Examination Cancelled, Results next month

Title of this blog is from a headline on 2nd June, the day after CBSE was asked to cancel its 12th class examination. And I wonder if anyone felt that there was something strange about this headline. Result of what, if exams are cancelled.

No, I am not suggesting that CBSE should have waited indefinitely for situation to improve and then conducted the exams. That would be too stressful and we needed a closure on this batch. But suggesting that we should have an artificial method to guess how many marks a student would have got if the exam was conducted is something I find very strange.

But this is nothing new. Last year too, we had scores of some subjects been filled as average of other subjects. In many universities, marks of courses done in 3rd year were put as average of previous two years. Nobody thought that assigning marks in history on the basis of marks scored in Hindi was strange.

Was there an option. Of course, there was. CBSE could say on the 12th class marksheet that no public exam was conducted and the marks are as assigned by schools (with some regulations) and hence cannot be compared. So CBSE would have said that they had the confidence that if a school was declaring a student passed, they too could declare that the student had enough capabilities that they expected from someone passing a 12th class exam. What this would have meant is that CBSE was not commenting on the specific marks assigned by schools and was not recommending that marks assigned by one school be comparable with marks assigned by another school.

Would this have been acceptable to stakeholders, particularly those who till the month of May were shouting that our system is bad because it considered examinations as sacrosanct. No way. While exams are considered bad, marks are important. How would university admissions take place unless CBSE certifies that marks are comparable.

But shouldn't that be a problem of the university system. May be they would have still treated marks of different schools as equivalent just like they treat marks of different boards as equivalent today. Or may be this would have forced the universities to come up with a better system of admissions.

But the nice thing about the whole issue is that no one cares about lying (or certifying marks in one subject based on how student had performed in unrelated subjects two years ago), and no one cares about quality or merit. Universities need a metric, however bad it may be, but which can be used to rank all admission seekers in a serial order and which will not be quashed by the courts. The only value of 12th class marks is to satisfy courts that admissions were done without any favoritism.

Note that I am not at all suggesting that there should have been exams. I am not at all bothered that everyone seems to have passed with high marks. My only concern is that a Board is certifying those marks which are not based on any exam.

BTech@JKLU: Can high quality education be free of cost?

Is your JEE Mains performance in the year 2020 or Jan/Feb 2021 higher than 80 percentile. Do you know someone who meets this criteria and is looking for admissions to engineering programs. Then this blog post is for you.

I am only explaining the scholarship policy for BTech admission this year. A small blurb about the program is written below. But I would be happy to answer any questions on the program itself. Please write them as comments below or send me an email.

Most universities provide scholarships to some of their students. JKLU also does. Most scholarships are meant to cover a part of the cost and not the entire or even substantial cost. We also did the same. And in many institutions, the criteria for continuing the scholarship is restrictive and as a result, the number of scholarships in successive years are much less than initial offerings. We followed the industry practice. We were always more liberal in providing scholarships than our peers, but we now want to go much further. After all, we are completing 10 years.

We are making it easier for good students to have free education in all four years, and for a very large number of students, we will make costs very low. This, together with the opportunity to learn with a pedagogy and curriculum designed in collaboration with the best in the world, with international gateways, innovative faculty and unique inter-disciplinary curriculum, makes it a very special opportunity.

Sample this: Male applicants with a JEE Mains score of 91 percentile or higher will get complete waiver of both academic fee and hostel fee. Female applicants get free education at 90 percentile or higher. This means, going by JEE numbers last year, an unprecedented opportunity of free high-quality engineering education.

Academic fee includes everything that is normally charged by universities, be it tuition, development fee, exam fee, registration fee, and god knows how many different lines are there in the fee schedule. We have only one number and you get complete waiver of the same. And even the hostel room is free for these students. The only thing you pay for are utilities and mess bill to make it even for day scholars and hostelers. That is it.

What is more. You get to keep this 100% free education for all four years if you maintain a CGPA of 8.0. Easy for students who are in the top 10 percent of the country. And by chance, you slip below 8.0. We don't remove scholarships completely. You still get a 75% waiver. So almost free. You can see details at the scholarship webpage.

We also have other levels of scholarships. 75 percent waiver for JEE Mains percentile of 89 to 91 (for female students: 87 to 90), 50 percent waiver for JEE Mains percentile of 87 to 89 (for female students: 84 to 87) and a 25 percent waiver for JEE Mains percentile of 83 to 87 (for female students: 79 to 84). We want to encourage female students to go for engineering education and hence the JEE Mains performance required for the same level is significantly lower than male students. Again, please do check out our scholarship page for details.

We will consider both the performance in JEE Mains 2020 as well as performance in JEE Mains 2021 (January and February rounds that have already happened). If you take JEE Mains multiple times, including in both years, we consider the best performance.

Here is the link for admissions page for more information and application.

Is there a catch? Of course, there is. Internally, we do have a budget for scholarships which is very liberal this year but not infinite. The current policy is applicable only for applications that we receive till Monday June 21st, 2021. We will make admission offers by 25th June, and a small initial payment will be required by 30th June. (For those who are offered 100% fee waiver, the initial deposit will be equivalent to the security deposit that we charge, that is, Rs. 10,000, and for others the initial deposit will be Rs. 25,000 only.)

