242 - Is building and running the IIT JEE a public goods problem? - Ajay Shah

SATURDAY, JUNE 09, 2012

Is building and running the IIT JEE a public goods problem?

( Ajay Shah Blog )

What should government do?

In the question "What should government do?", economists have one big answer "do the public goods". A public good is something that is non-rival (the consumption by one does not come at the cost of consumption by another) and non-excludable (it is not possible to exclude someone from benefiting from the public good).

The regulation of air pollution is the favourite example which illustrates a public good. Clean air is non-rival (if you breathe clean air, it does not diminish my supply of clean air) and non-excludable (if the air is cleaned up, nobody can prevent me from breathing it in). Indeed, nothing that one person can do can make a difference to air pollution. Only the government can regulate pollution and this deliver clean air.

Similar issues arise with defence, police, judiciary, monetary policy, financial regulation, public health (though not the health of the public), biodiversity, etc., all of which add up to the economists' vision of what government should be doing.

What should government do in the field of education?

Education is substantially a private good. I study, I benefit. There are spillovers ("externalities") to others, and so there is a case for a government subsidy. But barring that, this is a field where the incentives are well aligned for each person to be the main one in charge of his own education.

Public funding solves the problem of externalities. At the level of elementary education, vouchers are a nice way to deliver public funding that is large enough to pay for the externalities. At the level of higher education, public policy can focus on economies of agglomeration alongside some public funding, nudging the outcome in India so that there are 100 high quality broad-based universities.

As I read The delicate technology of creating excellence by Pradip Ghosh in the Telegraph, I was reminded of the public goods character of testing and curriculum development. As he says:

in this very large country with a multitude of school boards and their non-uniform curricula and examination standards, it would be inappropriate to go by board grades because that would yield unreliable, undesirable results — we would not get the best students. And, such a course, therefore, would be unfair both to the aspiring students and to the institutions they would be entering. A single post-high school examination with a well-defined syllabus and a centrally administered paper-setting and grading system was thought to be the best alternative

The production of education services is a private good problem, to be sorted out between one student and one education provider. However, the problems of curriculum and testing have a public goods character. Let's run the tests of a public good, for a nationwide system for standardisation of curriculum and testing.

Is it non-rival? Does the consumption of the services of this system by one person diminish the amount of this system available for another? With computerised testing, there should be full scalability (though Pradip Ghosh argues, in the article above, that there are problems with this).

Is it non-excludable? High quality curriculum is non-excludable in that once curriculum documents are on a website, everyone can download them. Testing is excludable if you want to be cussed about it, but for the rest it should not be possible to exclude anyone from taking a nationwide test.

This argument guides us in thinking about what government should be doing in the field of education:

1. Funding (calibrated to overcome the externalities)
2. Curriculum development
3. Testing
4. Information infrastructure about education service providers (i.e. schools but also all sorts of new ways of organising education service delivery) so as to assist choice by parents and students.

The entire focus of management time, and the entire resources available for the task, should be devoted to these 4 problems.

Central government or local government?

Once we know that testing and curriculum are public goods, we have to ask who should do it.

If an important outcome (getting into the IITs) was linked to regional board examinations, that is a recipe for grade inflation. This is a reason for doing this at the central government.

There are economies of scale. A curriculum only needs to be developed once. This is a reason for doing this at the central government.

In conclusion, the IIT JEE has many problems, but the building and running of high quality examinations is an important task of the central government and should not be diluted or abandoned. The fraction of management time, and resources, that are devoted to curriculum and testing need to go up.

at 11:22 PM

1 comments:

• 
  AnonymousSunday 10 June 2012 7:28:00 AM IST
• 
  To add to this, the production of education services is going to be solved globally by online efforts like Udacity, Coursera, edX, Khan Academy, etc.
  
