Discussions on Govt's proposal for Common Entrance Test (CET) for IITs, NITs and other engineering schools

People have been discussing a lot on this and I felt it’s good to put up in this forum all those we’re having between us.

The contentious issues are as follows:
1. It’s proposed that the CET would have some weightage on the +2 scores of the various central and state boards – many people are not liking this
2. A common test for all schools may also dilute the brand of IIT – this is a very controversial topic
3. Few people feel govt. is interfering too much into IIT, the autonomy is being lost
4. There’s one interesting angle is being also pointed out by few – a conspiracy theory where politicians are alleged to be trying to destroy the brand IIT (Interesting)

These are discussions:

Anandaroop Bhattacharya

I also do not endorse the Common Test proposal.

However, during my short stay in IIT-B, I had some first hand experience of seeing the present JEE and interacting with some of the students. Let me simply say that the JEE today is not the same that we took in our times. Today's format is purely based on multiple-choice questions where there is hardly any scope for testing "funda", We were given credit for "how" we tried to solve a problem irrespective of whether we succeeded at arriving at the correct answer. That format is a thing of the past. To quote my good friend in KGP, Prof. Suman Chakraborty (one of the most brilliant young profs in KGP today - check his website) "In today's JEE, the students try to eliminate wrong options rather than trying to arrive at the solution." And this is the skill the coaching centres of today impart in the students, most notorious among them being the ones in Kota, Rajasthan.

So, while I do not endorse Sibal's proposal, I strongly feel that the present JEE needs a major revision

In a related context, I would also like to mention that perhaps very few examination systems in the world can match the JEE/GATE in the way it is conducted. It is really unbelievable that such a fair and efficient system is possible in a Govt. organization in India. In so many years, there has been only one instance of paper leak in JEE (1997) - compare that statistics with any other exam in our country including CAT!!

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Kamalesh Ghosh

Folks, anything has a scope for improvement, no matter how good it is. Of course, IIT entrance could be too.

The question to be really asked is, was it higher priority to look at it than numerous other problems facing
the education sector as a whole? Do I need to point out those problems and the seriousness of their nature?

My point is, why has the HRD ministry taken so much interest lately in shaking up the whole IIT system
with various moves like this?  I am a total conspiracy theorist  in this matter.

I have a firm belief that a lobby of powerful politicians and maybe foreign powers too, have a  definite interest
in destroying/ diluting the IIT brand. Every step has been a measured one towards that goal, be it providing 27% obc
quota, opening up 10 more IITs or now this master stroke, to destroy the JEE altogether. Inclusion of board
marks means everything will go haywire as politician's children in Jharkhand and Bihar can get 99 % marks
in board exams if they ask their papa.

We really should try to understand the game behind the scenes and not view this thing as a simple administrative
issue.

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Anandaroop

I agree with you 100% on this. Actually, I had posted something very similar in the IITians FB page sometime last year. Essentially, it's almost identical to what you are alluding to.
https://www.facebook.com/alliits/posts/197691450301855?comment_id=1735110&offset=0&total_comments=4 

"Through contacts, money and muscle power, one can get his son or daughter a seat/job anywhere in India and maybe even to some of the top univs in the world. BUT NOT AT IIT or IIM. Our politicos find this extremely hard to digest!! Therefore, be it MM Joshi, Arjun Singh or Kapil Sibbal and irrespective of party lines, the effort to kill the JEE/GATE/CAT based system has been there for a long time. I hope like in previous instances, IITs push back strongly .... let's see."

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Rahul Mehta

Guys,

I fully support the points raised in the last two posts on this forum. In fact, I saw something similar in an article by Prof Kanchan Chowdhury. This article can be found here:

http://www.scholarsavenue.org/2009/08/20/letter-from-president-iitta/

Quoting from this article,

For a long time, the IIT system has been the sore point of the moneyed and powerful persons of the country as it allows (apart from close to 50% socially disadvantaged) only the brilliant students to get into the system. Many rich and powerful have sent their children abroad because they could not get into the IITs. How long can this situation be allowed to continue!

