516 - Growing influence of coaching classes: ‘Change in JEE criteria has failed to achieve the desired objective’ - Indian Express

Growing influence of coaching classes: ‘Change in JEE criteria has failed to achieve the desired objective’

Every move the JEE administration makes to reduce the role of coaching classes seems to backfire.

Written by Kannan M Moudgalya | Updated: November 17, 2015 9:14 am

Students sit with their laptops while attending a lecture. (File photo)

The Rajat Moona Committee has come up with figures that state that after 12th marks were included to decide the rank of JEE, the number of students who were trained at coaching classes went up. There was a valid reason to include class12 marks as students were completely ignoring schools so as to prepare for JEE. Unfortunately, this move seems to have strengthened the role of coaching classes: many more seem to have gone for coaching, possibly for combined class 12 and JEE coaching.

Every move the JEE administration makes to reduce the role of coaching classes seems to backfire. Not too long ago, the maximum number of attempts in the original JEE was reduced to two, to deny an unfair advantage to the wealthy, who can afford a lot more of coaching. Unfortunately, this resulted in students enrolling in coaching classes earlier than before, as one could attempt JEE only twice, and this increased the coaching business, naturally by those who could afford it.

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There is a reason to believe that coaching classes are seen by the public as an insurance against uncertainties introduced through major changes/disruptions in JEE. If the 12th marks get removed now, it could be considered as another major change, and there is no guarantee that the role of coaching will not increase yet again.

About 10 years ago, the JEE coaching business was considered to be about Rs 10,000 crore worth. An Assocham survey in 2013 estimated the size of coaching business to be $23.7 billion and that it would reach $40 billion in 2015. For further discussion, we will take the extent of JEE-related coaching to be of the order of Rs 1,50,000 crore worth. I am tempted to say that the coaching classes have beaten the JEE system.

Rs 1,50,000 crore is a lot more than the annual budget of all IITs and NITs put-together. As a matter of fact, the cost of establishing all the existing IITs and NITs together would not have been more than this amount. Coaching classes are not a cause, but a symptom of the malaise in the system. Given that the public is bent on going to all lengths to get admission to their wards in top IITs and NITs, this will continue to happen. 

Their financial inputs help pay teachers of JEE coaching classes ludicrous salaries, who in turn devise methods to beat the exam. JEE coaching classes thrive because of the demand-supply mismatch in engineering education. The only guaranteed way to get rid of the coaching classes is to increase the number of good quality seats fifty to hundred fold and provide admission on demand to every reasonably good student.

This is not going to happen through the traditional approach of IIT-NIT centric undergraduate education, despite the tens of new IITs and NITs that are being established. Despite this thrust, there is an all around deterioration of overall engineering education during the last decade. The increasing faculty shortage in all the IITs and NITs, including the well established ones, does not give confidence in this approach.

We can achieve the above said task of good engineering education on demand only by improving the quality of the about 5,000 engineering colleges that already exist in the country. Top IITs, NITs and select engineering colleges should be encouraged to take up this nation-building task. In order to provide an undivided attention to this important work, and to avoid any conflict of interest, they may be requested to vacate the undergraduate training space. To produce the large number of teachers required in the engineering colleges, the postgraduate and research programmes of top IITs-NITs be strengthened manifold. Hopefully, successful coaching classes can be encouraged to convert themselves into good engineering colleges. Naturally, government interventions are required in this approach.

Coming back to the Rajat Moona Committee report, most families possibly find it difficult to provide the extraordinary financial and other kind of support required to their female children to clear the entrance exams. This may be one important reason why the presence of females is abysmally low in top IITs and NITs. What I am proposing now will address this issue and also other imbalances, such as urban-rural.

The Rs 1,50,000 crore that is annually spent on coaching is a colossal national waste. Possibly it helps a small percentage of students to get better, to become good enough to secure admission in top institutions, but for all others, it is an utter waste. It may actually lead to the loss of self confidence of more than 90 per cent of our aspiring youth who are denied admission in these institutions, even after a rigorous preparation.

