Are Competetive Exams (like NEET, JEE) Fair?

There is a big debate about the fairness of NEET given all the allegations of paper leak, favoritism by some center superintendents, grace marks for loss of time, two correct answers for one question, and so on. They are all implementation issues which I am sure will keep improving year to year.

I think the bigger question is whether such exams like NEET and JEE are fair even if the implementation is perfect and there are no charges of wrongdoing. Almost everyone in this country (except a few in Tamilnadu) seems to believe that if the same question paper is given to two students (may be in their respective languages) then it is a fair exam. And the believers include most academicians as well.

What is fairness. What type of student should, in general, be ranked higher? Do we have an answer to this question? No. In the past, I have asked IITs whether they have a definition of what kind of student they want to select and why, and whether they have at any point in time checked if JEE (and now JEE Advanced) is selecting those kinds of students. If you don't even know what kind of students you are trying to select, how can you declare fairness.

Let us assume a definition of fairness. An exam will be fair if a student who has learnt what has been taught to him/her very well because this gives a university hope that the student will learn well in the programs to which s/he will be admitted.

Now think about it. A student from board of state 1, and another student from board of state 2 are given the same exam which is based on the syllabus of the board of state 1. Is this a fair exam.

This will be a problem with any exam under the concept of "One Nation, One Test." The syllabus of the exam cannot be the intersection of all state boards since that would be too small a set. And if you are going to test it on any other syllabus, its overlap with different state boards will be to a different extent causing unfairness.

Such a test is not just unfair to students, but it is also unfair to universities. Every program is slightly different and this may need different inputs. A university may have a program which requires a greater focus on communication and hence they may want to admit students with decent language skills. Should they not have the right to do so. Admission is basically a system of predicting who will succeed in the program or benefit most from the program. Can we say that the same test will predict success of all programs in the country.

Unfortunately, in a country with very few good colleges, the competition for those few colleges is so intense and the incentive to game/hack the system is so high, that fairness takes the back seat. Any agency conducting the exams will only care that the exam can result in a ranking of students and the process passes the judicial test of fairness. Who cares if it does not pass the academic test of fairness.

Given the reality of few good seats being chased by large number of students, is there no hope of at least improving fairness. There is. One can go back to having multiple exams, may be one based on each state board syllabus. May be there is an exam conducted by a private party which will include language and other skills. A student can try taking those exams which are closest to examining his/her strengths. And a university can choose the exam that it wants to use for admissions. It can even have some seats through one exam and other seats through other exam and so on.

There are two perceived problems in this. One is that students will have to take a large number of exams, and two, the earlier system prior to NEET was roughly this and it had a lot of corruption including capitation fee.

My answer to this will be that students will need to take 2-3 exams only, may be 4, which is not a problem. In fact, it is good that they will have something to fall back upon if they don't do well in one exam. Second, the corruption happened because the admissions took place at the college who could manipulate the merit list based on capitation fee. We can easily have a centralized counseling for admission. Each university can tell their criteria of ranking applicants and a centralized application server will get applications from students for all colleges they are interested in, and the seats will be allocated centrally. In fact, universities may be allowed any parameter which is objective in nature (to stop manipulation). They may even use grace marks for under-privileged students as long as the criteria for deciding under-privilege status is objective.

So the real solution to NEET is to have several smaller exams. That will be more fair to both students and universities.

Problems with NEET 2024

We have serious allegations about the NEET exam this year.

Police has arrested people who have shared an exam paper one night before with some students who paid hefty sums for a look at the questions and answers and they are agreeing that the questions that they crammed the night before indeed appeared in the exam next day. (Media Report here)

We have seen police action on a center where some students were asked to leave the difficult questions which will be marked by the person before packing up the OMR sheets. Several students from around the country somehow knew about this and gave the option of this center. But, of course, when several students knew about this, it also means that someone will leak the information to Police and that is what seems to have happened. (Media Report here.)

