In India, engineering students outsource their academic projects
expressindia.com
expressindia.com
What I wanted to point out was how things work out in the real world. The thumb rule for describing these sort of things in India is the saying 'No good deed goes unpunished'. You will see most of these students doing these will actually win over the actual hard working guys. The guy who did the real project would have probably failed, or wouldn't have enough polish on his project. Or due to his sheer intelligence, and little touch of arrogance gotten out of favor of his professors. Due to all this he probably would have scored less marks, missed out the interview opportunity and then left to wander for jobs.
The guys who got the project done 'ready made', would have made their project look complete. Mugged up all the viva and etc questions. Got plenty of time to study interview books and questions asked in campus interviews. And due to all this would have easily cleared the already heavily gamed interview process.
So the net story is, if you cheat you are likely to win than if you work hard the true way.
When I joined the industry I noticed the process manifest in front of my own eyes. Every joe joining the company wanted to be a manager in 4 years, with a monthly take home of 1.5L, at least 3-4 foreign travel opportunities. Of course in highly political environments like large corporates, some played their old game and got through. But most who didn't had two options
a) MBA
b) MS in the United States.
The actual hard working technical guys(programmers, hackers or whatever you may call them) are treated like commodity, worst like a foot ball tossed around by 'business guys', because Indian IT religion creed says 'Being technical is not important, rather one must do smart work'.
So in the name of smart work, technical career has no growth path, no long term rewards. In order to grow and get paid well you have to be a 'manager'. Or worst work at a start up, where you are likely fail, not get compensated enough, Or if you are too unlucky work for a stingy/unethical founder and burn your hands then get back to your old MegaCorp back again.
When this is the routine cycle. What do you expect this students to do?
"working today in the US and probably will end up being US citizens."
So? And what kind of a generalization are making here anyways? You are meaning to say: "All people who did this cleared GRE/ GMAT and went to the USA". That's a gross overstatement based on no evidence. Not to mention the fact, assuming even if they did get their project made from somewhere else (I really doubt it that it happens a lot), they still had other academics to clear. And they had the GRE exam. And then they cleared the job interview. Means they were not as dull and stupid as you want them to and show them to be.
Your tone and your attitude seems more of hate based than anything else.
Kamaal, Do you get frustrated because you don't think you are paid as much as you should be? Or, that the business people shouldn't be paid as much as the technical guys? If it is the latter, there is no respite, and you should probably do what others do.
First of all, you are in your own country, and you are welcome to leave the job anytime you want. ANYTIME. If you think you are overworked you don't have to put up with it, you just move on. There is no shortage of software jobs in India, and if you are as technical as you say you are, you shouldn't have any problem finding one.
Secondly, are you an engineer because you like it, or you do it to satisfy your ego, or differentiate yourself, or because you worked so hard until now that you can't give up? If it is for any other reasons than the first one, take a good hard look at yourself. It probably is not worth being frustrated all your life for anything. Life is short, and you should not do disservice to yourself. Don't buy into the hype created by society for serving its own selfish reasons. Yeah, it is great if you invented an algorithm that solves a problem in half the time, but recognize that in itself it is meaningless to your life unless you enjoy it. Don't, please don't do it because everyone says so-and-so thing is great.
Thirdly, I don't know how you would do it, but please don't let others recognition of you define your happiness. Do it by keeping away from people who cause all the negativity or learn to ignore them. You are your own person, and you should do everything to serve yourself better and keep yourself happy.
PS: I am a desi living in the US from quite a while now. I felt the same frustration you feel now. It is quite a journey to get out of it, but you should not stay where you are
PPS: You are not responsible for the world. The world is a unjust place and is what it is. Learn to live with it. It is not going to be "your" problem in a few short years anyways.
The other way. Technical guys must be paid what they deserve.
I don't know why you think I'm frustrated. And if you feel things are good as they are in India, then I rest my case.
I have no intentions of immigrating to US. Especially when there is so much growth in India and I have so much to benefit from, besides I don't feel coming to US alone will magically transform my career and make a billionaire. If working hard is what it takes to be successful, I might very well do it here rather than the US. Also immigrating to US means spending a long process to get green card and citizenship which translates to >10 years dependency on corporate sponsorship. And there is little logic in living hand to mouth just because you can get a citizen ship there, while you can have it all here now.
Besides India is awesome these days. I see nothing that I'm missing by not being in the US. Travel for a visit is a different thing, but setting down in US is something I don't feel is worth at this time.
