Coaching Factories Are Dumbing Down The IITs

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Coaching Factories Are Dumbing Down The IITs

Not So Bright

• Tata Steel MD, B. Muthuraman, an IIT Madras graduate, says IITs are now thriving on their "past reputation" and TISCO is "not likely to recruit" IIT graduates any longer
• Many IIT professors too find the present crop of students lacking in creativity, and the spirit of innovation and inquiry
• They blame the students' blinkered, robotic approach to their studies on the fact that a large majority are products of coaching factories.
• They call for reform of the joint engineering exam (JEE), and of the IIT curriculum as well, to develop the students' societal awareness, communication skills and knowledge of the humanities.

The nearly 2.5 lakh students who wrote the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) a few days ago for the 4,600 seats across seven IITs were blissfully unaware of a simmering debate about the JEE system, the institutes' curriculum and their future employability. What has triggered the discussion within the fraternity is the concern expressed by two distinguished IIT alumni about the general decline in standards of excellence at the institutes in recent years. Their remarks have questioned the calibre of students who make it into the IITs by subjecting themselves to the killing rigours of coaching factories in places like Kota and Hyderabad. The alumni seemed to conclude that these products of coaching factories—who now form, according to Wikipedia, 95 per cent of students at IITs—had a blinkered approach to education, did not recognise new ideas and had lost the spirit of inquiry and innovation. In short, elements that had built Brand IIT over the decades had now gone missing.

The first salvo was fired by Tata Steel MD and IIT Madras alumnus B. Muthuraman. Speaking at a Ruby Union meeting of the pioneer batch organised at his alma mater in January 2007, he said that tisco was "not likely to recruit" IIT graduates any longer. He based his opinion on a recent interaction he had had with a set of final year students, who he said did not even know the authors of books they were supposed to have studied. He made many other related statements suggesting that IITs thrive only on their "past reputation" and that he actually preferred other college students who were amenable to company training. The oblique message was that the current crop of IITians thought a bit too much of themselves.

A classmate of Muthuraman, who was in the audience, told Outlook that the tisco chief had "stirred the hornet's nest" with his statement, the corollary of which was that the entry point to IITs, the JEE, "needed revision". Bhamy Shenoy, also from the pioneer batch of IIT Madras, said that he later discovered from his friends in other companies present at the reunion that they too were similarly wary of the current crop of IITians. "I wrote to Muthuraman after this, he is really concerned about the issue. Human tendency is to boast about one's alma mater, but here you find a person who does not mind coming out with the truth so that the institution can improve," Shenoy said.

Within a couple of weeks of Muthuraman dropping the bombshell, Dunu Roy, the IIT Bombay alumnus who has distinguished himself by working on rural technologies, did some blunt talking at the institute's annual Techfest. He provoked his audience by calling them "big fools" who knew nothing about India and its village life. He said the courses that the students learnt were more suited to the needs of the US. He pointed out that earlier the IITs had a more integrated approach and also taught humanities, ethics and logic.But these subjects were excluded in order to hasten the production of what he called "unreal" technologists.

Ironically, the dissenting views of these two distinguished IIT alumni have come at a time when mainstream debate about IITs and IIMs has concerned itself with how extension of OBC reservations may alter their agendas of merit and excellence. When excellence in the IITs today is more in the imagination than in reality, how could reservations further erode it, is a question that emerges from the two views.

But what is the chief complaint about the JEE system and quality of students getting into the IITs? The JEE tests are said to be of an irrationally high standard, which makes students depend on intensive coaching at the cost of systematic scientific education and normal teenage activities. Take a look at the critique of three IIT Kanpur professors on the JEE system in an in-house journal. Prof Vijay Gupta writes: "Teaching and coaching are two different kinds of things. Even the best coaching does not attempt to clarify concepts. It does not inculcate the spirit of inquiry. It does not train persons in starting from first principles. Instead it relies on pattern recognition. Do enough problems so that when you see a problem in the exam, you can recall the special trick required to obtain the answer.... Most entrants into IITs have not read a single book in their last three years or so." Prof B.N. Banerjee touches upon his classroom experience: "JEE has spawned a system that reduces young people to automatons, in more senses than one. They not only become robots in academics, as all of us can see in our core teaching encounters, they even resemble one another in personality. Gone are the sparkling eyes and scintillating engagements that used to be the teacher's joy..."

When the inputs for getting into IITs is itself flawed, how could one expect the finished product to be a bright spark? "One cannot get a diamond out of clay or ordinary stone, however much it is polished," says Prof M.R. Madhav. In a mail exchange, a IIT-Madras professor admitted: "One thing my colleagues and I seem to agree is about the damage that the gruesome entrance exam causes to the motivation of a student to study seriously after entering the campus. Having seen fellow students decades ago and my students now, I should say there is a deterioration." An IIT review report of 2004 commissioned by the government with eminent scientists on board too took a critical view of the JEE and made this recommendation: "The level of examination should be made suitable for what can reasonably be expected of a bright school-leaving child without need for intensive coaching outside of what the school curricula prescribe. The purpose is to screen inherently gifted candidates capable of thinking on their own." Pointing out the limitations of the IIT curriculum, the report says that "several employers have observed that the communication skills and societal awareness of B.Tech graduates are not commensurate with their technical skills.... Ignoring the importance of Social Science and Humanities education can place at risk technical leadership that is gaining prominence, within our own country and on the world stage".

Statistics secured from a dean of students of an IIT offer an insight to the admission imbalance at the premier institutes. For a recent year under review, 979 candidates from the South zone secured admission. Of them 769 were from Andhra Pradesh alone, Tamil Nadu had 94, Karnataka 84 and Kerala a mere 32. "Andhra may well be producing bright IIT entrants, but those from other three states can't be that poor. Mushrooming of IIT tutorials and coaching centres in Hyderabad may have to do with the JEE results," says Bhamy Shenoy.In the North zone, Rajasthan is the unlikely state that is reported to have been sending a high proportion of students to IITs, and this is due to the umpteen coaching centres in Kota: "The amount spent by IIT aspirants attending the coaching factories is estimated to be around Rs 2,000 crore, which is four times the annual budgetary allocation of the government for the IITs," observes Shenoy.

Gururaj 'Desh' Deshpande, co-founder of Sycamore Networks and IIT Madras alumnus, has a different take on the issue—he doesn't agree that standards have fallen at IITs. He says the amount spent on coaching certainly demonstrates that we are not putting our resources to good use. "We spend more resources getting students into the IITs rather than building more IITs. But the good news is that we have so many motivated students who are prepared to work so hard to get into IITs. The solution here is to open up the market for education."

Like Desh, many other honchos of corporate India that Outlook spoke to were also circumspect in their comments on the current crop of IITians, though their remarks imply that they no longer find the best talent there. Vidya Natampally, director-strategy at Microsoft Research, says guardedly: "We recruit creative people with a strong research vision, irrespective of the institution that they have studied in." A blogger had an interesting point about IITians and Microsoft: "In April 2007, there were just seven Indians out of 118 Microsoft executives and only three of them are IITians. Why are there so few IITians in the top pack of the software giant?" Bikramjit Maitra, head of HR at Infosys, said that though "IIT graduates represent a pool of talent that has been hand-picked by the JEE exam and honed by academic rigours...there exist several such talent pools in India." The sentiments expressed are clearly not quite the unqualified praise that should have been there for the recent crop of IITians. Perhaps it's time the IITs paid serious heed to the warnings of Muthuraman and others who share his views.