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The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

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Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#51

Post by barry-cotter »

endisneigh wrote: post #5

I would love to see really elite schools lowering the threshold for the quantitative measurements like the JEE to say, 85% percentile, and just randomly selectively students who meet it. In my experience there's definitely a point in which better scores on things such as the JEE stop being correlated with both college performance, life satisfaction or even career earnings.

> In my experience there's definitely a point in which better scores on things such as the JEE stop being correlated with both college performance, life satisfaction or even career earnings.

Bring the citations because the research shows that doing better on highly g loaded tests is basically an unalloyed good.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#52

Post by ZephyrBlu »

majormajor wrote: post #35
ghgdynb1 wrote: post #2

I used to think that the “holistic” criteria elite US colleges use to select students was a failure of meritocracy. My view was that the non-objective metrics were excuses for colleges to let in students who wouldn’t grind but wanted prestige and had rich parents. But if you tie a person’s social status to performance on a single test, you suffocate all the useful things people could be doing if they didn’t have to s…

The trick would be coming up with an exam you can't study for. But even "IQ test" style stuff hasn't been immune to this, and many attempts to do so fall victim to "select for people with upbringing like the test authors, so actually they did study their whole life, they just didn't realize that's what they were doing." Job interviews would benefit from the same thing, to go by the self-reported amount of time wasted…

How would that help?

Rewarding people for simply being born with high IQ is the opposite of meritocratic.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#53

Post by olladecarne »

ghgdynb1 wrote: post #2

I used to think that the “holistic” criteria elite US colleges use to select students was a failure of meritocracy. My view was that the non-objective metrics were excuses for colleges to let in students who wouldn’t grind but wanted prestige and had rich parents. But if you tie a person’s social status to performance on a single test, you suffocate all the useful things people could be doing if they didn’t have to s…

I still think the "holistic" approach is flawed. The "holistic" criteria benefits upper-class students because lower and middle class kids are rarely trained from a young age to be involved in extra-curricular activities the way upper-class kids are. I experienced this first hand growing up, many future Ivy league students almost seemed to have been trained for it from the moment they were born. The parents had connections all over the place and their kids could study/work on all sorts of interesting hobbies. On the other hand the lower class people had no idea that this world existed and at best spent some time studying for the standardized exams if their parents were really invested in their future.

Basically, whatever thing you choose as the metric, people with more resources and information will be able to optimize for it better. However, the more difficult the metric becomes to achieve, the more it benefits those who already benefit from the resource and information asymmetry.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#54

Post by hintymad »

What's wrong with students doing everything they can to get into IIT? How is it different from the US? A student aspiring to get into HYPM in the bay area often needs to get full GPA, complete more than 10 AP courses, be the leader in multiple voluntary groups, be a captain in a sports team, sleep 5 hours a day, and take illicit smart drugs. Do such students have a childhood? Do they have life? Do they have true hobby? So it's okay to toil for so-called "holistic admission", but it's not okay to play the game in India? What kind of twisted moral superiority is this?

And how is different from a Korean students doing everything they can so they can get into the top medical school?

And how is it different from a Japanese kid fighting to get into Tokyo University?

And how is it different from a Chinese student who walks 10 miles every day to attend high school so she can get into a top-tier university?

Do Americans even know that some countries do not have as many universities as the US? Do they know that national entrance exams can be the most fair system a country could afford? Do they even know that building leadership in high school can be a luxury that millions of family wouldn't even dream to have, yet the families can still produce brilliant students?

Holistic my ass.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#55

Post by lokeshk »

listmaking wrote: post #46

As data, here is a list of each year's top-ranked student in the IIT "joint entrance exam" (JEE) since 1979, and what they're doing now: https://dev.studentgiri.com/last-38-years-iit-jee-toppers/ I know a couple of them personally, and a fair number of other IIT graduates besides, and while many of them did work hard, all of them did/do have hobbies and all that, not quite fitting the "No life, no hobbies, burnout, l…

I didn't exhaustively scanned each entry, but sampled many (> 15) and one thing that I found to be odd was that all of them were male. I'm not sure if it's cultural but it's quite interesting.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#56

Post by ZephyrBlu »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #49
ghgdynb1 wrote: post #2

I used to think that the “holistic” criteria elite US colleges use to select students was a failure of meritocracy. My view was that the non-objective metrics were excuses for colleges to let in students who wouldn’t grind but wanted prestige and had rich parents. But if you tie a person’s social status to performance on a single test, you suffocate all the useful things people could be doing if they didn’t have to s…

I'm becoming convinced by the idea that meritocracy itself is bad and a terrible way to organize society. But perhaps I'm biased by being a failure in the meritocratic system.