  In this scenario, I'm not sure why curriculum development should be the job of the govt. I'm not even sure if govt testing will be required if these sites come up with their credentialing mechanism. Why shouldn't testing be left to the corporates? A Coursera profile might carry equivalent weight to a BTech from IIT in future.
  
  The only thing the govt needs to do is provide funding: we need a national research funding organization like NSF in the US which will have stable funding of say 3-5% of GDP for research. All good students will stay back and do PhDs in India if this was done. And, a fraction of this research will flow into high quality companies, provide jobs, expand the economy, etc, etc.
  

223 - Diluting the role of the IIT JEE by Ajay Shah

http://www.citizeneconomists.com/blogs/2012/02/07/diluting-the-role-of-the-iit-jee/

Diluting the role of the IIT JEE

By Ajay Shah, on February 7th, 2012

The JEE used to serve India well

Many years ago, high school education in India worked in a twin track system: There were those who studied for the IIT JEE and there was everyone else who didn’t. The former studied good books (e.g. Resnick/Halliday (which is a college level book elsewhere in the world), solved physics problems from Irodov, etc.

In contrast, studying for the 12th standard (”board examination”) tended to emphasise rote memorisation, focusing on trivial questions where you had to plug numbers into a formula, emphasised accuracy of calculation and good handwriting. I vividly remember a textbook for 11th class physics used in Maharashtra, which said that Newton’s second law did not apply for living things and powered vehicles. The thoughtful author must have wondered how a stationary cat started walking without the action of an external unbalanced force, and resolved the problem by limiting the footprint of Newton’s second law. The less time that kids spend in studying for board examinations, the better.

I used to be optimistic that the footprint of the enhanced curriculum, and complexity of examination questions, lay far beyond the tiny number of people who entered IIT. Even if only 2,000 kids entered IIT, if 40,000 of them studied for the JEE, it gave them world class capabilities at high school. In each cohort, we got 40,000 people who were very good by world standards. In a country with pervasively low capabilities, it was very useful having this slice of high inequality of knowledge, for it gave a group of people who were able to learn modern technology, connect to globalisation, and create firms which generate a lot of high-paying jobs. It is fashionable to complain about inequality of knowledge, but given that you are in a LDC with a very low mean, would you really rather have very low variance??

With this old configuration, we also got a nice tool for inter-generational class mobility. The middle class got their kids into IIT, and almost all these graduated into upper class by the time they were 30.

More generally, a lot of countries have found that high stakes examinations are a good thing. High stakes examinations push the work ethic, grow the ability of young people to work hard in a sustained manner with high concentration, ensure foundations of mathematics and science, and encourage a meritocracy. They create a self-selected elite of young people who are not immersed in and defined by mass culture. All these are good things.

Problems of the JEE

I used to think like this for a long time. I have reluctantly been persuaded, over recent years, that the JEE isn’t working so well.

Too many young people are studying for the examination and not the subject. The obsessive focus upon coaching classes is producing a one-dimensional personality which isn’t so well suited to entering college. In the 1980s, the most interesting students in IIT were thinking people who read books, knew a lot about the world, and could also solve monkeys on pulleys. With brutal competition, and the coaching classes phenomenon, too often, all that’s left today is the monkeys on pulleys. There is a certain kind of parent who is willing to have a child go live in Kota at age 15. This screened out many families from the race.

Economists know about this phenomenon in agency theory. High-powered incentives are a problem because the agent only focuses on the incentive and tends to cut corners (or worse) on everything that’s not mentioned in the incentive contract. Andrade and Castro bring this generic idea in agency theory into the question of examinations, and find similar effects.

In the 1980s, there was substantial diversity of background, experiences and class amongst the students. This was a good thing, since students would then pick up the culture of people unlike them. In recent years, it appears that there is much greater homogeneity of background, experiences and class. The extent to which the person gets transformed in the four years has, as a consequence, gone down. When very few children of the elite go to IIT, this reduces access to the knowledge and networks of the elite for everyone who goes to IIT. This has reduced the ability of IIT to generate inter-generational class mobility.