Burning out and the loss of childhood are other collateral damages that result in this warlike preparation.

Opponents to the proposed approach give examples, such as China and South Korea, where also a similar rigorous selection process is possibly in place. But should we not learn from good examples, such as the ones practised in the west and also in countries like Israel? It is a pleasure to see Israeli high school students spending all their energies in new ideas, projects and inventions, without having to worry about the future admission processes and round the clock preparation for entrance exams.

Finally, the approach proposed here has the potential to make us a centre of learning for the whole world. A trillion dollar education economy is certainly achievable in the near term.

(The author is a professor of Chemical Engineering, Systems and Control, and Educational Technology at IIT-Bombay)

515 - The Other side of JEE by Deepak Agarwal

The Other side of JEE by Deepak Agarwal

Story of an Indian engineer

By Deepak Agarwal

Jun 15, 2015

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Every April, the railway station in Kota, Rajasthan gets swamped by thousands of middle class Indian parents with their ward in tow. They all have similar busy-bee behaviour with a mixture of anxiety to settle the ward down in a new town and burning hope for a good future of the ward. Wards are usually young boys and girls between 13-15 years of age, still carrying a streak of child in them.

They come from all over the country. These are people from Bihar, UP, Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Interior Maharashtra, Orissa, north Karnataka, Seven-sisters, Andhra Pradesh and places hidden somewhere in the finer details of map of India. They are people who are clerks in state governments, engineers in steel plants or on irrigation canals, doctors running clinics, businessmen running showrooms and dealerships, teachers in government schools and even professors in some big universities. They are quintessential middle class, who never made it big. They are people whose heart is in palpitation about  intense competition their ward will face to find his or her mark in inhumanly competitive India, competition worse than what you would have seen among wild beasts in migration in Africa on Animal Planet. The scene on the railway station is no different.

They are approximately 100,000 in number in Kota alone*. They are all here to chase IIT JEE* dream. IIT JEE means a passport to well paid job and possibly good life. These kids will be here for 3-4 years**, sweating out to learn Physics, Chemistry and Maths and ace IIT JEE.

Within two weeks, this number gets settled in hostels, independent rooms, shanty and chawl accommodations and left in alien place to fend for themselves with usual see-off "Son! work hard. It's only 3 years. Your life will be made. Do not disappoint your mother. Remember sacrifices we are making. If your brother could, you can. Eat well. Keep good company. Finish your tutorials same day. Call us every afternoon". And so on.... a childhood cut short with a snip...

Mid April, the grind starts. These impressionable young minds do not attend school. The private coaching classes make "suitable arrangements" for children's school continuity while administration turns into an ostrich and bury its head. Children spend from early morning 6:00 AM till 9:00 PM in coaching classes with almost 200 children in each class, with weekly and monthly test thrown in to segment children. The better test takers are segregated into exclusive sections to be coached by better faculty. Weaker are provided continuity with impression of obscurity of JEE outcome. System and parents go after them to do better and move to privileged sections. Play stops, social interaction stops, travel stops, vacation are none, science experiments in sham schools are mechanical and ability to look at world with wonder and hope extinguishes. The goal hardens to clear IIT JEE come what may, losing the entire meaning of the Win. Three years of grind culminates in famous JEE tests in blistering heat of May and June. Some children are upbeat, some fall sick with trepidation, some have already lost hope but most of them take the tests.

There are two outcomes. One is heart-breaking and other is heart-rending.

Less than 2% make it to get an admission through JEE to one of the prestigious IITs*** or NITs^. 98% get beaten and are those who could not live up to system's criteria and parental expectation. Precious years lost in learning what they won't need. Precious years lost in not being good in social skills, communication skills, teamwork and self-awareness. They go back into oblivion to fight another battle of finding a job with their soul crushed. Net outcome, a nation full of so called losers and opportunity for another set of private coaching classes to polish students for bank exams, government jobs, B. Ed exams, soft-skills and so on. These 98% who have put in sweat, blood and money to become IITians then crank up the private engineering school business, who gleefully exploit the opportunity. Even those who make it to NITs more often than not carry a sense of inadequacy of having not made it to IITs. It breaks my heart.