An immediate question will arise. What if one changes one's mind and decides to take admission in another institution. We respect your decision. And we will refund your deposit but for a small fee of Rs. 1,000. And we will be quick. Very unlike many other institutions that may take months to refund and deduct 5,000 or even 10,000 rupees.

Another question: I took JEE in Jan/Feb. I have a percentile score of 89.5 which as per your table makes me eligible for 75% waiver. But what if I take next round of JEE and get a score of higher than 91 percentile. Would I be considered for 100% waiver.

Answer: Your scholarship depends on the policy as on the date of your application. If you apply before 18th June, we will offer you 75% waiver and if you accept that offer and deposit the initial fee, and later you show us proof of improved JEE score, we will upgrade your offer to 100% waiver. But if you do not apply and do not accept admission by 30th June, the scholarship policy as on the date of application will be applicable.

About the program:

JKLU offers BTech programs in Computer Science, Electronics & Communication, Electrical, Mechanical and Civil Engineeringwith exciting areas of specializations. We have a strong Project-based learning pedagogy that has been developed with the help of Olin College of Engineering, USA ranked among top 3 Engineering undergraduate programs (non doctoral) in the US by US News & World Report for 2021 and 2020, and was named along with MIT, as the top leaders in engineering education globally. We have close interactions with industry and in fact, it is necessary to spend one semester in industry. We also encourage our students to spend a semester in another fine institution in India or abroad. Our students have been to IIT Gandhinagar, University of Florida, University of Amsterdam and other places. Committed to our students’ entry into and long terms success in their chosen careers, our Centre for Communication & Critical Thinking helps them become confident, articulate and independent thinking professional. Our Director of Engineering, Prof. Sanjay Goel, an alumnus of BITS Pilani and IIT Delhi, is a well known academician with rich experience in leading innovations in engineering education. Similarly, the faculty is mostly with PhDs, and has been recruited from fine institutions.The infrastructure of JKLU is state of the art and we welcome all potential students and parents to visit us (if Covid situation permits) before taking a final decision. When you apply for admission, ask the admissions office that you wish to speak to some faculty member. Get answers to as many questions as you have. The career choices should be decided very carefully.

I join JKLU: A small university with big aspirations

 As people following me on social media know, I have joined a small, young, private university in Jaipur as its next Vice Chancellor. The university is J K Lakshmipat University (JKLU), founded in 2011 by generous support from J K Organization. JKO, as any Indian would know is one of the oldest industrial house in India with businesses in diverse sectors and well known for its philanthropic activities.

When I announced my decision to seek retirement from IIT Kanpur and join JKLU, many of my friends were surprised. But I was itching to join a university which is open to doing things differently, one that had desire to achieve excellence, where the promoters were willing to invest in the future, and there will be enough autonomy to do all this. After having spent time at multiple institutions, it was becoming clear to me that I would have greater impact in private setting than public setting. I recall that of all the places I enjoyed my stint at LNMIIT Jaipur the most, and I believe that stint was the most impactful of all my leadership roles. Many friends who knew about my yearning for a new role tried to dissuade me. There aren't many such institutions in the country. But I didn't care. I didn't care if there were 100 such institutions or not. I only cared if there was one such institution. (And to be honest, I have come across several private institutions today who will meet this criteria. Higher education in India is changing.)

I had known about JKLU earlier. On 1st November, 2017, I had met Pramath Sinha and Asheesh Gupta regarding some other educational initiatives and in that meeting they told me about JKLU and wanted me to be advising the university. And so it started. From January 2018 to January 2019, I spent two days a month in most of the months at JKLU. I interacted with all the top leadership and faculty. Participated in their discussions on all academic matters. We had a faculty member from Olin College to help us in designing courses around project-based learning approach. (The Olin approach is very different from what colleges in India do in the name of project-based-learning.) The University was kind enough to send me to Olin in the summer of 2018 to learn the Olin way of education. I was part of faculty selections and we could recruit faculty from IITs and abroad. A Center for Communication and Critical Thinking was set up to support all academic programs as it was felt that these two skills are extremely important to future proof your education. We setup an office of Dean of R&D which supports faculty members when they submit sponsored research projects and want to file patents. We also created an incubation center. I was quite excited about my limited role and was extremely happy to see the pace at which things were changing. I knew that one day I would come back to this place for a full time role.

After joining PEC in 2019, I stopped going to JKLU. But they kept sending me their newsletter and I kept on learning of all their new initiatives. In 2019, they started their third major discipline - Design. (The first two were Engineering and Management.) They had recruited a truly exceptional faculty for Design and it could claim to provide education at par or better than the best design schools in India. There is a push to internationalization of education. We would like as many of our students to spend a semester in a good university abroad as possible and have a few agreements to support this. We have a very interesting program with Univ of Massachusetts, Amherst where the first year is done at JKLU and the second year at UMass with a very large scholarship provided by JK Organization to reduce the cost of education in US. We also support our students going to top Indian institutions, including IITs, for a semester exchange. 

We believe that the future lies with multi-disciplinarity. And as New Education Policy (NEP 2020) also mandates, we will be growing in other disciplines including basic sciences and liberal arts over the next few years.

We are tiny as the universities go. We do want to make an impact on the society and we understand that we need a critical mass to do that. We are growing in all three areas: Engineering, Management and Design. I am going to write a separate article on them soon. This one was just to introduce JKLU to my readers.