Jishnu Das and Tristan Zajonc have found a nice bump in the upper tail of the distribution of skills in India. The pessimist sees this as being about class or caste: certain families bring up kids who know more. The optimist in me used to think this was the bunch studying for the IIT entrance. Also see Geniuses and economic development on the importance of the upper tail of the skills distribution.

It is increasingly difficult to be optimistic about how this is going. Narendra Karmarkar graduated from IITB in 1978, and went on to do truly important work in 1984. My optimism about the IITs peaked in 1984. This should have scaled up manifold in the following years. It has not. In the 1980s, I used to think that by 2010, we’d have atleast one Nobel laureate from the IITs. That has not happened.

This tells us that the IITs are not delivering on their early promise; things haven’t worked out well in the following years. I think the JEE is a part of the problem.
One of the most disappointing features of the recent OECD PISA evidence was the absence of this bump in the upper tail. This new evidence shows a scary world of low inequality of skill, of a country with a terrible mean and no upper tail of an elite that can power the country out of mass poverty. I would conjecture two potential explanations for what has been found. One, it could be the case that this testing was done at age 15, at which time not much of the IIT JEE studying has as yet taken place. Alternatively, it could be the case that studying for the IIT JEE is not producing good knowledge.

But the solution being offered doesn’t seem to be the right one

There are two views on how these problems can be solved. The first alternative is to shift away from admissions based on a high stakes examination. Universities in the US screen applicants on many parameters, so this is generally thought to be better. But when we look back in history, universities in the US used to focus primarily on academic performance only, until a glut of Jews showed up in Harvard. The shift to asking for `well rounded personalities’ was a tool by the dominant anti-semetic elite to screen out Jewish kids who did not play football. So we should be cautious in respecting the undergraduate admissions process in the US. It is also important to remember that the quality of kids starting college in the US is quite weak by world standards. There are other countries (e.g. Japan) where large scale high-stakes examinations are used for university admissions, with much success.
 I feel that the core problem that we have in India is just too few seats, which has generated a ridiculous extent of competition and distorted behaviour on the part of the kids. The solution lies in solving the policy problems in higher education, so that a large number of kids are taken into world class institutions every year. E.g. adding undergraduate programs at I I Sc, with recruitment through the JEE, was a move in the right direction. We need to grow the size of the entrant class in universities in India, that figure in the Times Higher Education Supplement ranking, by 10-fold. At present, we have only one university in that list – IIT Bombay.

Kapil Sibal is offering neither of the two solutions above: we are not being offered a modified admissions process based on looking at a fuller picture of the child, and we are not being offered a Japanese scale world of high stakes examinations with a lot of seats in world class universities. What we’re being offered is a scaling down of the role of the IIT JEE. A greater role for the 12th standard examination is just a recipe to emphasise rote memorisation, focusing on trivial questions where you had to plug numbers into a formula, emphasising accuracy of calculation and good handwriting. This seems wrong to me.

• MVV Sarma

  February 7, 2012 at 11:44 pm

  The core issue is not lack of adequate seats in IITs or killing of creative problem solving skill due to coaching. IITs cannot be world class as long as admission is based on reservations on different accounts and not on equal opportunity irrespective of gender,caste,creed etc.
  So unless this basic issue is addressed doing away with JEE/AIEE or diverting attention to coaching etc is mere eye wash.
  
  
• Pradeep Bhat

  February 15, 2012 at 1:49 am

  IITs even in 80s were much behind world class universities like UCB/CalTech/MIT etc. Compare the NObel Laurates in these schools. Forget Nobel, just miniscule of IIT professors are world class. How many books authored by IIT Profs. have made big name in international schools?
  Same thing about IIT students. UCB/Caltech admit people who play good football and don’t solve monkeys on pulleys. With few exceptions, level of IIT students is average compared to above world class schools. In India i gree that these lads are best and brightest.