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.