But I respect your decisions. And I'm sure you have your own reasons. And I wish you all the very best.
I don't know if you immigrated to the US. But if you did, I know you have your own reasons. If you are happy about it, stand by it. Other wise why should you have any issues at all?
That doesn't quite make sense. Wouldn't technical work be the "smart" work?
Its not very financially rewarding. And when you see the guy next to you making big bucks by just asking for status updates, forwarding mails and changing cells on excel sheets. You begin to wonder if its worth it.
I had this same question and asked one of the more experienced guy in our team on why he didn't took the managerial path when he had the chance and experience - his answer was "This is what I like". I could see that there are more financially motivated people in the team than there are people who love technology. If tomorrow the whole IT industry in the country goes extinct most of the guys who fill in excel sheets will be happy counting boxes in a factory as long as they pay enough.
This is a defeatist attitude - giving up before you even start. Its surely better to learn technical skills and then later-on develop your business/management skills if required. Saying that students cheat because they have no long term reward is a poor excuse.
When I see the average HN-er complain in the thread on the recent (Latimes?) article which complained about how Liberal Arts degrees are letting people down, I feel that your nation has decided to strap lead weights and jump into the deep end.
STEM fetishization is Bad. its stupid, counter productive and creates a vastly toxic situation where now everyone has to go to college to get a STEM degree so that they can go on to become consultants.
If non-STEM inclined people start doing STEM, all you get is a huge demand for STEM and that follows with rising prices of premier institutions, dilution of degree value from anyone else and then a flood of McDonalds education institutions which prey on the weak.
On top of that it leads to unhealthy competition and student suicides as - well now you need to get great SAT scores before you count anywhere in the world.
I could go on, but I forget more points every time I remember one.
One of the things that you will realize was important once its gone, is people actually versed in history and softer study fields who can chime in discussions and provide things like good moral arguments.
If I asked someone here to defend free speech beyond the obvious first few feints and lunges, they'd fall.
STEM has a certain utilitly, but for many its only useful for introductory jobs. Specialization is too great. And Like accounting, it is a limited skillset, especially for senior management positions. So, yes a technical degree will put you in a better 1sr year salary than an english major (or whatever) but its not going to make a career happen per-se.
Their is also dis-utility. There is a power curve thing. Unfortunately, STEM grades are more transparent and the use of curves is prevalent. Two things follow: not everyone is in the 10% (or top 10-20 schools). And there is a clear signal on who is not.
Both this guy and the english major now have to go to grad school or what not to prove something. Maybe they both do MBAs. But then you have an engineer with an MBA, and still this is arguably not great either. He's arguably at a dis-advantage in soft-skills (empathy, creativity), and his former advantage in quantitative elements vs the english major is less.
For some roles, this is fine. But There are plenty of smart people good at maths that make poor investment bankers, or poor economists, or poor product-dev guys. Just like the english major with the weak quant skills, but they are just missing the boat from another angle.
Alternatively, for grad school in STEM you are unlikely to gain entry in the lower half of your class. So again, for the lower performers this can limit options.
The only people that really have business dedicating their (entire) undergrad to science are: phd candidates, medicine, and applied engineers (like civil). And then those top or the top-top 10-20% of they best who are going to be able to leverage the full value of the degree. Go on to Ms, or otherwise put it to use in a deeper career trajectory, or go on to NASA or Google, etc.
What needs to happen with the rest, though, is intesting. The level of technical skills for basic competence is higher today than 30 years ago, so people need to be doing more 3+1 or 4+1 or 2+2 degrees, combining a technical qualification with a proper education in another area, such as liberal arts or something inter-disciplinary. Being one-dimensional is now a bit of a liability (in either direction).
The HN audience is not a great sample, as there are people here for whom total technical dedication indeed pays off (and makes sense). And/or who are bright enough to absorb knowledge in other areas independently. But one is best aware of what is the general and what is the exception. The odds are long otherwise.
Don't want to sound dismissing, but where outside scholarly work is it necessary to defend free speech beyond the obvious first few feints and lunges ? Public debate and policy making rarely go beyond those first feints and lunges, plus some vote gathering.
So, if it has no practical purpose, you can argue it's worth doing for itself, but then you'd just position itself near that modern madhouse, contemporary poetry.
This is the case with an obvious argument like free speech.
Have a debate on something like civil liberties and rights, or the Aadhar scheme and you will draw blanks.
Or comprehensive and confident arguments against something as basic as superstition.