Those 2% who make it, are on the top of the world. However, their story (most cases) slowly turns into a heart-rending one. Among approximately 12,00,000 who write the IIT JEE tests, successful ones get a rank, a number which can swings wildly with answering of just one question right or wrong. In the month of July, these children fill a counseling sheet to rank order their choice of IITs (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur and so on) along with choice of engineering discipline (Computer science, Mechanical, Civil, Metallurgy and so on) and submit the counseling sheet to a big wheel of fortune. Social strata and education levels in child's family has huge influence on how the counseling sheet is filled. Most of the parents are elated with any outcome from the wheel of fortune. Sweets are distributed and parties are thrown for child's joining Metallurgy at IIT Kharagpur (no offense to Metallurgy department at IIT Kharagpur) at July end. Passport to good life through IIT has been secured, so they think.

When this teenager joins IIT, new found freedom, new friends, new ideas and possibilities are aplenty and bewildering and anything in the world seems within his grasp but he is also flummoxed why is he learning about alloys and slag in metallurgy. He is quick to reject what he does not like but almost always fails to choose wisely for his lack of self awareness. Some get involved in random extracurricular activities to build their profile, some do internships in unrelated areas, some simply give up and take to apathy with a bottle. With every distraction his CGPA suffers, his loathness for metallurgy increases and trials become more frenetic. Four years pass by in a jiffy in trial and errors and comparisons and now this adult finds himself in famous placement season at IITs. At this juncture,  three paths emerge.

First. Those students who were focused and well supported by their family (better educated) are the ones who choose engineering discipline as per their interest, treat IIT only as means to a goal and who keep themselves to their studies secure good CGPA. They also receive timely career guidance. They secure admissions to US MS and PhD programs. Later they are flowered by the US education system. 

Second. Those students who end up thinking IIT to be an end in itself, continue to experiment with themselves. They receive conflicting and myriad career guidance. Indian industry always hungry and selfish for their own growth lures them as raw talent. IT Industry hires and puts all metallurgy, civil, electrical engineers etc. through six months of grueling training say in Mysore and forges them into coders. Similarly lot of financial services firms, make them do inane and unending analysis of alien US stocks in back office support. They still wonder and fret about why are they doing things they have been asked to do. Their poor social skills come in the way of their growth in knowledge industry where teamwork, communication and collaborative problem solving are often more important than just analytical brilliance. They were told that they were the brightest when they entered IITs yet they can not reconcile it with reality of work they do. Some quieten after sometime because they get to travel to US and do same thing there. Some take courage to act, which is not to find their passion but only to correct the wrong which has happened.

Third. Those students who end up or take up a job in the industry which is relevant to their engineering discipline. However initially the metallurgy engineer finds it hard to fathom authority, appreciate industry rules, earn respect from peers and working in teams in heat and swelter of a steel plant. The feeling is exacerbated mostly because of lack of poor social skills and ability to handle adversity. He pines to escape from this work which he never aspired for and make his mark in. Very few students who indeed stick with their first job actually end up making a good career because of sheer alignment between what they studied with the industry they are in. However most are desperate to discover themselves and sometimes take courage to act.

Both second and third paths now move towards making repeated attempts to secure admission to a good MBA program and when they succeed, in most cases the story above is repeated once again. Those who do not succeed or make an attempt slowly learn to love what they do. It is during MBA that I personally meet them. It leaves my my heart rending. 

What could we do to avoid this colossal waste of human talent and spirit who gets beaten early on and then colossal waste of talent who finds itself on the wrong boat. Should we sit like industry which as long as it get manpower it only looks for short term fixes of training centers in Mysore and other vocational trainings? Should we wait for leadership like Paul Polman who at Unilever has stopped giving quarterly results and has stopped giving earning guidance to focus on long term things?

