Teaching 500+ Students - Part 1 (Language Issues)

In an earlier post in the summer, I had mentioned that I will be teaching the first year programming course to 500+ students, and I wanted advice from my readers on how to handle such a beast. First of all, I thank all those who responded. Your suggestions really helped me. This is the first time I am teaching such a large class. The last time I taught a large class was 17 years ago, when I taught Pascal to about 200 students.

525 is a very different beast. I thought I was well prepared. With 1 lakh lines of code under my belt, I was confident of knowing C language much better than Pascal that I taught 17 years ago. I had sat with several weak students last year and tried to understand what problems weak students face in this course. I went through videos of the first programming course at MIT and Stanford. I went through example lab assignments at several other universities, and the entire archives of this course at IIT Kanpur, for the last 6 semesters - all PPTs, lab assignments, and the works.

But when it started, I did not know what had hit me, and I still haven't recovered. Blogging was the first casualty. Google+ came at the wrong time. I have joined but don't follow anything. My active social life has come to a screeching halt. I guess this is my destiny for the remaining part of the semester. Today, after having spent the good part of the day in the office, I decided enough is enough. I got to blog.

At least point out the issues that I face, and hopefully the collective wisdom of the readers will help me sail through. The biggest issue is the language. No, I am not talking about 'C'. A fairly large number of students, in the initial survey said that they don't understand spoken English. This number is more than 15 percent, almost 100 students. They claim to follow the powerpoint slides. My natural way of teaching would have meant that while there are slides being projected on a screen, I would use blackboard to explain the finer points. This revelation meant that a lot more would have to be put up on the powerpoint, even though I may still use the blackboard on the side.

About 50 students said that they would like to be tutored in Hindi. And what came to me as a shock, some students do not follow even written English.

And this caused a debate in the department. I decided that I will request a graduate student to provide extra help to those who are weak in English. So he holds a session on Sunday for an hour in which he speaks in Hindi. I also encourage students to come to my office and ask me questions in Hindi.

Am I doing the right thing. Some faculty members don't think so. They point out that English is the official language of instruction at IITs, and therefore, it is the responsibility of the student to make sure that s/he learns sufficient English prior to coming to IIT Kanpur. By agreeing to offer help in Hindi, I am discouraging them from learning English. Second, it will increase expectation of students that in other courses too, the faculty would explain in Hindi, and a majority of faculty members are not from Hindi belt. So that would cause problems. Third, this is discriminatory with respect to non-Hindi speaking students who are also poor in English.

My take is different. The collective wisdom of the leadership of all IITs and indeed this country (because such decisions are taken at the cabinet minister level) has decided that students cannot be tested even on basic language skills. That we can't even specify that they must take English as a language in 10th or 12th class. This leadership has also decided that JEE will happen after 12th class, and not earlier, and that the schedule will be such that admissions will be offered only a few days before the semester starts. So, there is no scope for running a remedial course prior to the semester. With such decisions, one must expect that there will be students who would be weak in English.

What am I supposed to do. Ignore 100 students in the class. I do respect the fact that the same leadership has decided English to be the official language of instruction at IITs. I do not speak even one sentence in Hindi during my lectures and tutorials. I do not have any course related information on the official website of the course in Hindi. All assignments, quizzes, and exams are in English, and no translation is provided to anyone. But it is difficult to digest that even informally, I should do nothing about such a large set of students, who have worked really hard to reach where they have reached. I believe that a bit of compassion and support at this stage will make a huge difference to their learning experience. And I think not understanding the course content for several weeks till they learn more of English would be an insurmountable hurdle in doing well in this course.

Will this put pressure on all other faculty members to offer some support in Hindi. Will this discourage these students from learning English quickly enough. I don't know. Till I am officially told to do otherwise, I cannot refuse if someone asks me informal help in Hindi.

Language skills and JEE

Recently, there was a strange drama in the parliament. Due to some confusion, some Rajya Sabha MPs thought that JEE was conducted only in English. The Minister HRD added fuel to the fire by responding to the question in English, and maintaining that the decision on the language is best left to IIT Council, an autonomous body. Finally, the Rajya Sabha had to be adjourned for 15 minutes, to bring the situation under control.

Of course, JEE question papers are available in Hindi too. So the whole discussion was unnecessary. But just imagine the uproar that will happen if IITs were to decide that they will introduce a language test in JEE. The language test could be in multiple languages - it is only to test linguistic abilities of the candidate. But there will always be criticism that English test is simpler than non-English tests. And, therefore, forget about testing language in JEE.

A few years ago, I met a German student who was carrying out research on the success of Indian IT sector. He told me that he is shocked by whatever he had learnt about the Indian higher education system. One point that he made was that India was a unique country in the world (well, amongst the 50 largest countries anyway) in that it did not consider language skills for the purpose of admission to professional courses. There is a huge amount of research which shows that the language skills are the best predictor of being a successful professional, and that is why the entire world considers these skills as amongst the most important parameter for both under-graduate as well as post-graduate admissions. But India did not do it. (And as I said above, language skills are not synonymous with English skills. It should be possible to design a language test in multiple languages.)

Today, I met a professor of another institute, who has been doing a lot of traveling to various institutes in India, and he told me that he found BITS Pilani students to be amongst the best, and we started discussing this. We felt that the reason for this (perception?, how does one really check this?) could be that BITS Pilani is the only institute in India amongst the top rated institutes which considers language skills as important, and includes them in its admission test. (And also a section on logical reasoning.) It also happens to be the institute with perhaps the highest cutoff for the 12th class marks. (It requires 80 percent in aggregate of Physics, Chemistry and Maths.) And of course, there is a lot of research which shows that the performance in school has a better correlation with the performance in college compared to the correlation between entrance exam with performance in college.

As a result of different admission processes, while a lot of good students in schools (including those who are really good at at least one language) do manage to get through JEE and join IITs, but a lot of students who manage to get admission to IITs do not have good performance in school or do not have good language skills.

Is there a way to influence stake holders to include an exam component in JEE on a language (of the choice of the candidate), and also increase the cutoff marks in 12th from 60% to at least 65%.