The next problem is that of "wasted time." This happened because in many centers, there was an error in distribution the correct question paper (language) and by the time, the correct paper could be distributed, significant amount of time was wasted. And NTA decided to compensate for the loss of time by giving grace marks (which they later withdrew). This is probably the most ridiculous thing that has happened and points to incompetence of NTA. I have been involved with IIT JEE in the pre JEE Advanced days, when several lakh students took the exam with OMR sheets. We almost never had a situation where wrong question paper is being distributed, and if by chance, such an error indeed happened, the center representative was authorized to compensate for that time by extending the closing time. If the exam started 10 minutes late, it will end 10 minutes late. It is as simple as that. Did NTA not have such a simple SOP? Also, when this issue of wasted time came into limelight, and a decision was taken to compensate for the time, they did it only for those students who went to court. If a student did not go to court but only complained to the center, no compensation. What happens to poor students. Is it obvious to everyone that they should go to court for every small thing which can be handled at a center level.

I wonder why they can't use the same model as JEE Mains for NEET. There are lots of sessions, which means that there are lots of question papers. So any one paper getting leaked, the person accessing it would not know whom to sell and hence the incentive for leaking the paper is minimized. Also, it is online and hence there are no physical copies to leak. Further, if there is any problem with the machine, the exact time and every keystroke is recorded, and hence it would be easy to figure out what was the loss for each individual student. And, there are two groups of sessions and every student can take the exam twice. This way, if some thing indeed happened with a few individuals, they have another attempt. Not every minor incident would need to be handled by re-examination.

Of course, this is not to say that JEE Mains is above all suspicions. People are very creative and there is technology to hack every system. But, by and large, JEE Mains is a better managed exam than NEET and we can learn from it. And both are conducted by NTA only.

Having said all this, I think the biggest problem with NEET is not the poor conduct of the exam, but the notion of "One Nation, One Test." This notion puts all the eggs in one basket, makes it super important for people to do well in that one exam. When the competition is that high, some people will use their creativity to hack into the system and sell their service to students and parents and there will always be some students/parents who will agree to get ahead through these means. And of course, "One Nation, One Test" may sound fair, but it is not fair, and I will write another blog around it soon.

I don't know what solution will NTA or Supreme Court will come up with. But I have one request. All those who have received 720 marks out of 720 (some of them removed from the list after grace marks were removed), they should all have the right to which ever college they want to study in. I know NEET had pre-announced the tie breaking rules. I am OK with those tie breaking rules for everyone but not for those who have got 720 marks. For everyone else, one can say that you should have worked harder, gotten another question right, but you can't say this to someone who has got all questions right. What more should s/he have done to get admission to their top choice.

An 18 year old who have worked really hard and got 100% marks is now being told, "Sorry, you can't get into AIIMS, Delhi, because of things that are not in your control." This is unacceptable. If there aren't as many seats in a college as are the number of 100% students are interested in, then for this particular year, we should allow super-numerary seats.

Return-on-Investment in Education

During this time of the year, when millions of students are deciding which college to go to and what program to enroll in, one question that is often asked is, "What is the RoI of the program?" RoI means "Return on Investment.

Now, RoI of education is a bit complicated, because it is not just the additional money that you can potentially earn, but also the quality of job, and the quality of life, happiness, and the privileges of connections and so on. But let us assume that everything can be reduced to a number, the financial returns.

What is the financial return of a program. Well, one has to see what would be the estimate of lifelong earnings of the person without doing that program, and compare that with the estimated earnings of the person after doing the program. The difference between the two can be attributed as return due to that program. Now, you can sense that this is not easy. One can perhaps model an average person but it does not work for an individual because your return on investment could be very different from my return on investment simply because you are more prone to doing a corporate job after the same degree while I am interested in becoming a teacher. The financial returns over the next 50 years in an uncertain world under two hypothetical conditions, impossible.

But still we need to decide whether to spend a very significant amount of money or not. Is there a proxy for RoI calculation. Yes, of course. Without this, what will all the consultants do. It is a simple proxy. You take your expense over the program, and look at the first month salary of an average student in the last batch graduated and computed in how many months one would get as much salary as the amount spent in the program. So, if the fees for a BTech program is 15 lakhs over 4 years and the average package in the university for that program is Rs 50,000 per month, then the RoI is 30 months (never mind that RoI in financial world is in terms of percentage, here months will do). One can question the exactness - you haven't taken into account the hostel/mess expense, you haven't taken the cost of time, you haven't taken into account the interest, and all that, but well, it was always supposed to be a proxy, an estimate.

But this has several problems. (And I am not even talking about how do you know these numbers. Everyone seems to present these numbers in the most confusing way.)