I'm sure after a series of disasters and a home grown enlightenment movement which grows out of religious adventurism we could learn the same lessons as the west. The question is do we have to?
I know a guy who was quite dedicated with his project and though he didn't get good marks ( project )or awesome campus placement, he got into AMD later as a new grad. ( w.r.t placement ).
Our team did some work on compiler ( source to source translation ) which is pretty unknown in my college and even the guys who make project for cash won't take it as they prefer easy cash :P
At the end it all depends whether the guy has a hungry mind or chooses the easy path.
Exactly my point. I am happy that he got what he deserved. But you can imagine this is not likely to work at scale.
There are many places where you won't even be shortlisted for the interview if you don't have good marks.
and frankly if someone is smart enough to play politics and get the business done by being a manager, why shouldn't they get rewarded ?
I am technically strong and loved every project I did in collage but I also recognize the value of business people and their marketing and sales skills. Learn from them and be good in business and engineering.
In the technical field, cheating or faking it can only take you so far. Comparison should not really be with companies like TCS, Infosys, but with good companies who hire real talent and pay for that talent.
This, as far as I know is a direct result of proliferation of the number of engineering colleges in India. A good warning for companies to start recruiting only from top engineering colleges.
I was forever interested in what I was doing. Be it studying biology in class 12 (Yes, I had PCMB) or studying the subjects in my engineering class. I initially took admission to Computer science but soon realized my affinity to electronics. I took a branch shift. I never copied any lab experiment or any project, minor or major. Being the only girl who wanted to make her own projects, I was left alone, yet I struggled and learnt enough to be picked now by the largest open source hardware company.
But when I was completing graduation, no company would come to take students from my college. Yes, not even Infosys or TCS. Also I would have been more or less rejected even if those companies came as my area of studies and expertise is very specific and narrowed down. What deters core companies to pick students from small colleges? I strongly believe that I would have got a better career beginning if only core companies came for interview. My currently employers did not care for my degree or the 'percentage' I scored. It was simply my contribution to the open source community that got me where I am today.
TL;dr : I strongly vote out against companies discriminating against 'small' and 'big' named colleges. Least there is another interested hard working mostly self-taught engineer as me in any of them.
Most Master's degree holders from other Indian universities cannot even solve FizzBuzz in a language of their choice. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...
Maybe they can't go to each and every college in the country? Or maybe it's just inertia on their part.
True. However, more and more product based companies are setting up shop in India. Many of these have vigorous and interesting interview processes that identify truly capable technical people. And believe it or not, they offer very high pay packages that sometimes exceed that of Executives.
I agree that the number of such opportunities is still small compared to openings in Service-based companies. But the trend has started to catch on. Recently, Infosys announced an increasing focus on products because they realize that the services business ‘provides revenue that scales only linearly with headcount’. As more and more product work happens in India, core techies will gain greater value. Also, as the years pass: a) more Engineering students will graduate, the total number of really strong engineers (vs. the let-me-please-mom-n-dad types) will increase leading to the creation of great techie environments in more companies. b) more well experienced Engineers will stay in hands-on roles leading to proper mentoring that enhances the techie environments.
The Business guys will still be more important as anywhere in the world. But the treatment of programmers as commodities that worries you will decrease, IMHO.
During my 2nd year of engineering we had to complete a programming "mini project". If you're familiar with these you may know the quality of most projects.
Year after year you can see the same projects reappear, some even to the point that the old student's details aren't changed in the source code to reflect the new owner's!
So we had to complete this project by forming a group - minimum of 2 students and a maximum of 4. The guideline? It should have a UI (duh!) and a database. The clear instructions from the professor were to use only Visual Basic or Java. The syllabus booklet obviously mentioned that any suitable language could be used.
I went to him to ask if it was OK to do a "web based", "database-enabled" & "User Interfacing" application. To say that he was agitated would be a euphemism. It was like I had insulted him. To placate him, I respectfully pointed out that it was perfectly okay for me to use a language that I was comfortable in and that a web-based project was in fact a norm.
To avenge the dishonor I had brought him, he bullied another member of my group to leave my group just an hour before the demo to an external professor (a professor from some other college who is invited for the demo and viva voce).
Meanwhile the demo went great, the external was very satisfied with the answers to his questions although I can be sure he was a little happily surprised that I had coded it myself completely. My professor sitting next to him was fuming with rage. I gladly left the hall being sure of making it satisfactorily.
