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The IIT Entrance Exam

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Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#51

Post by rgovind »

108 wrote: post #48

"Students pay subsidized tuition at a fraction of the real cost of their education. The Indian government subsidizes over 80% of the costs of the IIT, with alumni donations only accounting for under 3% of the system’s budget. “While the total government funding to most other engineering colleges is around $2-4 million per year,” a critical article writes, “the amount varies between $18-26 million per year for each II…

The Indian govt is surely stupid in subsidizing higher education in place of primary education. However, there is a flip side. Even though the people are allowed to migrate, it is the same people who have brought the IT industry to Indian shores. According to a study commission admittedly by IITians, there is a positive economic benefit to funding IITs.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-11-25/india...

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#52

Post by rgovind »

rurounijones wrote: post #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).

You are right about smart people outside the 2%. IITs own study says that entrance exam marks vary by 1 or 2 for ranks between 2000 and 10000 The govt has recently opened 10+ new IITs. I think they should add many more..though.

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#53

Post by seanmcdirmid »

31reasons wrote: post #49
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

I don't think they are condemned to mediocrity just because IIT didn't select them. You will find far more non-IITian indians making impact in the world if you look for them. Just like not all fortune 500 CEOs come from Harvard, not all great engineers and scientists come from IIT.

True enough. But high-stakes testing and the value we place on them does act as a biased filter. I'm pretty sure it would have been very hard for me to personally thrive in such an environment.

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#54

Post by areddy »

tokenadult wrote: post #40

From 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 disappoint…

Agree with you. There are around 12 IITs while Harvard is a single institute(?). The article omitted JEE mains phase. 12.5 lakh students appear for mains, in 2013. 75,000 qualified for JEE advanced.

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#55

Post by 108 »

rgovind wrote: post #51
108 wrote: post #48

"Students pay subsidized tuition at a fraction of the real cost of their education. The Indian government subsidizes over 80% of the costs of the IIT, with alumni donations only accounting for under 3% of the system’s budget. “While the total government funding to most other engineering colleges is around $2-4 million per year,” a critical article writes, “the amount varies between $18-26 million per year for each II…

The Indian govt is surely stupid in subsidizing higher education in place of primary education. However, there is a flip side. Even though the people are allowed to migrate, it is the same people who have brought the IT industry to Indian shores. According to a study commission admittedly by IITians, there is a positive economic benefit to funding IITs. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-11-25/india...

More than stupid, the Indian government is clueless and careless about how it spends its earnings from the 2-3% of Indians that actually pay income tax. That coupled with rampant corruption and politicians only interested in saving their vote-banks adds to the woeful state of affairs.

If the Indian citizens started being more demanding about how their money was being spent, on whom and the ROI per rupee of tax collected, the government and the politicians would be forced to change. See, http://openspending.org/

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#56

Post by ruswick »

tokenadult wrote: post #40

From 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 disappoint…

This is my thought exactly, and made me immediately suspicious of the article's analysis.

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#57

Post by ashray »

Schwolop wrote: post #10
casual_slacker wrote: post #6

It's so strange to be considered a "peer" to people who have spent years working harder than I can imagine at the same career path.

I can completely empathise with this viewpoint. People jump through increasingly complicated hoops because everyone else is doing it, without stopping to think whether the end result they're after can be achieved in a simpler way. Then again, there are definitely benefits to competition encouraging a strong work ethic, even if what you finally end up doing doesn't require such efforts. (Anecdotal case in point; I wan…

That's the right choice - work harder or work smarter ? It's true that getting into a top school like the IIT will open some doors, but that's really important if you don't know about the doors you want to open and head down.

When someone already knows what they want, there's often a simpler way to get it. Unfortunately, that's not expected of 17/18 year olds and in fact, parents in India will say "Oh you want X now, but what if you want Y later ? Better go to an IIT so that your options are open".

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#58

Post by ashray »

sc00ter wrote: 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.

Since this is HN, I'd like to draw a parallel. Six gruelling hours of complex programming.

I think you can now appreciate the level of concentration that the exam requires because no question is easy. (well, to be fair, maybe 2-3% are..) So when you have to think really hard about each question, and think really fast to solve it, it becomes a bit tricky. I don't know if they have penalty marking now but before if you got a question wrong, you'd get a negative mark too!

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#59

Post by xxpor »

areddy wrote: post #54
tokenadult wrote: post #40

From 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 disappoint…

Agree with you. There are around 12 IITs while Harvard is a single institute(?). The article omitted JEE mains phase. 12.5 lakh students appear for mains, in 2013. 75,000 qualified for JEE advanced.

1.25 million, for those (like me) forgot how much a lakh is.

Re: The IIT Entrance Exam

#60

Post by sneak »

I don't know fuck-all about chemistry or physics (I dropped out of the 10th grade), but could someone confirm for me that the correct answer to that multiple choice aluminum-hit-with-an-alpha-particle question about 20% in to the article is (a)?
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