First, should you consider the highest salary in RoI computation or the average salary or the median salary. What is your expectation from the program - do you expect to be closer to the highest or average or what. One would say that what is the expectation of an average student. That should determine RoI of the program. But the expectation of an average student is the median placement offer and not the average placement offer. And I have never seen anyone talk about median. Everyone talks about average which could be significantly higher than median. Next, should you only consider jobs in the core engineering or all jobs of students graduating with that degree. If you look at all students, then you will get biased result. The RoI will be biased by the societal bias (good students getting to a program causing higher placement and not something that you learn in the program causing higher placement). On the other hand, if you look at only core jobs that is not right for the undergraduate programs because it is expected that you are learning to be ready for a non-core job.

OK. So we will toss a coin and take a decision of what jobs to consider for RoI. But then this method has other serious concern. If you have a choice between a 4-year BTech and a 5-year BTech-MTech dual degree (or integrated MTech), what would you choose. Your cost has gone up by at least 25% (if you don't include interest and the fees is not going up by inflation) and unless the median/average salary offer is also higher by 25% or more, it does not make sense to do MTech. In certain industries, and certain kinds of jobs, MTech is still considered very valuable and over 50 years of career, you will be compensated for that one year extra education.

Similarly, there are disciplines which have a slower start but you get to the same point in due course. So if you are taking a decision based only on first month salary, you will not choose disciplines with slower start. The reason why some of the engineering disciplines are less popular today is that first people tend to over-estimate earnings based on highest salaries offered in certain popular disciplines, and second, the core engineering have a slower start of the career.

There are other slow-start careers like Design (this is changing though). In disciplines like Design where one works with other designers in small firms, the importance of working with better known designers is so much that you may have to work for a much smaller salary initially till you establish yourself. And, therefore, the number of students interested in design are less and as the opportunities for earning better salaries right in the beginning are improving, the number of students getting interested in design are increasing.

The obvious question then is this. If estimating lifelong earnings is impossible, and just considering the estimated first month salary is deeply flawed, how do we choose between the two programs.

My answer is this. If you are taking education loan, and you don't have family support to pay that loan, then you really have no option but to look at the first month expected salary. (But even in this situation, you should only decide whether you will be able to pay the EMI, and not compare programs on where you will have more savings or less savings after paying EMI.)

In general, if you are being funded through parental savings, then think like this. What are people doing 5-10 years after doing that program. If it is a new program, can you guess based on a "similar" program. If it is a new college, can you guess based on similar program in other colleges where you think the quality of education is likely to be similar. And if that profile is to your liking, both in terms of job content and reasonable financial gains, it is ok to do that course. And if you have a choice between several such courses, choose the discipline you are interested in, or choose the college where you think the quality of education (broadly defined) will be better.

This advice is based on my life principle that while it is important to have financial security and enjoy the good things of life, beyond a certain level of prosperity, one should look for happiness, impact, time for family, and such, and money should become secondary. And if money is primary for you, go back to previous paragraph and see which program leads to best jobs after 5-10 years and one way to check that is to check linkedin profiles of alumni. So check out 5-10 years and not one month.

JEE Mains 2024 Result: Why Advanced Cutoff Highest in 5 years

The result of JEE Mains 2024 is out and every newspaper is reporting that the cutoff for eligibility of general category for JEE Advanced (for admission to IITs) has gone up to 93.2 percentile. In 2023, this cutoff was 90.7 an in 2022, this cutoff was 88.4.

Why has this happened. The simple answer is that the competition has increased. The number of students taking the JEE Mains exam has increased substantially this year and hence the percentile score has gone up.

To explain this with an example. If I want to select 10 students out of 100, I am selecting those who are above 90 percent of the students, or in other words, my cutoff is 90 percentile. But if I want to select 10 students out of 150, I am selecting those who are above 93.33 percent students, or in other words, my cutoff is 93.33.

If we look at the numbers, the total number of students who took JEE Mains (in either session) in 2023 was 11.13 lakhs, while the total number of students who took JEE Mains in 2024 was 14.15 lakhs, an increase of 3 lakh students. So clearly, if the same number of students is being selected for JEE Advanced (roughly 2.5 lakhs), the cutoff will go up. Please note that it is not dependent on the difficulty level of the question papers in different sessions. So one cannot interpret this data to imply that questions were easier or tougher this year.

