Fundraising 101

We will come back to JEE and admissions after a day. In the meanwhile, I had written this up a long time ago, and thought of publishing it today.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from an academic institution (in India). One of those bulk emails, asking me to consider giving a small gift for supporting some specific activity. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the link in the email and it took me to a page which described the project in brief, mentioned the goal of fundraising, how much had already been raised from how many donors, various suggested levels of gift (1000, 5000, 10,000, etc.),  and methods of payment (credit card, debit card, etc.). A few months ago, I had been to a similar site by a US university and made a small contribution. But this time, I decided against it.

Just as I was watching this page, a student walked in to my office. I asked him to look at the page, and read all the details. Then assume that he has a lot of money, and that he is passionate about the cause for which money is being raised. Would he donate. His answer was in negative. And he said that even he donates a few coins to the beggar outside a temple, he typically donates to a beggar who already has a few coins in his bowl. If you look at the waiter serving you food in Shatabdi/Rajdhani trains, when they come for tips, they already have a few notes of 10/20/50 rupees in the plate which is meant to indicate both the expectation of the waiter and also inform you that others have already donated. You are not the only one.

It was a drive to raise Rs. Ten Lakhs only and the site said that till now, there have been only one donor who had gifted Rs. 1000 only. So they had achieved 0.1 percent of their goal till then.

Contrast this with an email I received from my alma mater, University of Maryland, about their fundraising campaign a few weeks ago. It is dubbed: Fearless Ideas: The Campaign for Maryland. The 7-year campaign is planning to raise 1.5 billion dollars. But the interesting part was that the campaign had started in 2014 and they have already raised 900 millions so far, and only after they have raised 60% of the goal, are they now going public with their campaign.

I wrote a long email to the person responsible for fund-raising at this academic institution, suggesting what all can be done to make such campaigns more effective, and since I don't see any change in their sites and there was no response, I felt that my writing all this was waste, and I decided to publish this as a blog in the hope that it will not be a waste.

You don't want to tell a potential donor that you have raised only 0.1 percent of the amount so far. It will always raise a doubt, what happens if no other donor gives. Will my money go waste. Even when I give a tiny contribution, I want to know how this will be used, and I want to ensure that it will indeed be used in that fashion. But once I see that 60% funds have been raised, I know the development team is strong, and will be able to raise more, and if there is a minor shortfall, the project scope might be reduced slightly, but my money will largely be used for the purpose I am donating. Hence, if you have a strong project for which you believe there will be many donors, first go to donors privately, get some donations, and start your public campaign with a significant part already covered.

Second, on such a site you are also having some suggested amounts. It is a good idea to have these suggested amounts vary by a multiple of 2 to 3. And maximum number of options are around 5 o 6. A very large multiple means that people who wanted to donate something in the middle will be discouraged. And a small multiple means that your complete range is very small. So someone who does not want to donate in that range will be discouraged. So you could start with Rs 1000 and have other suggestions as 2000, 5000, 10,000, and 20,000. Five suggestions have taken you to a multiple of 20. If you don't know your donors at all, may be you can add another suggestion of 50,000. But anything more than that gives out an impression that you have no clue what to ask for and that is not very professional. Of course, there should always be an option for "Any other amount" that the donor can fill in.

The way these suggested amounts are decided is that the maximum of that should not be very close to the overall goal of the campaign. If you are looking at the overall goal of Rs. 10 lakhs, and the maximum suggested amount is Rs. 5 lakhs, then you really don't understand crowd sourcing. If someone is really passionate about this project and can pay single handedly whatever you are trying to raise, s/he will contact you directly and negotiate with you a bigger project, etc. Won't come through crowd sourcing. And such large sums as expectations deter small donors.

The site stated that the project needs donations because the institution has no money. That is too negative. People don't give money to run your routine programs (some people will, but not many). If you were to give a positive message, what is it that you are already doing, what are your aspirations and then say that institutional funds can do only so much but the vision is so exciting that we want others to share that vision.

One thing that most people find difficult to understand is that money is fungible. So you have a small budget for X, Y and Z. And you want to increase all three. Would you ask for money for additional X, additional y and additional Z. May be, donors don't get excited about X, but are more willing to give for Y and Z. Then just ask for Y and Z. Use your internal funds more for X.