I was dumbfounded when I found it on my report card that I had failed getting only 10% of the total allotment for the project and the re-hashed project managed to score 90% and above.
The sad thing is most of my colleagues didn't even try to code or come up with an idea. Even sadder is the fact that if you do, the professors make sure to take it personally and pull you down instead of motivating or giving a helping hand.
Doesn't matter. Great colleges in India are about campus hiring, not education.
>>During my 2nd year of engineering we had to complete a programming "mini project". If you're familiar with these you may know the quality of most projects...
:) You made feel nostalgic.
>>The clear instructions from the professor were to use only Visual Basic or Java.
and then..
>>I went to him to ask if it was OK to do a "web based", "database-enabled" & "User Interfacing" application. To say that he was agitated would be a euphemism. It was like I had insulted him. To placate him, I respectfully pointed out that it was perfectly okay for me to use a language that I was comfortable in and that a web-based project was in fact a norm.
Cardinal sin!
Golden rule of such places. Just do as he says, because the idiot feels great power in his fingers and can ruin your whole education because he can't stand a guy more intelligent then him.
Additional Advice: Since you are about to graduate and come out soon. Let me tell you there are many people in the industry who are just like your professor. They have their pets in their projects and their own way of running things. If you fall out of favor of such guys you lose the game.
>>To avenge the dishonor I had brought him, he bullied another member of my group to leave my group just an hour before the demo to an external professor (a professor from some other college who is invited for the demo and viva voce).
Its more like 'Raju Rastogi' from 3 idiots, if you act like Rancho the principle is likely to advice him to join chatur.
>>I was dumbfounded when I found it on my report card that I had failed getting only 10% of the total allotment for the project and the re-hashed project managed to score 90% and above.
Hardly surprising. I was expecting this end in the very beginning at the start of your post.
>>The sad thing is most of my colleagues didn't even try to code or come up with an idea. Even sadder is the fact that if you do, the professors make sure to take it personally and pull you down instead of motivating or giving a helping hand.
More sad thing, They are likely to placed before you, and may even get a better compensation than you can.
I know profs who would be more than happy that someone took some initiative.
At the same time the same prof was completely cognizant of how the game was played.
When I took a course and answered like a sane person, he held his head in his hands and directed me to a few students who reminded me that a 5 point answer was a minimum of 1 page of regurgitation.
I had even more fun when I spoke to the bio med students. I remember their jaws dropping to the ground when I described how I had worked on an autoclave/run gels and generally had fun running genetic experiments over summer break.
Their final project? Making ghaghras and perfect pineapple juice - because the board had decreed that graduates should have some "usable skills once they are in the real world."
I'm a mechanical engineering by education and one thing I have noticed is there are no such options available for mechanical engineers. I remember sweating it out at the workshop fabricating a continuous variable transmission (automatic transmission) unit by hand from scratch.
I went on to work with a "leading education company" in India and we rolled out an "innovative" program for engineering college students. I was fresh out of bschool and was mainly involved in preparing the presentations to be presented to the top management.
The plan was supposed to connect the student community with the industry to facilitate final year projects for "free". I was happy because this entire "outsourcing of projects" was always one of my pet peeves. I later found out that the real plan was to do the above, but do it slowly and when the students were running out of time, make them pay up and "sell" them a project.
The service didn't take off and boy was I secretly glad!
What did I learn from the exercise?
1. There is a booming industry to sell projects.
2. There is immense demand. The moment we started advertising, we got tens of thousands of calls every day.
3. The students just want to get done with the projects. Why? They already have job offers from one of the various software companies and this is just a formality to get their degree certificate.
4. They just aren't interested.
5. We approached engineering colleges as part of marketing and most directors/principals we met were @$$holes who asked us just one question - Will this help me get more admissions for the next academic year?
6. Most HODs wanted a cut out of the entire deal.
7. Demand for projects (in decreasing order) EC>EE>CS/IT>EI>Mech/Civil
I do not know the solution to this problem, but the entire ecosystem is flawed.
2. Are those projects more fun than other jobs?
3. Subvert the whole system: Create a project-making company. Keep good records. Refer your employees to employers, on the basis of their solid project portfolios. Basically, project-making companies thus displace the universities as the place where real learning happens and is proven.
4. Thank you to all the Indians posting here today. I feel like I am reading hackernews.in, and it's nice to get a vacation from Silicon Valley :-)
2. No. More often than not, students end up doing projects "suggested" by these project-making companies. They already have a bunch of "Student Database Management System" and "Hospital Record Management System" projects lying around which they rehash.
