hans Rosling in this fabulous TED talk: Religions and Babies. [via Swarup and Gwen Sharp].

Now, watch the awesome Hans in action:

Links

1. Charles Simic in NYRB: Why I Still Write Poetry. Simic had me hooked right in the first paragraph:

   When my mother was very old and in a nursing home, she surprised me one day toward the end of her life by asking me if I still wrote poetry. When I blurted out that I still do, she stared at me with incomprehension. I had to repeat what I said, till she sighed and shook her head, probably thinking to herself this son of mine has always been a little nuts. Now that I’m in my seventies, I’m asked that question now and then by people who don’t know me well. Many of them, I suspect, hope to hear me say that I’ve come my senses and given up that foolish passion of my youth and are visibly surprised to hear me confess that I haven’t yet. They seem to think there is something downright unwholesome and even shocking about it, as if I were dating a high school girl, at my age, and going with her roller-skating that night.

2. Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic: How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit. Worth reading to get some insights into the online culture at two sites that depend totally on contributions from their users.

3. The Oatmeal (comics): Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived. Warning: Don't click if you are a fan of Edison. [Update: This post attempts a fact-check (Via this comment; thanks, Anirban!) Update 2: A rebuttal from The Oatmeal (thanks, Priyank!)]

European Universities and the Two Body Problem

Just a quick note to link to the Crooked Timber post and comments thread on how European universities handle the issue of academic spousal accommodation (one version of which is the Two Body Problem that was the topic of a couple of posts in recent months).

Lots of interesting views in the comments thread there. Go take a look!

Explaining Privilege

John Scalzi says:

I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. [...]

The result? A multiplayer video game called "The Real World". Here's the intro:

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

Mitt Romney, the Time Traveler

From the ever reliable Onion News Network: Romney To Travel Back In Time To Kill Liberal Versions Of Himself. [Make sure you watch the twist at the end!]

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An earlier post on Mitt Romney: Quantum Politics.

Weird Web Fun

Teddy Wayne in New Yorker: I’m an Article About the Internet That You Repost on the Internet:

What will Mark Zuckerberg do next? Who cares! You do, in an involuntary, Pavlovian way, which is why you’re reading me when you should be outdoors, talking with a loved one, listening to live music, knitting, doing nearly anything else! Make a limp statement about your technocratic dictator that masquerades as wit, you enslaved peon, and pass me on!

Atul Gawande: 200 Years of Surgery

In the New England Journal of Medicine: Two Hundred Years of Surgery. A breezy -- but pain-filled! -- survey of the developments in surgical methods.

Before anesthesia, the sounds of patients thrashing and screaming filled operating rooms. So, from the first use of surgical anesthesia, observers were struck by the stillness and silence. In London, Liston called ether anesthesia a “Yankee dodge” — having seen fads such as hypnotism come and go — but he tried it nonetheless, performing the first amputation with the use of anesthesia, in a 36-year-old butler with a septic knee, 2 months after the publication of Bigelow's report.10 As the historian Richard Hollingham recounts, from the case records, a rubber tube was connected to a flask of ether gas, and the patient was told to breathe through it for 2 or 3 minutes.12 He became motionless and quiet. Throughout the procedure, he did not make a sound or even grimace. “When are you going to begin?” asked the patient a few moments later. He had felt nothing. “This Yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow,” Liston exclaimed.

It would take a little while for surgeons to discover that the use of anesthesia allowed them time to be meticulous. Despite the advantages of anesthesia, Liston, like many other surgeons, proceeded in his usual lightning-quick and bloody way. Spectators in the operating-theater gallery would still get out their pocket watches to time him. The butler's operation, for instance, took an astonishing 25 seconds from incision to wound closure. (Liston operated so fast that he once accidentally amputated an assistant's fingers along with a patient's leg, according to Hollingham. The patient and the assistant both died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with a 300% mortality.)