Another thing I found on the website was a statement that if I pay through credit card, I will need to pay 2 percent extra. This is plain stupid. Any fundraising office will have costs. It is not just the cost of payment gateway, but also the cost of website/server/internet, staff salaries, office expenses and so on. When I donate money, I do expect some of that money to pay for the overheads. Why charge me separately for payment gateway but not tell me that part of the money will go for other overheads. You can write a line there saying that if you have an option please donate using debit card since my payment gateway costs are very low. So your donation will go a bit far. But if I want to donate 5000 rupees, don't suddenly tell me at the last minute that my credit card will be charged 5100 rupees while I will get a tax-exemption receipt for only Rs. 5000. In fact, if you are a smart fundraising office, you will divert some of the budget to pay for fundraising office, and tell the donors that all their donation will be used for project without any deduction for overhead expenses (if your budget allows that).

Fundraising is both an art and a science. It is new to Indian academic institutions. I wish there was a community of people working in Indian academic institutions who are involved in fundraising to share best practices. I am sure there are lots of people out there who want to help their alma mater but are not doing so because no one approaches them properly.

National Testing Agency

For a long time, a need has been felt for a body that can conduct massive public exams that can be used by universities for the purpose of admissions to various programs. Till now, CBSE has been carrying out this task, but there were two problems with this arrangement. CBSE was too overloaded, handling school leaving exams and all the issues related to affiliation of schools. Second, the college admission tests are very different from school leaving tests, and there was a need of different kind of expertise to do research into these tests. Both problems were solvable, of course, but it was best to have a different body altogether.

Last year, the government announced setting up of National Testing Agency (NTA). Today, it was announced that NTA has started working and it is going to conduct three major tests in the coming academic year. The most important announcement was that two of these tests - JEE Mains and NEET would be conducted two times a year.

This is all very good, indeed music to my ears, since my blog has been saying for many years that we need to have exams conducted multiple times. But I also want to point out possible issues in this, and what they may do in addition to conduct of exam.

First of all, an exam being conducted more than once should not just mean that a student can choose his/her date of the exam. It should mean that a student can actually take the exam more than once. Minister has indeed said that the student will be able to take the test on both occasions, if s/he so desires, and I hope NTA will do exactly that.

Second, when a test is conducted twice, one must be prepared for normalization of marks. Unfortunately, CBSE wasn't doing that for JEE Mains. There were multiple tests being conducted even now (online and offline) on different dates with different question papers. But their absolute marks were being considered without any normalization. This is very unfair to students even if the degree of difficulty is different by a small margin. These tests are used to fill 10s of thousands of seats in several institutions, and a few marks can make a big difference.

Third, we need a strong research wing. Testing is a science, and just asking a few IIT professors (or school teachers for that matter) to prepare a question paper is not enough. We must analyse what type of questions are difficult, moderate, simple, etc., and whether there is a reasonable mix of them. We must also analyse when some question is answered wrong by a lot of students whether the topic is too difficult, or whether the language is confusing, or whether most teachers in the country are not teaching it properly. We must also look for performance of different segments of society on different questions. Are there questions on which some particular segments perform particularly poorly. That may yield some inherent biases which if the paper setter is aware can be avoided. I can go on and on. This is really a huge issue in the current exams in the country that we don't analyse them enough.

Research is also needed in newer type of questions. Also, what kind of exams will best predict success in different programs - what exam is a meaningful one for engineering, and what is meaningful for medical, and what is meaningful for BA/BCom/BSc type of courses. The current exams may not be the best predictors of success in the programs to which students take admission in.

During a twitter discussion, my friend, @learning_pt pointed out that there should also be research on interfaces. Is computer interface that was used for JEE Advanced by IITs this year the best one. Did we have the same distribution of successful candidates this year as in the recent past or did we lose out on a segment of society because they somehow could not get adjusted to the new interface. If yes, we may need to do something about it. Hopefully, we will not find such discrimination, but if we do find it then we need to solve this problem. May be we need to continue with the offline version for some more time. May be we need to have better methods of giving them practice in realistic scenarios.