I'm interested in hear about why you believe you're a failure in the meritocratic system.

I also have some doubts about meritocracy for a couple of reasons:

1) Although we can try very hard to be objective, at the end of the day everything is subjective

2) So called "merit" seems to be largely based on genetic traits (Intelligence, personality, physical, etc)

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#57

Post by gumby »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #52
majormajor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick would be coming up with an exam you can't study for. But even "IQ test" style stuff hasn't been immune to this, and many attempts to do so fall victim to "select for people with upbringing like the test authors, so actually they did study their whole life, they just didn't realize that's what they were doing." Job interviews would benefit from the same thing, to go by the self-reported amount of time wasted…

How would that help? Rewarding people for simply being born with high IQ is the opposite of meritocratic.

Really depends on your definition of "merit" (which is frequently misunderstood the same way evolutionary "fitness" is often misunderstood).

Read Young's original book coining the term: it was both a satire and dystopian lament. Far from a term of approval!

Certainly many people -- perhaps most -- believe that "IQ" (loosely defined) is in fact the proper definition of meritocracy.

(In case it's not obviously I definitely disagree)

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#58

Post by majormajor »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #52
majormajor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick would be coming up with an exam you can't study for. But even "IQ test" style stuff hasn't been immune to this, and many attempts to do so fall victim to "select for people with upbringing like the test authors, so actually they did study their whole life, they just didn't realize that's what they were doing." Job interviews would benefit from the same thing, to go by the self-reported amount of time wasted…

How would that help? Rewarding people for simply being born with high IQ is the opposite of meritocratic.

In theory, the purpose of the admissions test (or job interview) is to find people capable of doing the work, so they won't wash out from the hard, demanding programs. But none of these tests are rewarding people for doing useful or directly applicable work in the first place. So ideally you'd want a test that didn't require wasted zero-sum-game studying marathons, but would also correspond to the type of work involved... again, I don't think IQ tests are this. But such a thing would be useful, if it could be devised. If you still look at grades in addition to the standardized tests, like in the US, you'll wash out the not-willing-to-put-in-any-effort crowd like that.

To steal another idea from the job interview discussions: what you want might be entry-level intro survey type classes that are broadly open to lots of people (maybe online) but have a high bar for completion to gain full admission, and focus on some of the hands-on aspects of the field in question. "Lower bar + weed out courses" is used in a lot of places that couldn't get away with the high bar of MIT or such.

Alternately, I often suspect the best solution would be fully randomized admissions. Does it make sense to stratify by institution, so that you have one single gate into university, instead of looking at the output of four years of work across mostly-evenly-distributed places? Where you can more legitimately assume that what someone gets out of their time will be the result of what they personally put into it?

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#59

Post by savanpatel »

Last year, 1.5 million students took the JEE to qualify for 13,000 seats in 23 IITs across the country – in other words, for each seat there were 115 aspirants.

-- Wrong Math. Count in the reservation. General Category Students have to compete more for a seat. Ratio will be higher for them.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#60

Post by mywittyname »

primitivesuave wrote: post #30

I have been hiring IIT graduates and building a team in India for several years now. They are all really smart people with a strong work ethic, but their approach to work tends to be the same as the approach they needed to succeed in a test-based education system. The engineers will grind until any hour of the night to ensure that all feature requirements are met and JIRA tickets checked off, but nobody will stop to…

Don't write this off as a solely as a symptom of education.

Being able to question the judgement of an authority figure / decision maker is a privilege. A squeaky wheel gets the grease but a raised nail gets the hammer. Engineers generally lean more nail than wheel in most orgs, and being a minority or otherwise less respected subset of that group makes you feel even more like a nail.

Dotting I's and crossing T's is exactly the kind of behavior one would expect from a person who is smart enough to recognize something is a stupid idea, knows that they lack the authority to make any changes, and will bear the bunt of the inevitable failure.

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