What do we fix? Should we rethink grounds up?

1. Fix our School Education.

Lets start from very beginning. Ours is a system devised by one Lord Macaulay for creating clerks for the British Raj. We have not yet come out of it. One has to read Kautilya, Froebel, Rossouw, Margaret McMillan, Bertrand Russell and Maria Montessori to know what the school system should be. 

It can be done with better goal such as "Every child should be employable right after 12th standard". It is not a pipe dream. It happens in Scandinavia, US, China, Australia, Israel and many countries where most students are able to join economic systems right after their secondary/ high school. It means that school education has to be both knowledge and skill based not just knowledge based which currently it is because it is expected to meet an objective outside its purview and mandate (read point 2 below). This expectation results in lot of unnecessary somersaults (smart class, iPads, and what not) which makes them look ludicrous to parents and inscrutable to children.

After taking this unnecessary and unreal yoke off its back, we need to scale our school infrastructure. We need a visionary and uncompromising leadership to create public schools like that of Dwight Eisenhower's roads, when he realized that public roads are essentials for growth and security of the nation and economic well being of people, he went after creatingInterstate Road System between 1953-1961. 

This probably is the only way to make "Make in India" a reality.

2. Scrap JEE

A very renowned professor with PhD and enormous number of publications remarked to me that  JEE is a wrong test (incidentally the year he made this remark to me, his son was in a coaching class preparing for JEE). The level of Physics, Chemistry and Math it tests, should be used to possibly give admissions to CERN in Switzerland or pure science programs not to relatively humble technology institutes which are supposed to produce engineers for industry and not fundamental science whizkids. 

JEE is a relic from past. Its a symbol of command and control model of economy and handles admissions same way. It is from the days where connectivity and information was hard to come by. It is unnecessarily centralized solution where there is no central problem. The damage it ends up creating is enormous and disgusting i.e. 2 % winners and 98 % losers. The systemic branding of a child at a tender age of 16-18 as loser is downright evil and grossly insensitive. In parallel, it ends up creating distortion in the preceding schooling system at least in middle and secondary school systems.

We only need a simple standardized aptitude test which guarantees nothing and evidence of interest and effort through school education for selection to individual IITs. Let's ask it this way, if Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Delft and several others can individually get approximately 800 students each and every year and at the same time produce technocrats loved by Industry, why can not individual IITs? The decentralization create more distributed opportunity for more number of applicants with no single point of failure and stigma. IIT administrators love JEE because it helps them to hide behind the brand of JEE and talent it secures them. JEE has given them so much comfort that among 5 oldest IITs, only IIT Kharagpur bothers to market itself with "Why choose IIT Kharagpur", whereas IITBHU website does not even work.

3. Make Higher Education broad based 

Why should we all be engineers and sometime doctors? Why do we need engineering colleges at every nook and corner of every tier I and tier II city? Are we not doing well in media, television and films? Are we not doing well in tourism and need to do better? Are we not doing well in fashion and apparel and need to do better? Are we not writing better literature and Indian authors making a mark worldwide? Why should these things be only for those who are aware and conscientious about them in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata? I think we need to broadbase higher education across different fields through institutions such as NIFTs, NLUs and others but we need to do more. We need to do better in journalism, art, history, anthropology, psychology and several other fields. This can be done only by first doing 2 and in parallel 1 above so that our children across nation are more aware about themselves during school days and then can choose appropriately in higher education.

 (Author 's view are personal)

Highlights:

*There are several such towns now, Kota remains most famous among them. JEE stands for Joint Entrance Exam. 

** Some children start from 9th grade meaning 4 years of IIT coaching. Some start at 10th grade meaning 3 years of IIT coaching.