But if this simple answer was the complete reason for increase in cutoff, I wouldn't be writing this blog. Enough media houses have pointed out the increased number of candidates. In fact, if the reason was only the increased number of students, the cutoff should have been around 92.7 percentile (and not 93.2).

There is another very interesting reason for increase in cutoff. And that is the impact of two sessions of JEE Mains exam.

A student can take JEE Mains once or twice (in January/April). The higher of the two scores is assigned to the student. Now, consider a scenario where 100 students take the exam in the first session, and the same 100 students take the exam in the second session. The top 10 of the first session is the same set as top 10 of the second session. And now, if I am selecting the top 10 students, I will select those who are above 90 percent students in either of the two sessions, or 90 percentile will be my cutoff. But if the two set of 10 toppers are completely disjoint, that is, there is no common person in top 10 (actually top 5), then I end up taking top 5 of first session, and top 5 of the second session, and my cutoff will be 95 percentile. So the interesting consequence of two session exam is that more than 1 percent students can be there within 1 percentile.

So, the cutoff crucially depends on not just the total number of students, but also on how many students took the exam twice and how many of them had inconsistent results in two attempts. Inconsistency here means that their performances in two sessions is significantly different. And that seems to have played a role in increasing this year's cutoff.

Last year, 5.94 lakh students appeared in both sessions out of 11.13 lakh unique students, which means that 53 percent of all unique exam takers appeared in both sessions. This year, 8.23 lakh students appeared in both sessions out of 14.15 lakh unique students, which means that 58 percent of all unique exam takers appeared in both sessions. So a lot more people have worked hard in the intervening period to see a significant increase in their performance compared to session 1, and that has increased the cutoff by another 0.5 percentile.

Please note that the exact cutoff would also be dependent on the distribution of the number of candidates of different categories, how many students from different categories get counted in general category because of their top performance, and so on. But there is no reason to think that across just one year, there would be significant differences in group performances.

What to do if you didn't meet the cutoff for JEE Advanced but still want to study in an IIT.

Most IITs have a scheme to allow students from other colleges to study as a non-degree student for a semester or two. But pretty much no college has a system of credit transfer despite NEP2020. To the best of my knowledge, the only university in India which sends a large fraction of their students to do coursework in IITs is JK Lakshipat University in Jaipur.

There is also a very liberal scholarship for those who have done well in JEE Mains. If you have 95+ percentile in JEE Mains, you study for free. If you have 90-95 percentile in JEE Mains, you get 75% fee waiver, and so on. And these scholarships can potentially last for all four years based on performance. Check out the details on the scholarship page.

 

Is there a problem if everyone wants to study CS/AI

In every media interaction and now, even social gatherings, I get asked if Indian growth story will get affected if no one studies Civil/Chemical/Mechanical/Electrical and everyone only wants to do CS, AI, and at best ECE. How will the new infrastructure be built. How will we become a hub for manufacturing. Can we be VishwaGuru with everyone studying only AI.

And I tell them to just relax. Lots of students are studying non-CS/IT engineering branches. One can check AICTE data for the same. There is no shortage of pieces of paper declaring someone to be a graduate in Civil Engineering. And it takes only 4 years to print more paper, if there is need.

The problem is that degrees are only on paper and do not reflect learning. Industry is genuinely worried that they are not finding good engineers. But that problem is also true for software industry. They too are not finding good engineers.

Who are joining non-IT engineering programs. There are, of course, rare students who for whatever reasons are interested in these programs. But these are rare. In any given college students prefer CS and related programs over other engineering programs. This is true of IITs and this is true of Tier 3 colleges. But a lot of students think about non-CS in a more competitive college versus CS in less competitive college and there are enough who choose non-CS in a more competitive college. This comparison happens not just between IIT Civil versus NIT CS. It also happens between Civil Engineering at an affiliated college versus CS at a private university. (Affiliated colleges are cheaper and a lot of students/parents believe that getting a degree from a government owned technical university is somehow more valuable and education does not matter.) This comparison is here to stay and we will always find enough students taking up non-IT engineering programs.

There are some smart students who take benefit from this lopsided preference of the society. They can get admission to a college which provides much better overall education than they would have got if all branches had equal interest from students, and they get better placement too. Don't believe me, let me explain.

