வியாழன், 21 நவம்பர், 2019

On IIT suicide
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A lengthy write-up on IIT suicides:
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A lot of noise is made about suicides and unemployment at the top 5 IIT and the alleged caste bias as the cause of the same. One such institute being targeted is IIT Madras, India's top institute, which is derisively called the Iyer Iyengar Technology, a reference to the fact that until reservations were imposed virtually every Tamilian who made it to IIT was a TamBrahm. So, let us get some facts straight.
1.) In the past, even though reservations for SC/ST existed, the JEE scores were only relaxed to a small extent. As a result, many seats in the SC/ST category were left unfilled as the students didn't qualify. If those who qualified (after relaxing the cutoff) from the reserved category lacked basic grounding then they were asked to take a year-long preparatory course in IIT. This helped them bridge the gap and they could negotiate the remaining 4 years of B.Tech and make the best out of their IIT years. Sadly, two destructive outcomes ensued because of politicizing. First, cutoff for reserved categories (which themselves were expanded) were further lowered (e.g., SC/ST cutoff is almost half of what it is for general category). Second, fewer students were mandated to go through the preparatory course. This resulted in a large body of students, who were unfit and unprepared to enter IIT, being thrown at the arduous challenge of having to deal with a tough 4-year-long curriculum.
2.) Let us not deny the facts. IIT Roorkee revealed that the average CGPA for General Category was 8.09, OBC - 6.6, and SC/ST - 5.9. This is quite likely the case in all top 5 IITs. Now contrary to the media-created perception, virtually all IIT professors want the students to pass. They're lenient with C grades and below while being stringent on A and B. This means that many students who ended up in the lower CGPAs have already had grace marks awarded to them, i.e., the actual average CGPA of OBC and SC/ST is even lower than what is reported.
3.) Now, if you want to see CGPA in the right perspective, most good employers insist on a minimum CGPA of 7.5. This means that an average reserved category student fails to meet the bare minimum standards. It is no surprise that 15-20% of IIT B.Techs do not land a job on campus. No marks for guessing which categories they belonged to. Lowering the standards from JEE through grading can earn a degree but it won't get you a well-paying job or admission to an MS program in a leading American university.
4.) It is no surprise that many such students are under constant stress because they entered an institute without qualifying. Allegations of caste discrimination provide a tempting and easy explanation to deal with this reality. However, these are fake allegations. IIT professors do not know your name or caste when they grade your papers. They do not care about your caste. They are teaching some of the most rigorous course-ware. Don't expect to be spoon-fed. In top American universities too professors don't spoon feed. In fact, they're usually impersonal. My daughter studies computing at a top American university. One of her professors revels in always giving exceedingly tough assignments on Friday afternoons. These problems often have no answers and the student is expected to detect this, fix it, and submit it by Monday. Less than 5% of the students meet the deadline. The professor is unrelenting. He would let you submit beyond the deadline but then he would take off marks - you can forget an A for a late submission. Oh, by the way, he also carefully monitors whether students help one another - not copying but even explaining things to one another. If he suspected that then he would ask the student to come take the retest with a shorter submission time.
My daughter got called to his office once. Her crime was helping her classmates. She is very intelligent. The professor brought up the solutions of a bunch of students and then correlated those with my daughter's and charged her with helping them solve difficult steps. He put her perfect score on hold and gave her a really tough, custom-created assignment and just 8 hours to submit. She cracked it. He warned her not to help others and then right away recommended her name to write code for a top-end program he was leading. His parting words to her, "This is a tough program young lady. It is that way for a reason. When you're out of here you would be solving some of the toughest challenges mankind faces. Collaboration and being nice is okay but those aren't as important as having the ability to solve the problem. If you bail someone out then they would never learn to confront tough problems and you would become complacent!"
That's how high-end education ought to be. That's how you find and nurture bright talent to find cancer cure or build high speed trading platforms. Not by offering grace marks. Not by falsely alleging caste discrimination when none exists.
5.) Why do reserved category students, on an average, fair poorly in IITs? The reasons could be many. It could be the level of average intelligence, lack of good K-12 schooling, lack of emphasis on learning in families, etc. Now, to be clear, there are undoubtedly high-achieving, intelligent students from reserved categories too. There are dumb students in general category too. However, we're discussing measurable average CGPA and IIT JEE scores. They do tell an empirical story of reality of the averages. This may be a bigger problem to solve. Every constituency has to invest in critical thinking and good quality K-12 education. However, given the reality of India's low average IQ, I don't think even that would make the disparity go away.
Finally, about the derisive reference to IIT Madras as Iyer Iyengar Technology. TamBrahms did outshine everyone else in Tamilnadu in IIT-JEE until reservations were imposed and entrance criteria lowered. TamBrahms are generally not a wealthy people. The TamBrahm middle class, from which the IIT aspirants spring, often lives on shoe string budget ingesting sub-par diet. The dominant castes of Tamilnadu (e.g., Mudaliar, Gounder, Nattukottai Chettiar, Nadar) have a lot more wealth yet they didn't sweep IIT JEE the way TamBrahm kids did. Once again, there could be many reasons: IQ, an emphasis on education, etc. It could also be a consequence of the willingness to risk-it-all and fight it out because one has to risk 10+2 scores and give up the safety net of getting admission to a local engineering college to prepare for JEE. Regardless, I do think it is a feat which is worthy of emulation and can be replicated with varying degrees of success. Disparaging a community which did the right thing is despicable.
Some institutions and programs are meant to be tough. IIT B.Tech is one such. One must do a reality check whether one is cut out for that. If one is not IIT material one could still go to a second or third tier college like Anna University, NIT, etc., and still do well in life. However, to destroy an institution so that you could get in and out of it without deserving it is reprehensible

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