Many private institutions have come up with large investments. Foreign Universities (not necessarily the best ones) would be allowed to set up their campuses on Indian soil very soon. How would they get competent faculty? Therefore, it has become absolutely necessary to frustrate the existing and future IIT faculty, particularly the younger teachers, by giving them a raw deal in salary and perks so that they finally decide to switch to systems that can serve the rich and the influential. The plot seems perfect in planning and execution. The first battle has been won by those opposed to IIT system. But Friends, we have to reach to the nation and the people, who are supreme and placed higher than even the Government that has let us down so badly, explaining them the present situation and projection of the future. That is our hope and the only hope to rescue IIT system from extinction.
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Kanishka

Not to be offensive, but I think this pro JEE bias stinks of a certain kind of casteism - where people who have gone through the grind somehow feel they are superior to those who haven't. If the onus is entirely on the entrance exam to define a population that's capable of growing into competent engineers, it easily leads to an institution that can abdicate it's responsibility towards it's students, since the blessed ones will sail through and shine, no matter how inferior the quality of courses and teaching. 

The GRE or SAT, in spite of being  "easy" exams, still serve as a major part of the admission criteria to institutions with much higher standards than the IITs.

There is immense scope to democratize access to the IITs, and give our teenagers the quality of life they deserve. But whether that is the motive behind the HRD ministry's moves or not, I don't know.

CET for IITs and other engineering schools in India

Recently the government has announced that there would be a common entrance test for IITs and many other government engineering colleges. This means the IIT-JEE would be replaced by a CET and would be the basis of entree to not only the IITs but many other colleges.

Subsequent to the announcement, there has been lot of debates in many forum. People are happy, disgusted, frustrated, angry and the most interesting part is that even the IITs are also not unanimous with their decision whether they should accept this or reject.

Here are some reactions:

Chetan Bhagat: Strongly against (He has written extensively on this in several news paper)

Many others are saying that many premier institutes like St. Stephens and others take students based in +2 scores, and a similar thing (as announced as a part of the CET) for IITs should be also OK.

Dhananjay (IIT KGP):

Let me put it on record that I am personally all for one and only one test similar to SAT and admission based on 12th Standard scores (using some weightage for ICSE, CBSE, IB, PU, etc.). It is ridiculous why these guys again want two tests on the same day. Instead, they should focus on designing one test that can grade student effectively. English scores should also be one of the criteria for admission into IITs - maybe we can consider TOEFL scores if we dont want to design our own course.

Let us also accept that current JEE is not producing desirous results. First year classes are filled with coaching school products who are just not able to cope.  NRN talks about this in his interview in today's newspaper. IITs are not producing students like old times and are now focused on mass production. Maybe that is the call of the day and I dont want to get into this discussion.

Once again, I am for one exam (not the current two exam format too) all India based on which students can apply anywhere.

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Sharmik (IIT KGP)

First off, I would like to thank Subhashis for including me in the conversation that deals with a matter close to all our hearts.

Let me start by saying while I strongly agree that one can find many things to "crib" about regarding the quality of the faculty at IIT-KGP, I think this issue is not directly related to the question at hand: Is it a good idea to have one common entrance exam for all engineering colleges and/or make the admissions criteria "broader" (including board marks, scores on personality tests, taking into account extra-curricular activities etc.)

IMHO, the answer is "no" for the following reason:

I saw the JEE as a test that tries to identify the top 1% students in mathematical / scientific ability/achievement at the 12th grade level. Not only that, it is also designed to distinguish between the top 0.001% (the truly outstanding) from the mere top 1-2%.
In such a test, it is very likely that a student who is at the 90th percentile (top 10%) and a student at the 80th percentile will be indistinguishable from each other.

On the other hand, a test designed for the purpose of selecting students for many engineering colleges will necessarily have to distinguish between the 80th and the 90th percentile student - and in doing so will no longer be able to identify the top 0.01% student from the mere top 1%.

Let me illustrate this further: In KGP, my friend Debraj (not from my dept) was much better than me in Math. In our 1st and 2nd year courses, he breezed through the Math with Ex-es, whereas I struggled to get a D (and not because I did not study). In fact he  had a much higher JEE rank than me (in the low 100s vs. in the 1200s for me). The JEE was successful in being able to distinguish the brilliant (him) from the merely good (me). However, in the GRE exam, both of us got the same high mathematical ability score.