Most people would look at placement data and see that average of CS batch is higher than average of Civil batch. They also notice that the highest salaries in CS are much higher than the highest salaries in Civil. And they assume that they are the ones who will get those highest salaries. But smart people will think differently. They will understand that it is very difficult to be the topper of CS batch while it is much easier in a less competitive branch. It is aided by the fact that a lot of students who join non-IT branches keep wondering if they took the right decision and whether they should have taken up CS in a less competitive college. Their peers also demotivate them. The smart people will further notice that the top few jobs to Civil engineering graduates are of higher amount than the median of CS. And hence the expected placement is better in Civil for these people. (Of course, I must quickly add that I would never recommend anyone to choose a branch based on placement data or a faulty concept like Return-on-investment. But man people still do that.)

So, overall, I don't see a problem in terms of number of people opting for non-IT branches. The problem is that a very large number of people are not getting the education they deserve in every discipline.

The related question is if it is possible for a top institution to attract better (read, more motivated) students to non-IT programs. Yes, it is possible. The simple method is to project placement data differently (unfortunately, people will look at placement data). Instead of projecting data in terms of discipline, if they project data in terms of CGPA, and point out that the placement is strongly correlated with CGPA (and to a lesser extent with a discipline), the craze for certain disciplines will go down. Also, if they don't already offer minor in CS/AI, do so. The students will have the confidence that if they don't get a job in their chosen discipline, they can go back to IT recruiters in the final year. And, finally, offer dual major. A student admitted to Civil should have the option to pick up his/her second major in CS/AI. This, again, gives confidence to the student in case things don't go right in Civil, and also produces inter-disciplinary engineers which are so important for the industry.

Progression of an engineering student in a typical college

Yesterday, one Mr. Angad Daryani, CEO of a startup, Praan Inc, tweeted about an IIT Kanpur graduate whose CV, should we say, had a few things which he hadn't done. He has since deleted the tweet (or post on X, but old timers like me still call it twitter) saying that the tweet resulted in IIT bashing which wasn't the intention. The intention was to point out lack of ethics in some people only.

I replied to that that this lack of ethics is very common in Indian academia and not limited to IITs. This also had a lot of reactions and I started thinking about why does this happen.

The life of a typical student interested in engineering changes as s/he enters class 11th (sometimes even in class 9th, and in rare cases, even earlier). They have to go through JEE coaching, a lot of hard work, typically, more than 12 hours a day, every day, for two years. No one can do this kind of hard work unless the fruits are really sweet. So they are told by everyone in the society, including parents, teachers, neighbors, and relatives, "You only have to do hard work these two years, and your life will be made."

The clear implication is that college life is cool. At least that is how most students understand this. And students fall for this. A majority of them work extremely hard with the goal of getting into a top college.

Two years later, most of them will get a shock. Only one percent of our 17-18 year olds will get into top colleges. Others will have to think of second and third options. But whatever it is, whether IITs or a local engineering college, the expectation is the same that College Life is Cool. After all, all the elders cannot be wrong.

Students who go to top colleges realize very soon that they have been lied to. Most of them will adjust to new reality, some won't and will pay a price in future. But students who go to next tier colleges have a slightly different journey.

Students join a college thinking they don't have to study. But the other thing that has happened is that they had a goal for the last 2 (or 4) years and they were working much harder than what they would have done earlier. Now, whether they achieved that goal or not is not so meaningful, but it is extremely difficult to live a goalless life after working so hard for a goal for 2 years. (In that sense, entrance exams do affect the mental health of a large number of students who do not get admission to top colleges.) In our times, we could explore the college for a couple of semesters before thinking what we want to do with our lives. But not today. They need to have another goal quickly. How do they decide the next goal.

The other change that is happening at that time is adjustment to the college life. Experts have pointed out that the transition from school to college is a very stressful period for most students across the world.

So, we have three things happening. One, the expectation that the college life will be cool. Two, the stress of a transition period. Three, anxiety to set up the next goal. Whom does the first year student go to for clarity? No, not the faculty members who have seen such students in thousands, not the professional counselors of the university, not the career services office. They go to 2nd year students since they were in the same position most recently and therefore are most likely to understand their situation.

But, the second year students have no experience. They don't know what opportunities the world will have. They don't know what is needed for grabbing those opportunities. They haven't sat for a single interview for an internship. But do they say, they don't know. Of course, not. No one ever admits to not knowing something. So a confident answer is given. Your next goal should be a job. And you need two things for the job: Good grades and good soft skills.