The testing agency should give out detailed information about each test so that different universities can use the same test result in the way they find it appropriate. It is already been done for JEE Mains, and should continue, and may be made even more elaborate. For example, raw scores in all subjects (after normalization, of course), total, percentile (normalized with respect to last few exams), may be even details of sub-disciplines, or how did one perform on different types of questions, etc.

NTA may consider designing an aptitude test (for different programs), communication test (in different languages), and conduct these tests too a couple of times in a year, and universities may use them in addition to JEE kind of exams. All these will require research.

As we move forward, testing may become a continuous process a la GRE, and we may go for adaptive testing based on a large database of questions. There is research going on in automatic generation of questions, which could come handy here.

Much of this expertise may not be available at government salaries. Would NTA remain a body bound by government rules, and only conduct large exams, or would NTA be a body that breaks new ground in testing.

Overall, I am very happy with this development and am hopeful that NTA will do many of these things in due course.

JEE 2018: Is 2 equal to 2.0

First, let me recap the case in Madras High Court. The following were the instructions on the paper of Advanced JEE, 2018.

• This section contains EIGHT (08) questions. The answer to each question is NUMERICAL VALUE.
• For each question, enter the correct numerical value (in decimal notation, truncated/rounded off to the second decimal place; e.g. 6.25, 7.00, -0.33, -.30, 30.27, -127.30) using the mouse and the on-screen virtual numeric keypad in the place designated to enter the answer.
• Answer to each question will be evaluated according to the following marking scheme:
• Full Marks: +3 if ONLY the correct numerical value is entered as answer. Zero marks: 0 in all other cases.

There is apparently a question, which has an integer answer. Since I have not seen the question, let me assume that the answer is '2'. IIT JEE has announced that they will give marks to all those students who answered, 2 or 2.0 or 2.00 or even 2.000.

Some student who answered 2.00 has gone to court insisting that students who answered 2 or 2.0 (or 2.000) should not be given any mark, and giving them marks would change her ranking.

The court directed IIT JEE to grade as per the original instructions. IIT Kanpur being the host institution has informed the court that as per these instructions, 2 or 2.0 (and somehow even 2.000) are all correct answers and they have graded as per the instructions only.

The court is not pleased and has now come up with a specific order, which is very strange, to say the least. It is not saying that answer 2 or 2.0 is wrong as per the instructions and should get 0 marks It is saying that students should be penalized for not following the instruction and hence if two students have same marks and one student has followed the instruction and another has not then the student who has followed the instruction should be kept higher in the ranking.

The court gives NO reason for this order, which is rather strange. I have not seen any court orders in the past where the legal point has not been explained well.

By saying that 2 is an inferior answer than 2.00, first of all court is declaring that answers could be inferior or superior. For an extremely technical point, the court to make such a ruling, is, to say the least, strange. But why is 2 an inferior answer. Because students were asked to truncate or round off to two decimal places.

What happens when you truncate 2. Does it become 2.00

What happens when you round off 2. Does it become 2.00.

It should be obvious that the instructions are only meant for cases where truncation and rounding off makes sense. And in case of integers, the instructions do not make sense.

In fact, all those who wrote the answer as 2.00 are wrong, and their marks should be deducted as they have followed some instructions not applicable to this answer. IIT JEE has been kind enough to admit that these students might have been confused and agreed to give them marks. But now, they want the court to say that others who did the right thing by interpreting the instructions correctly should suffer.

And Madras High Court is essentially saying that when you truncate or round off an integer number 2, you will get 2.00. It has not specified in its order whether truncation will get 2.00 or rounding off will get 2.00. I would really like the honorable court to specify this too so that we can change all our school mathematics textbooks in the country as per the court decision.

Now, you might disagree with me that the interpretation of writing the answer as 2.00 is wrong. But can you deny that some students would read the same instruction and come to a conclusion that these instructions are only meaningful if the answer is a real number with more than 2 decimal places. And if their interpretation is a reasonable one, should they be penalized.

Last year, when IIT JEE had done lots of wrongs and yet courts supported them, I had written in my blog that for a long time courts have been ignoring anything and everything IITs do. They are letting IITs get away with murder. I didn't know that in just one year, we will have a complete U turn in the circumstances where the courts will support students who can't even interpret instructions properly and ask IITs to penalize those who understand and interpret the instructions properly.