You may have noticed that for the math GRE, a score of 800 corresponds to a the 95th percentile. Please note that the GRE did the job it was designed to do - distinguish between students at the 40th, 60th, 80th and even the 95th percentile in ability. It cannot be used to identify the top 0.1% (or even the top 1%) from among the top 5%. I fear that in moving to a system where the same test is used for a variety of colleges, we'll have to necessarily make the test more like the GRE in its resolution than the JEE of yore.

So for a very technical reason alone, I think the idea redesigning the JEE for use by a large number of universities is a bad idea. I would be happy to hear the thoughts of all people here on this.

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I also confess to have a different, and much more optimistic, outlook on current admissions.

Regarding tuitions: As a steel-town boy in the mid-90s, I was perhaps near the epicenter of the tuition mania - and one thing I can attest is the following: I never encountered a single instance of a not-the-sharpest-tool-in-the-shed type of guy making it to IIT based on the benefits provided by tuition. Over 1000 students used to take tuition from the most sought after teachers. only about 25 would make it to JEE - and maybe 100 more to the more competitive schools like RECs, BIT etc.  (The teachers would use this as publicity to attract the next bunch of suckers, er. sorry customers). The prime function of the tuition was to make sure we studied with regularity. Had it not been for the tuition, I would have probably slacked off too much to make the cut. Motivated students, like my school senior Abhishek Chandra who was AIR 10 in 1993, did not bother attend tuition.

Stress and the ripples of under-performance (dropout, even suicide) were with us even during our times (Chetan Bhagat captured some of it well in FPS). I may be mistaken - but I don't seem to think that they have increased that much (our 24-hour news channels would be on any suicide in a micro-second and make it a recurring story for a month). My personal opinion is that we could do a better job in helping students who fall behind - but that's a totally different topic.

Regarding "Personality tests": I think they have some serious issues here (a) they can be easily gamed by the intelligent-but-unscrupulous, and (b) some truly intelligent people - of the sort that make real innovative breakthroughs - have contrarian personailities - and would flunk any HR-administered tests (if they answered honestly - which they are more likely to do when young). I for one, would want to have them in IIT - not weed them out.

Once again, I welcome the opportunity to express my opinions on the matter - and look forward to hearing from others as well

Sincerely
~Shramik Sengupta
(Class of 98 - LLR; Biotech)

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My comments:

I think any decision is good as long as it's debated, and decided after taking into accounts all the sides. There has been discussions in forum like this, but what's unfortunate is that similar things might not have happened at the highest levels, and that's why even IITs are divided now. This is surely not a good sign that few IITs have 'broken out'. I feel that's the most important thing to take care now. IIT as a system has been working with a common goal and if they are now divided the entire system breaks down. I believe IIT alumni should try to assert their influence and make sure that the IITs are not divided like this - that's a very bad precedence. There should have been enough debates and discussions, which I feel is totally missing and people are taking unilateral decisions.

Illu & Rangoli - A Very Rare Form of Art That Finally Became Extinct

People who haven't seen the Illumination and the Rangoli competition on Diwali in IIT Kharagpur have absolutely no idea what's it about. Though lately it has been covered a bit in some national media, still it remains an almost unknown facade of IIT Kharagpur, which is unique not only to the rest of world, but also to all the other IITs. It's an excellent example of a mammoth team work, unparalleled intricate project planning & management - accurate to the minutest level, timely delivery of the highest quality with more than 6 sigma precision (it never failed ever) and finally a very high quality of art that you would see no where else in the world.

First let be try to explain the magnanimity of the event. Rangoli is a well known form of art very popular in most parts of India. It's an art with various powdered colors (used in Indian festivals like Diwali and Holi) known as gulal and also some other colored materials like tumeric or haldi powder. In most houses in North India the women folk create colorful Rangoli during festivals. So from that point of view it's not something that's unique. But what's indeed unique is the size. Generally the common rooms of the hostels were used to create these huge Rangolis which used to be at least 20'x20' or even more. As you can see in the above picture, it's not possible to capture a full Rangoli in a single frame of a picture unless you break the walls of the rooms and tale a snap from 100ft. above.