So far, so good. No major problem with the advice. Yes, I would tell the students to do more thinking, talk to more people over the next one year, don't drop the alternatives like higher education, entrepreneurship, etc. But still, quite ok till now.

The next advice is where everything goes wrong. They are told that good grades are easy. You can just copy everything. There is no need to learn. You can prepare for campus interviews in a month in the third year. Till then, enjoy campus life. Of course, soft skills are harder to imbibe, and hence the freshers are advised to join multiple clubs, and do a whole lot of extra-curriculars.

Notice that this advice is completely consistent with what they had heard from their parents, their teachers, and everyone else. And they follow it diligently. In JKLU, where we have strong rules against copying and we have failed student for first time copying, dropped a semester for second time copying and terminated a student for third time copying, the parents will not just seek pardon for their wards, some of them will argue how we can be so different from other colleges.

In most colleges, faculty will not check for copying and really don't care for student success. So not copying can mean that those cheating can get better grades. That demoralizes a few who are still thinking of doing projects ethically. They don't realize that their career will depend more on learning and not so much on grades. At that age, grades seem like the only goal to care for. (And the society has contributed to that obsession.)

It is only in third year that they start applying for a serious internship and this is when they get a shock of their life. They fail interview after interview. Some students are smart. They realize the mistake they made in the first two years. Now, start learning and get ahead. But a lot of students are stuck. And they will either get no jobs or at best get the 3.5 to 4 lakh job in software services where the company is only looking for students who can learn (and not for students who already know something), and then have a 3-4 months training for them.

How do we solve this problem. We do a few things. First, in all our communication during the induction program, it is repeated several times that we want students to do assignments themselves, that we provide additional support in terms of student TAs, faculty office hours, and strongly encourage all first year students to take advantage of such additional resources. We also provide them a curated list of free online resources for each course, including Coursera (which we provide free to all of them). We also tell them that copying can lead to serious consequences and give examples from the past. We also try to create situations where the first year students have occasions to meet the 3rd year and 4th year students. They can certainly get better advice from senior students compared to 2nd year students.

 

Note: This journey is based on my travel to more than 100 engineering colleges and talking to several thousand students. I have not been traveling so much for the last 5-6 years. I am assuming that contours of the problem haven't changed much.

Are Students our Customers

Over the last two to three decades, the language in higher education has changed. When I was looking for higher education as a student, the talk was about quality of education and the affordability of education. But the language today is branding, return on investment, etc. I keep hearing that students are our customers and we must keep our customers happy. And in this situation, the customer delight is all about placement or more bluntly, return-on-investment (that too in short term).

I am too old fashioned to appreciate this.

To me the relationship between the student/alumni and an educational institution is not transactional. It is not that one pays some money and one gets some education in return. There is a relationship that is life long and the relationship is one with no expectations or in some sense, huge expectations. When I was looking at my flight options from Delhi to Cancun, Mexico, I could change flights in multiple cities in North America or Europe, but I chose to spend several hours in Washington DC, since my alma mater, University of Maryland, College Park is nearby and I would like to meet some alums and faculty members there before hopping on to the next flight. I can't imagine visiting Kanpur without dropping by in IIT Kanpur campus. A transactional relationship does not last this long.

People whom I have taught decades ago still keep in touch, still ask for advice and I still reply. In which business, the organization will spend time to help someone who was a customer 25 years ago. We do this because we are not a business.

And how do you compute return-on-investment anyway. And how much return is good enough?

Quality education has many consequences, a higher salary is just one of them. You pick up certain skills which may not immediately provide you returns in terms of first salary but will help you in life. It enables you to take better decisions in all spheres of life including dealing with family and friends. You become part of an alumni network which often provides certain level of support in various situations. What monetary numbers are you going to put for these benefits to evaluate your RoI?

A student who considers himself as customer will invariably demand better facilities (which is ok) but a student who considers herself as a learner is more likely to demand better education.

But, of course, it is not just students and parents who think of themselves as customers, even some universities consider students as customers. They also realize that the RoI computation by these customers is strictly based on first month salary after the program. These universities will in their curriculum put focus on those skills which are immediately in demand, and they don't care if the knowledge of these graduates will become obsolete very soon. On the other hand, good universities will want to ensure lifelong success of their students which means a very different approach to education. Learning how to learn becomes important. Skills like Critical thinking become important. More focus on basic concepts is needed.

