Live data from Hacker News

The IIT Entrance Exam

priceonomics.com

21–30 of 96 posts

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#21
post #2

I'm unreasonably pleased that I was able to answer both the example questions.

First one's simple enough, but second one I couldn't figure out if there's a clever trick. Or are students expected to apply the quadratic formula and do a bunch of symbolic manipulation?

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#22
post #21
post #2

I'm unreasonably pleased that I was able to answer both the example questions.

First one's simple enough, but second one I couldn't figure out if there's a clever trick. Or are students expected to apply the quadratic formula and do a bunch of symbolic manipulation?

(Spoiler) Here's a way to do the second one: http://tinyurl.com/ojs6ux5

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#24
Think of the lost potential of the people who may still be the cream of the crop but just outside the 2%.

The logical part of me says that they should be building more of these academies (if they can without sacrificing quality).

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#25
post #9

As I was watching the Google I/O webcast last month, the one thing that struck me was how some of the most important products and services from arguably the most influential tech company of our times, were headed by IIT graduates: Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, who heads their search team and essentially rewrote the critical ranking algorithm in 2001, and a graduate of IIT Roorkee [1]; Sundar Pichai, who heads Androi…

Clearly these men are all very capable but would they have been able to have the same impact had they stayed in India?

Given that they all did post-graduate study in the US and currently live in the US and work for an American company, I think their accomplishments say less about the quality of IIT graduates and more about the fact that a huge amount of human potential is being wasted in India.

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#26
post #20
post #18

"six grueling hours of chemistry, physics, and math" Otherwise known as three two-hour papers - hardly the stuff of legend! I'm not suggesting the papers are easy, just that by any measure, at this level the length is nothing remarkable.

It is remarkable. It is a game of chess. You have to be in upper 4000 ranks to land a good engg. stream. And the ranks often have incredibly minor mark differences between them, which makes for harsher penalties in form of being denied good streams in good IITs. The mind games played in JEE is a game of chess. You only know the syllabus, and that's it. In my times, physics paper was easy and people scored a lot. It w…

Is there an equivalent of this? http://web.mit.edu/ir/pop/awards/nobel.html Closest would be University of Madras not IIT.

Its just a numbers game, the universities are not even smart enough to increase seats in a country of 1.2 billion.

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#27
post #9

As I was watching the Google I/O webcast last month, the one thing that struck me was how some of the most important products and services from arguably the most influential tech company of our times, were headed by IIT graduates: Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, who heads their search team and essentially rewrote the critical ranking algorithm in 2001, and a graduate of IIT Roorkee [1]; Sundar Pichai, who heads Androi…

Awesome Compilation. I had the suspicion that a lot of the higher-ups were IIT grads, but I never looked into it. (Not that that's a bad thing, but it's interesting). Is there a very pro-google culture in India? Does Google recruit relatively heavily from India?

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#28
post #5

For all the shit Quora gets on HN, it's probably the leading authority on the IIT system due to the enormous number of Indian members. See https://www.quora.com/Indian-Institutes-of-Technology/best_q... for some of the more interesting questions and answers.

Most of the questions and answers are quite narrow in their perspective probably because the community they are targeting to comprises largely of other IITians and people who are closely related to them. If you are looking at it from an outsiders view, I would rather suggest that you talk to an IITian personally. Nearly all of them are quite open to discussion about it.

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#29
Stories about rigorous tests and top-notch universities in other nations make me realize that prestige is myopic.

For example, I recently introduced two friends: One was an American who had gone to Princeton; the other was an Indian who had attended the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Both colleges have fancy names and star standing in their own nations, but neither person fully understood the cachet of the other's education. I'm sure that employers wouldn't entirely understand it, either.

That's ironic when you consider how much we judge ourselves according to prestige ... you move to another nation and suddenly your clout evaporates.

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#30

Think of the lost potential of the people who may still be the cream of the crop but just outside the 2%. The logical part of me says that they should be building more of these academies (if they can without sacrificing quality).

They are building more as well as converting some of the existing non-IIT engineering schools to IIT status. More than 20 years ago when I took the IIT, the total number of students admitted was much lower (~ 2000) than the article states for today (~10000). That would seem like a 5 fold increase in number of seats in about 20 years. Definitely much faster rate of growth than the rate of population growth in India.

Also, people who are just outside that 2% mostly do fine. There are a number of other highly competitive (and pretty good) schools of sciences and engineering that are not IIT's and most of the people you are talking about (smart, motivated students who had a bad day at the test or such), do end up with good careers regardless.

Post reply on HN