Next let me explain the most unique thing - that's the illumination or more commonly known as Illu in the KGP lingo. The above picture is just a portion of a lighted facade of an Illu of one of the hostels. The entire front elevation of all the hostels used to be lighted like what you can see in the picture. The interesting thing here is that the complete lighting was done with earthen lamps - holding a small quantity of oil which can burn a small piece of cloth dipped in it only for a few minutes. Huge structures, called chatai, stitched out of flattened pieces of bamboo - sized at least 20'x20' - were put up against the walls of the hostels covering the complete front elevations. The three storied hostel buildings stretching some 100 or 200 ft were completely covered with these chatais. Depending on the actual size, at least some dozens of chatais were required to cover the walls for each hostel. Chalks were used to draw marks on each of the chatais such that when all these chatais were put up in the correct order a complete sketch was visible from a distance. The earthen lamps were then tied to the chatais along the chalk-marks, which formed the outlines of the sketch. When all the lamps were all lit together then the sketch appeared on the chatais. From a distance they looked like huge bill boards. That's what we used to call Illu. The sketches used to be generally chosen from Indian mythologies, mainly Ramayana and Mahabharata.

Now let's come to the monumental task required to put up the Illu and the Rangoli. It required serious planning and meticulous execution. I don't think I would ever get to see such levels of project planning and execution ever in my life. The corporates need to take lessons of leadership and team work from this. The entire event required a hierarchical team with an over all project manager, team-leads for various teams, a very detailed project planning with task breakdown to the minutest levels, regular tracking of the project for 2 weeks and finally a fully motivated team of few hundred residents of each hostel working almost round the clock without any grievance and grudge. The over all project manager used to be the president or the secretary for Socio Cultural activities of the hall. You can see this post as the CEO of a company. Apart from him, all the other team leads were selected solely based on their artistic skills. Like during the last two years of my stay in RK Hall of Residence, Pushpen used to be the unanimous choice to lead the sketches and Rangoli because he was the best painter in our hall. There were other guys also with good aptitude for art, but still there was never any confusion or politics in selecting Pushpen as the GM in charge of Rangoli. Most companies fail because they choose the wrong person - mostly due to legacy or internal politics. But Illu and Rangoli never failed.

Next comes the ingenuity required to draw the sketches for Rangoli and Illu. Off course the sketches were drawn first on paper and then Pushpen used to blow it up using a very simple technique that had been passed to the juniors for years by the seniors. Pushpen used to first create a miniature of the complete front facade of the hostel on a paper where 1 cm used to represent 10ft. In this scale a chatai of size 20'x20' was a small square of 2cm by 2cm in his paper. Once the miniature sketch was complete on the paper, each chatai got its portion defined. Pushpen used to enumerate each chatai based on its coordinates in his paper and assigned the other artistically inclined people for each chatai. Pushpen had the complete right to choose his team based on the skills he felt were required to mark the outlines of the sketches on the chatais with chalk. This is again something most corporates miss now-a-days and finally land up in big mess.

Each chatai owner used to first draw his portion on a paper with a larger scale, say 1cm representing now 1ft. As each chatai used to be 20'x20' in size he could fit his sketch on a paper sized 20cm by 20cm. This helped him to blow up the sketch on the chatai very accurately. Pushpen used to keep a track of the progress on each chatai. I still wonder how meticulously the guys used to blow up the sketches that, when all 100 chatais were stitched together, nothing looked out of proportion.

The chalk marks on the chatais were ready a few days before Diwali. The next major task was to put those up against the walls. Enough safety measures were taken to avoid any accident in putting up chatais as high as 30 ft. I haven't heard of any accident during my four years of stay. Once the chatais were put up the earthen lamps were tied along the chalk marks.

The climax was the few minutes before the troupe of judges came for inspection. As the lamps would burn only for 5 minutes in the normal scenario, they had to be lit only when the judges came. We had a team of people giving latest information about the coordinates of the judges. When the judges were just 1-2 minutes from our hostel we started the task of lighting the lamps - the task that required the maximum coordination and involvement. Around 20000 lamps had to be lit in 1 or 2 minutes of time by some 150-200 people. This meant each person lighting 100 lamps in less than 2 minutes - that's at the rate of almost 1 lamp a second. Here also we used a very simple tactic that had been handed over by the seniors for years. Each person, with 100 lamps to light, used to first light 50 alternate lamps in the first minute so that even if he failed to light the remaining 50 still the portion of the outline of the sketch assigned to him would be lit - even though some what sparsely - by alternate lamps. In the second minute he would come back and light the remaining alternate lamps. I don't think there can be any better example of planning for a contingency or disaster management. Those were the days before any of us went to management schools. But still if I look back I find that we used to follow everything that any successful project should follow. Perhaps it's true that management is just common sense!!