Whenever I say things like these, the question that I often get asked is this. "I want to be a learner and not a customer. But how do I evaluate that there is better learning in a university. If metrics like higher return-on-investment are not indicative of better learning, then what is." Well, I have answered it in many blogs in the past. The bottomline is "faculty." And the best way to find out is by looking at their profile, and by visiting the campus and talking to some of them and their students.

To close, I will repeat what I have said in the beginning. I don't consider myself as a past customer of IIT Kanpur or University of Maryland. I have a lifelong relationship with my alma maters and not a transactional one.

Sports Quota in IIT Madras

Recently, IIT Madras announced admission to its flagship BTech programs for those who excel in sports. They call it Sports Excellence Admission. The student should have got at least one medal at an international or national event in a specified list of sports. The ranking would depend on the number of medals, whether gold/silver/bronze, the type of competition, etc. The student should also have done well in JEE Mains and be selected to take JEE Advanced. He should have further done well in JEE Advanced to receive a rank in whatever category the student belongs to (whether general or SC/ST/PD/OBC and so on). The student should also have passed eligibility in 12th class. IIT Madras is creating two seats in each of its BTech programs for sports excellence.

It is the first time any IIT is considering admission based on excellence in sports. For a long time, the admission was strictly based on JEE. In the 1960s, there were admissions for board toppers. And then in 1960s and 1970s, there were lateral admission in 2nd year to a few students (at least in IIT Kanpur, but only one of those actually joined, and left IITK after a semester, so no one from lateral admission ever received a degree).

I have written many articles over the years asking IITs to consider an alternate admission mechanism based on performance in Olympiads (Science and Informatics), and there is thankfully some progress in that over the last few years. I know at least IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur and IIT Gandhinagar have admission processes based on Olympiads performance.

Having alternate admission mechanisms bring in diversity in the classroom which enhances the quality of education for everyone (and not just for those who came in through alternate mechanism). Also, if this move catches on and other IITs also offer similar admissions (and hopefully lower the academic bar), there will be many school students who will feel less stressed and can follow their passion.

The key issue here is what should be the academic bar for these admissions. The problem is that if you do not have any academic requirement, then obviously the sports quota student may have serious difficulty in carrying out academic work at an IIT. On the other hand, having a very high bar will mean that anyone who has spent a lot of time on the field will not be able to come through this mechanism. What is the right balance? Difficult to say.

I wonder if IIT Madras did some research into this and are there students who get medals at national level games and also get a rank in IIT JEE (Advanced), and are there many of them. They are talking about 2 seats per UG program. Hence, about 20 seats. Are there 20 such students. I doubt it. So, are they hoping that this will encourage many sports persons to go for JEE coaching.

In IIIT Delhi, we had similarly desired to attract sports persons to the institute, and we took a slightly different approach. We said that if someone worked hard to play for India (in recognized sports events), they worked less on their JEE (Mains) preparation and we will assume (based on some research) that if they had not spent that time on sports, they would have got a 2 percentile increase in their JEE score (which is a rank improvement by 20,000). Similarly, if they played at the national level (represented their state), we will add 1 percentile to their JEE score. Similarly, for Chess, we said that we will work with FIDE rating. Above a certain rating, we will add 2 percentile to your JEE score, and above a lower cutoff, we will add 1 percentile to your JEE score.

The beauty of this scheme was that we didn't need any super-numerary seats. We didn't need to worry about reservations in these seats (since there is no seat outside the reservation system), we didn't need to find a complicated way to rank sports persons from different sports. We didn't need to decide how many seats in each program. We just bumped up their JEE score and put them back in the counseling process. Simple.

It worked for us as we got a couple of students through this mechanism every year. But, we were working with JEE Mains which I believe is better aligned with school board syllabus than JEE (Advanced), and hence the requirement of performance in JEE Advanced is much harder for a sports person to meet. So even with JEE Mains, getting 20 sports persons to get decent ranks would be a challenge. But with JEE Advanced, this seems like an impossible ask.

So, on the face of it, the announcement appears to be just to collect brownie points with no real intention to admit sports persons. But I hope I am proven wrong and there will be at least 4-5 student joining IITM this year, if not 20.