*** IIT - Indian Institute of Technology

^    NIT - National Institute of Technology

514 - China rising, India falling: IITs are an illustrative example of the dumbing down of Indian universities - TNN Blogs

China rising, India falling: IITs are an illustrative example of the dumbing down of Indian universities

January 6, 2015, 12:00 AM IST Asit K Biswas in TOI Edit Page | Edit Page, India | TOI

Last September, Indian Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, gave me an honorary Doctor of Science degree. When the honour was conferred President Pranab Mukherjee, in his capacity as visitor to the institute, lamented that no Indian university is now ranked among the top 200 in the world even though historically the country had excellent educational universities like Takshashila and Nalanda.

President Mukherjee’s contention raises two serious issues. First, how relevant are university ranking processes and do these give a fair indication of the quality and appropriateness of education in a rapidly changing world? Second, should Indian universities be concerned that not even one is in the top 200?

There are now three ranking systems. The oldest one is Academic Ranking of World Universities, popularly known as Shanghai rankings because it was started by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2003. It is updated biannually.

The Times Higher Education (THE) World Education Ranking started in 2004 in collaboration with Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). In 2010 QS went its own way with its own ranking methodology whose citation data base is provided by Thomson Reuters. The three ranking systems provide different results because criteria used as well as their relative weights differ. Many of the criteria are subjective and dependent on views of stakeholders sampled. With different stakeholders, the results could be very different.

To be ranked, universities have to continually fill up numerous surveys from the three ranking organisations. How reliable is self-reporting when results have high stakes as there are considerable economic and reputational consequences?

University rankings have become an important tool to attract high-quality staff, good students and serious funding. For administrators, politicians, government officials, funding agencies and media, rankings are important. Thus, temptation to manipulate data is quite significant. Providing regular global rankings data have become a fiercely competitive, lucrative and booming market. The way rankings are done at present, the roles of poachers and gamekeepers have become blurred.

No matter how the three ranking systems are assessed, they do not consider how good or relevant teaching quality is. Sadly, there is no indication that the system is likely to change in the near future because universities that rank within the first 200 simply refuse to provide such information. Not surprisingly, they would like to maintain the status quo since it serves their agenda well.

From my perspective, even though not a single Indian university is within the Global 200, i am not overtly worried about this fact so long as they can provide quality education to prepare the students for a rapidly changing world. Sadly, this is not happening.

The country made a good beginning as early as September 1944 when it was announced that an ‘Indian MIT’ would be set up. Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, was conceived in the image of MIT and started functioning in 1951. When i joined this institution as a student, in 1954, it truly had an all-India character, with the best faculty and students available. When the second IIT was established in Kanpur a large number of faculty left Kharagpur, including M S Muthana who became director of IIT Kanpur. Over the years, as the number of IITs proliferated, these have become provincial institutions.

Until recently, admissions to IITs were strictly on the basis of quality. IITs became a respected global brand because they selected students who were the best in India. With the proliferation of IITs and quota system for admission, the overall quality of future IIT graduates is bound to decline.

Sadly, for political expediency, India does not have a single MIT as in the United States, but at least 21 IITs in the foreseeable future. Not surprisingly, in 2014, early results showed that during the first phase only 9,061 of 9,711 seats were filled. There is still high demand for the first five IITs (Kharagpur, Kanpur, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai) but not for the newer ones.

This is also reflected in quality and retention of staff. Overall, in IITs nearly 30% of faculty positions cannot be filled because of lack of quality staff. Indian politicians, for the sake of short-term gains, have killed the goose that laid golden eggs!

Compare this with Chinese policy. In 1998, the Chinese government decided to support only nine of their 2,000 universities to become world class. The results have been truly spectacular. China is now supporting a few universities at a much higher level so that these become globally some of the best. This does not mean research and teaching facilities are not supported at other universities but only that the elite universities are supported at a much higher level. Other countries like Germany have followed similarly successful policies. Current Indian policies are unlikely to produce world-class universities.

Irrespective of whether any Indian university is ranked within the first 200 of the world, the quality of education has to be improved significantly so that graduates receive the skills they need for employment. If India wants to have elite global universities it has to select a few that have the necessary potential and comparative advantage, then support them consistently over the long term with higher funding and less bureaucratic intervention.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.