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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

#111

Post by internetslave »

hintymad wrote: post #54

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 hobb…

IIT is a complete waste of time. You guys force your youths to spend their lives memorizing.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#112

Post by Zhenya »

flowerlad wrote: post #105
Zhenya wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think to check off they tickets, the first need to submit the fix and have it merged

JIRA tickets are typically used in IT departments. Do you really have to go outside the country to find people good enough to work in IT?

JIRA tickets are used to track bugs and features. Anyone can use them.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#113

Post by sriram_sun »

Aeolun wrote: post #77
mywittyname wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 Maybe? But it makes them useless for my purposes. Which requires them to think for themselves.

I remember reading a speech made to West Point graduates on the value of questioning authority. Not sure how much it is actually followed, but was pleasantly reassured that at least the thought is being planted.

Now if someone could only help me locate that speech.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#114

Post by caddemon »

chrisseaton wrote: post #70
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4.5% for Harvard honestly seems high to me. Do you have a source? (Not doubting, moreso curious about other Ivys).

Acceptance rates are pretty meaningless. For example Oxford and Cambridge have seemingly very high acceptance rates... but this is because in the UK students can only apply to one top-tier university. The Ivy League has tiny acceptance rates because many students apply to many of them. I guess you could apply to literally all of them if you wanted to? Does that make them harder to get into?

It is indeed common for one person to apply to most of the Ivy's, and schools care about yield so there are also various tricks employed like waitlisting students they think are not seriously considering the school (Harvard doesn't really do this though, moreso a thing with the tier 1b schools).

However there is the flip side that it's rare to apply to one of these schools as a random "why the hell not" reach. Probably 90% of the applicant pool has a good enough background to feel they are a serious competitor, which would be the top fraction of college bound seniors overall. I would guess the IIT exam is a less self selected pool.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#115

Post by Aeolun »

It has never made sense to me to spend my entire childhood stuck in books (or computers).

That’s not to say I don’t like them. I read tons, but I wasn’t chained to it.

Maybe the situation is different over here, but I guess it’s because I never felt that I needed to score top 1% to even be considered for positions?

The Netherlands has a fairly hierarchical hiring system, so if you score into one of the 3 levels you’ll generally be considered for a job at that level. Jobs at level 3 aren’t making shitloads more money that level 1 either (maybe some 2x more).

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#116

Post by viklove »

flowerlad wrote: post #101
shrubble wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the 120k managers and on up to the two levels higher director level, check off Jira tickets at the company I work at...

Yes, I would expect that at a company where managers make 120k.

Where do you work?

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#117

Post by hintymad »

internetslave wrote: post #111
hintymad wrote: post #54

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 hobb…

IIT is a complete waste of time. You guys force your youths to spend their lives memorizing.

I'm not sure if everyone survives IIT by rote memory. I'm sure some people thrive by truly understanding the fundamentals. For those who want to really learn a hard subject, IIT is wonderful. On the other hand, I have a hard time imagining anyone could survive a STEM subject through mere rote memory. A STEM subject is built on layers and layers of abstraction anyway. If someone could use things like "any subgroup of a commutative group is normal" or things like BPP=co-BPP to solve problems via sheer rote memory, what can I say? Hmm... Kudos?

Seriously, though, we should look at statistics instead of individual samples to assess the value of education. I mean, how many students can really solve a JEE question like below by rote memory? I'm sure there are some who got lucky, but I'd rather believe most of the students who could solve such problem truly learned some math:

If f(x) is a differentiable function and g(x) is a double differentiable function such that |f(x)| <= 1 and f'(x) = g(x). If f^2(0) + g^2(x) = 9. Prove that there exists some c \in (-3, 3) such that g(c)g"(c) < 0.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#118

Post by blasdel »

majormajor wrote: post #58
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 involv…

Randomized admissions were the implicit thesis of the satire we get the word from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#119

Post by ZephyrBlu »

caddemon wrote: post #107
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Regarding 2, why is it better to select on non-genetic traits? Those traits would be determined by the environment, which doesn't feel any more fair to me to judge on, and in general seems like something we try to avoid (i.e. we do not want rich kids to do well purely because they grew up with better resources). I'm genuinely asking because I have no clue what people want "merit" to mean. I always assumed the entire…

I don't think merit should focus on traits, I think merit should focus on effort. Though the problem with that is that traits can be a multiplier for effort.

I don't know what merit should really mean though. It seems like there will always be some sort of hierarchy in society, so I guess defining what constitutes merit is a pick-your-poison kind of situation.

Re: The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

#120

Post by ZephyrBlu »

twiddling wrote: post #108
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4.5% for Harvard honestly seems high to me. Do you have a source? (Not doubting, moreso curious about other Ivys).

1/3 of Harvard admits are legacy, so you're competing for the remaining 2/3 of the freshman class slots.

That's a shit load of legacy admissions. Seems like it would be quite cliquey.
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