Saswat Clarifies

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I thank Saswat for the following clarification:

"Narayana Murthy was basically saying that because of the enormous stress IITJEE puts on +2 students, and because of the massive amount of time +2 students put in coaching classes, the typical IIT student nowadays is someone who has been very very narrowly prepared to just clear the IITJEE. This is true! He was saying that back in the days, when this stress was less, students were more "well rounded" (such as Arjun Malhotra). So he was pointing to the need for an overhaul of the IITJEE structure.

I agree with this. Later IIT KGP diro also repeated the same argument when many of the younger IITians were protesting that the JEE should not be changed drastically in its structure.

You have seen entire generations of IIT students - starting from Arjun Malhotra to the very recent kids. Did you feel that there was this gradual change in the quality?"

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gps:

The issue is exceedingly complex and doesn't brook any generalization.

I think I have covered the ground in earlier blogs.

As I said before, when I joined IIT KGP in 1965, I felt that it was a little elite and that the infrastructure there could easily have catered to double or triple the number of students. I keenly felt that I for one was vastly underutilized.

For many decades, the intake strength stayed close to 250. Now it is around 1250 I believe and is going up.

In 1965, very few in AP heard of IITs. About half a century later, most of the top ranks in IIT JEE are grabbed by AP students. The reason is that AP doesn't have many industries and parents spend enormous time and money on the 'education' of their kids via Coaching Institutions.

And there is an explosion of the number of IITs.

The demography of the nation has drastically changed. Most of the IIT kids then were rather well off and came from better quality schools. This is no longer true now. Many kids of the 'hoi polloi' find themselves in the IITs. And many do well too.

As for me, I have a tunnel vision. I taught Physics for first and second year B Techs and do no know how they shaped up later. I don't see any vast difference in the average quality, interest and commitment of the IITians. The 12-strong Tutorial class of 1965 gave me as much pleasure as the 350-strong 2004 class.

After shifting to Hyderabad, I was curious about the kids in the IIT JEE Coaching Institutions here. I just took one lecture to see how it goes. There were about 50 students in that class room. I talked to them for an hour on a favorite topic of mine: Millman's Theorem and its Applications in Circuit Analysis. The joy I got was no different than when I taught the same topic in 1966 to the 'elite' students and to the Preparatory Class (weaker students) in 2004 just before I left KGP . There was no difference in the general IQ levels or interest.

The whole thing has an irreversible momentum of its own. The JEE question paper of 1965 is about the standard of the present day Class X. Syllabus is constantly being upgraded.

Whichever format you innovate, the Coaching Institutions will adapt to that...you can't legislate them out. They are mostly money-making affairs; but so are Infosys, Wipro, TCS, IBM, Microsoft and the whole lot.

N. Murthy knows about the run-of-the-mill IIT end-product and he maybe right. The average fresher nowadays is much poorer and is unlikely to have read Maugham and Poe unlike in 1965. And perhaps his communication skills are no match.

The difference is in demography.

On the whole I see no dilution in standards of IITs.

But I may be wrong because I dealt with only freshers and sophomores in B Tech. As for the Phy UGs, they are as good as they ever came...

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