Added on 6th July, 2018:
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And even if the interpretation of 2.00 is a better interpretation, why not allow an alternative interpretation as well. If those who wrote 2.00 had to spend extra time or would have done the rest of the paper in a better way had they known that alternative interpretations would be allowed, then, for a moment one can consider their request to penalize others. But if their exam has not been affected by it, and there is a genuine confusion, shouldn't that alternative interpretation be graded as well. What is the legal point in forcing only one interpretation when there was no impact on the exam (there will be impact on rank, but then there has to be a legal point supporting one interpretation). The court does not specify the legal point. (I guess it was important to pass a quick order in this case, and a reasoned order would have taken time. But the hurry to pronounce an order has unfortunately led to an order without reason.)

Is accepting one interpretation over other really the most fair solution. Shouldn't we demand a retest whenever the slightest confusion appears in the language of any question or instruction. May be what JEE should do is to prepare 10 different question papers, and conduct exams over 10 days. The exam on 1st day will be graded. If there is no confusion, that is final. If there is a confusion, let us look at the test 2. If there is confusion in this, let us grade test 3, and so on. And hope that there will at least be one exam out of those 10 which will not have any confusion. That, to me, seems to be the only fair solution in future.

Added on 7th July, 2018:
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A lot of comments here, on FB, on emails, and elsewhere, all saying just one thing. What was 7.00 doing in the instructions. Isn't the presence of 7.00 a proof that 7 was to be written as 7.00.

Sorry, guys. I disagree. Presence of 7.00 is NOT a proof that 7 was to be written as 7.00, That is your assumption. And I would ask a counter question. There is a specific mention of truncation/rounding off. Are you truncating 7 to get 7.00 or are you rounding off to get 7.00. You can't point out to just one number in the list, and not read the rest of the instruction.

The instructions is only saying what is the minimum you need to do to get full marks. And if you don't do that minimum, you will get a zero. The instructions are not meant to say that you can't do better than the minimum. If the answer is 6.997 you can write it as 7.00. That is the minimum expected. But if you write 6.997, it is not wrong. It is better. And in no exam can you be penalized to do better.

And further, I am saying that those who have made a mistake of assuming  that mere presence of 7.00 is a proof that 7 is to be written as 7.00, have made a small mistake. We don't need to penalize them. But I am aghast at people saying that those who did better should be penalized.

Added on 7th July, 2018:
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The Court's decision, besides being inconsistent with Mathematics, has other infirmities as well. If we look at the operating part of the decision, it is stated in Para #14 and Para #15, and these two paragraphs appear to be contradictory in nature.
 

Para 14 is essentially saying that the judge is satisfied with IIT's view that the answers with or without decimal are both correct and hence marks can be awarded to both, but only as a tie breaking thing, those who have written all answers in 2 decimal places shall be considered ahead of those who have written answers till one decimal place and they should be ahead in ranking of those who have written integer answers. It is not clear which category a student will be in if s/he has written some answers up to 2 decimal places and some answers up to 1 and some answers as integers. In any case, this is only an additional tie breaking rule and one can see that this won't impact the counseling process much. Almost everybody will get the same seat as they were getting without this court order.

However, Para 15 is saying that seat allocation should be based on original instructions, and not based on clarifications issued later on, specifically with regards to writing the answer up to 2 decimal place. This seems to indicate that those who wrote an integer answer or up to one decimal place answer should get a zero in that question. This will cause havoc to the merit list as many people have written less than 2 decimal places not just in one question but many questions. And every such question was 3 marks.

What should IITs follow? If you follow Para 14, the petitioners aren't going to be happy, and they are likely to go for an appeal. If you follow Para 15, then all those affected now, will go for an appeal. Either way, the admission process is stuck. So it was best that IIT went for an appeal, and now the best is to wait for the decision of the 2-judge bench.

In the meanwhile, I would suggest that those who have written Integer answers or answers till 1 decimal place, request the high court to join this petition. Don't depend on IIT alone to fight it. As we have seen in many other cases, IITs don't represent their cases very well. They really depend on the fact that most courts are sympathetic to them and hence even if they don't represent the case well, they will win. But in this case, that is not happening. So I am hoping that they would have done their homework really well this time and prepared a good appeal. But don't depend on it. If you can afford a lawyer at Madras HC, join the case.