fascinating subject - but the article was blaringly badly written!
Maybe you should help 'em out?
The IIT Entrance Exam
31–40 of 96 posts
Re: The IIT Entrance Exam
#32I'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?
No factoring or quadratic formulas necessary. I'm going to write c_n instead of a_n and a,b instead of alpha,beta.
Since a and b satisfy that equation, you know that
a^2 = 6a+ 2, b^2 = 6b+ 2
and hence
c_10 - 2 * c_8 = a^8 * (6a + 2) - b^8 * (6b + 2) + 2b^8 - 2a^8 = 6c_9.
Dividing by 2c_9 gives 3.
Edit: asafira beat me to it!
Re: The IIT Entrance Exam
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IITs have been increasing seats at a rate that is often unsustainable. During my stay at IITB from 2007-2012, I saw the number of undergraduate freshmen increase from about 500 to about 900. I think the largest issue has been scaling infrastructure and faculty.
And no, IITs don't have any nobel laureate to boast about, largely because of the lack of core sciences and graduate/post-graduate programs when compared to MIT/Stanford etc.
Re: The IIT Entrance Exam
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
No factoring or quadratic formulas necessary. I'm going to write c_n instead of a_n and a,b instead of alpha,beta. Since a and b satisfy that equation, you know that a^2 = 6a+ 2, b^2 = 6b+ 2 and hence c_10 - 2 * c_8 = a^8 * (6a + 2) - b^8 * (6b + 2) + 2b^8 - 2a^8 = 6c_9. Dividing by 2c_9 gives 3. Edit: asafira beat me to it!
Using the same convention as yours, I tried to break c_10 in terms of c_9 as follows:
(a^10-b^10) = (e a + f b) * (a^9-b^9)
Multiplying out the RHS, e = f = 1 are the best choices, but there remained a residual. At a second glance though, this residual was proportional to (a^8-b^8). Problem solved.
Re: The IIT Entrance Exam
#35As 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…
You didn't include the real big guy of Google(who died in an unfortunate accident later) who was Brin's and Page's professor and mentor.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajeev_Motwani
Motwani joined Stanford soon after U.C. Berkeley. Motwani was one of the co-authors (with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Terry Winograd) of an influential early paper on the PageRank algorithm, the basis for Google's search techniques. He also co-authored another seminal search paper What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket with those same authors.[3]
He was also an author of two widely-used theoretical computer science textbooks, Randomized Algorithms (Cambridge University Press 1995, ISBN 978-0-521-47465-8, with Prabhakar Raghavan) and Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation (2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2000, with John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman).
Prior to his involvement with Google, Motwani founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS), an umbrella organization for several groups looking into new and innovative data management concepts. His research included data privacy, web search, robotics, and computational drug design
Re: The IIT Entrance Exam
#36As 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…
On the other hand, India has a huge population and its inevitable that it will have more than a few geniuses/great persons. Did IIT help make these people, or did IIT just select them via rigid examination and admission standards? If the latter, more worryingly, how many great people were condemned to mediocrity because they weren't selected?
Re: The IIT Entrance Exam
#37As 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.
> more about the fact that a huge amount of human potential is being wasted in India.
I think your text would make more sense by using "the world" instead of restricting to "India".
I have thought multiple times about the quantity of great people that could be having a great impact in our lives and are "missing". We have examples all over our history (islamic mathematics, old greeks,...) of different civilizations that accomplished huge achievements with smaller populations.
Obviously, I don't think that there is a genetic factor for certain ethnics to be more intelligent, but we still see how jews (13-14 million?) are on top of the Nobel Prizes on science, while arabic contribution is symbolic. The same prizes a few centuries ago would have a completely different destination.
The current distribution of Nobel Prizes surely shocks me more than seeing some Indian IT people on top of great companies (1 billion). Not to remove merit from the individuals, but from the system; I have always thought that there is something more in a person than the results of a "simple" exam.
Re: The IIT Entrance Exam
#38As 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.
I shall not say they didn't work hard. But admission to an IIT and the status that you get after that is more about rot, luck, parents who can afford it and the fact that overall quality of education in India is so dismal and whatever good there is the quantity is so sparse.
So , what happens is when you are not in one of the IITs or few top colleges - you are stuck with the stereotype of second grade, third grade and over the years you fall into the line without even knowing you could have been sth else, sth bigger or better.
It's IIT or nothing. Govt and public alike are trying hard keep it that way.
When new IITs were announced - most of the alumni and pundits were not even giving it a thought that more students shall have access to relatively better education and facilities ; they were worried that brand value of IITs shall be diluted. Uhh.. once you get in and get out getting the tag, you are the elite and don't want many around you to dilute your elitism. Fair enough.
Re: The IIT Entrance Exam
#39Surprised there wasn't greater discussion of the reservation quota, which it is widely agreed could single handedly fell the prestige/quality of the IITs.
Re: The IIT Entrance Exam
#40From the article: "Only two percent of students will be rewarded for their hard work. In 2012, Harvard accepted 5.9% of applicants. Top engineering schools MIT and Stanford had acceptance rates of 8.9% and 6.63%. The acceptance rate at the IITs, as represented by the pass rate in the JEE, was 2%. Every year, when the results are announced and the media swarms the accepted students, 490,000 students receive disappointing news."
I am NOT saying that the IIT admission process is easy, but I will say that this is the wrong way to show that the process is hard. Not all smart students vie to attend Harvard, MIT, and Stanford in quite the same way that many, many, many smart students vie to attend IIT. The base of applications is broader, by far, for IIT, partly because of the especially steep drop-off in quality and in prestige from the IIT echelon of universities in India to other universities. If we compared Harvard's number of admitted students in the most recent reported year, 2,029,
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/03/college-admits...
to the number of students who took the SAT college entrance test in the relevant high school graduation class, 1,664,479 students,
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/T...
we could calculate that 0.12 percent of all high school seniors in the United States who took a college entrance test were admitted to Harvard, quite a low base admission rate. The key, of course, is that many American students self-select out of applying to Harvard, and indeed don't self-select to submit an application to any "prestige" university.
That said, direct examination of the IIT examination item content
http://www.askiitians.com/iit-papers/iit-jee-papers.aspx
may suggest what level of performance on specific item content is necessary to be part of the small subset of the large number of IIT joint entrance examination test-takers who gain admission to an IIT campus. On that basis, I agree with the statement that the IIT undergraduate programs are highly selective and likely to collect on one campus many very smart young people who provide a good peer group to one another so that everyone on campus picks up habits of aiming high intellectually, as the IIT alumni I know here in Minnesota all seem to do.