It's just fascinating to even think of the scenario where an entire sketch of 200'x30' comes up to light in just 2 minutes of time. The satisfaction was immense and the competition a very fiercely fought one. Even the girls used to put up equal effort.

I've graduated in 96, more than 13 years. But still if I've to mention a single thing about IIT KGP that stands out it's undoubtedly the Illu and the Rangoli. More than the high quality of art involved it taught us the best lessons of team work, obeying the orders of the team lead and completing a project on time. Though nothing was maintained on a MS Project Planner, still each of us knew precisely our tasks. Not a single moment was wasted. Not a single order was contested. We had supreme faith on Pushpen about his abilities. Such a faith came only from the credibility that he had shown in the previous years. We never fought for power, never wasted time in useless discussions.

I wish we saw the same thing in our corporate lives!!

Sadly... this tradition of Illu and Rangoli has come to an end. 2007 was the last time that KGP saw the Illu. We heard that the participation had dwindled down a lot gradually. I feel this had to happen sometime. Even ten years back KGP was in secluded part of the world - it took at least 30 minutes on a bicycle (the only mode of transport other than the rickshaw) from the railway station. Once you're in KGP, we'd nothing else of the outside world. All our entertainment and fun and frolic were within KGP. Even internet connections were things of luxury and were available only in the labs. But with time, every room in the hostel had internet connection - which opened up unlimited entertainment within the four walls of your room. Also I'm sure the seclusion would have ended in the last few years. The very tradition of Illu and Rangoli which used to be our life line became an obligation in later times. Professional competition also increased fiercely. The two weeks spent on the preparation were gradually seen as sheer wastage of time and resources. People would have rather enjoyed spending that time in some academic preparations. What-so-ever be the actual reason it's indeed a sad end to an art that never existed elsewhere and will never exist anywhere else.

Reference and source of pictures

• ILU snaps by Sandeep Gupta
• IIT Foundation site
• Pictures by Amit Kumar Saha
• Maddy's Blog: ILU 2005, Rangoli 2005, Others
• Kundan Sen's Collection on Illu
• Other Kundan Sen KGP collection: SF 96, SF 97, SF 98, KGP Campus
• eSnips
• Video on Illu (RK Hall)

Impact of IIT

Reproduced from Impacting the nation, published under "Inspire Innovate Transform" in Times of India, Bangalore, 11th Dec, with reference to upcoming Pan IIT Meet on 18-20 Dec in IIT Madras

"There have been many myths associated with IIT," begins B Santhanam. "For instance, people believe that there aren't too many IITians becoming entrepreneurs and some who believe that IITians pursue their careers abroad and never return to India. This study was conducted in partnership with the Indian Brand Equity Fund (IBEF) and Zinnov Management Consulting who helped us in both design and management. Through the IIT Alumni Impact Study, we have cleared such misconceptions and delivered an explicit picture with regard to the IIT’s contribution to the nation and the world at large. Through a global web-based survey, the study attempts to map the impact of IITians on the global economy across impact areas like entrepreneurship, scientific and technological achievement as well as social transformation, research and leadership over the last 50 years. From a total of 4,500 responses across seven IITs, there have been many interesting findings and surprising conclusions. Some of the findings are:

1. IIT alumni in senior positions in the industry and government sector across the world today have budgetary responsibility for over USD 885 billion, that's close to 90% of India's GDP
2. Prior to 2001, four out of 10 alumni, were managing top leadership roles in corporations, educational institutions, research labs, politics and as entrepreneurial heads of their companies
3. IIT alumni contribute over USD 450 billion (close to 50% of India's GDP) to the economy.
4. Seven out of 10 alumni are currently based in India and two out of 10 alumni return to India after their stint in other parts of the world.
5. 54% of the top 500 Indian companies currently have at least one IIT alumnus on their Board of Directors. That apart, these companies have a cumulative revenue which is ten times greater than other companies that IITians are not a part of.
6. One in 10 IIT alumni has started their own company, with over 40% of them being serial entrepreneurs and 42% of the senior alumni are in top leadership roles.. Of these, twothirds of the companies founded are in India which again re-affirms the contribution of IITians towards the nation-building process