3. This already happens to an extent. People who work in these low paying jobs end up getting some experience and move onto better paying jobs. But like I said in (2) above, what they get to do are hardly any fun stuff
PS - when I was a student I did 2-3 other projects for others...
AND students studying MS in USA and UK also send their assignments/homeworks back home - did those too ;)
Actually MS in USA and UK in many(Not all, so please don't frown on me) cases is really for.
a. Foreign degree.
b. USA return/citizen stamp.
c. Helps to get dowry in many cases.
Me and my friend knew 8051 assembly language before project frenzy started. We wanted to stay away from outsourcing project sellers and build something on our own. There was a senior who'd built a Robotic arm to show it was possible. Our major was in Electronics and communications engineering. We built a GPS vehicle locator by making two GSM phones talk to each other using SMS. It even had a maps front-end in VB.
Nothing I had learnt in College prepared us for what we did in those 3 months. We took printouts of 8051 microcontroller, GPS module, Nokia, Siemens modem datasheets. We spent lot of time researching GPS modules which we could get in Bangalore and after numerous visits to circuit shops, setup a lab at home for soldering and burning microcontroller ROM. We burned code in 8051 ROM like 200+ times and spent the whole time learning soldering, writing modular code in Embedded C, talking to Siemens AT modems. When we finally got SMS response of GPS coordinates, we had 600 lines of Embedded C code. We started writing the client side in VB which was a breeze except for soldering a Nokia phone to COM port. We got the same grades as those who bought their projects, but we had the satisfaction of building something.
College in India is pretty much useless unless you have great peers. I was fortunate to have a liberal education in school where the focus was on learning and not rote memorization. I learnt assembly, gwbasic, C, VB while in school. My friend got a job in Embedded systems industry. I applied for GPS and fleet mgmt software companies but ended up working for a big IT company. I got out of that soon and joined a place where developers are not treated like commodities.
The result being that a host of colleges have sprung up to meet this demand. These colleges are setup with the sole aim of making money. Education is just a side effect. Students get no academic freedom and have no space to learn outside of a very narrowly defined "syllabus".
The worse problem is that most students who end up in Engineering Colleges have absolutely no interest in becoming engineers. They do manage to somehow graduate and get an "IT job". They end up being mediocre engineers and at the earliest opportunity try to find a way out. These poor souls end up giving a bad name to Indian Engineers.
What about those who want to be engineers because they like to build things and love to tinker around? The hacker types? Getting into an engineering college requires a lot of money. If and when they do get into an engineering college it's a poor quality one. They are forced to spend time only on mugging up equations and theorems. They get no space to build circuits of their own or blow up stuff for the heck of it. Assignments are a joke, they require no application of thought and all that's required is merely copying stuff from the text book onto paper. The poor dispirted hackers end up languishing in low paying jobs or find an escape route by moving out of the country where their talents are recognised.
tl;dr : Quality suffers when quantity increases beyond limit.
The issue is most people coming from middle class background have big dreams to make money, build a good home and settle down. So the crowd goes where the money is.
Sure there are going to be passionate people, but if its not rewarding sooner or later they are going ask if its worth it.
Your STEM degree and then masters dictates how people perceive you, provide marriage offers, respect you and a huge swathe of other social niceties.
Its what creates our student suicides, competitions to place kids in a strategic school to jump start their STEM education.
Its the root for tution/cram classes that start 2 years before the final exam and absorb vacation and free time.
Its the cause of having a huge amount of useless engineering schools that just print out degrees after you pay a hefty fee.
Further you have non-STEM people doing STEM. They don't care about the subject and never will. For them slope is a pointless concept.
The teachers are over worked and have to correct a million different papers. On top of that since there is finally a national level test - so people just start teaching the test.
This generates tonnes of unmotivated rote learning. I've seen a student draw a circuit diagram, by starting at the lower left corner and sketch upwards to the right.
He may as well have been forging a picture from memmory.
Its frustrating.
With regards to disruption. I know of several pushes to disrupt the industry.
Someone I know is starting an extensive skillling course targeted at slums - the aim is to train plumbers, electricians and secretaries.
Education had also recently been the flavor of the month for investment purposes (I think early in the year). Right now I don't think thats so popular.
At the end of the day though, most of the education disruptions seem to ignore the lessons of education - namely that the fundamental unit of chaos in society is human beings.
Startups balk at this and then try to solve the easier problem of matching the requirements of an education board and their metrics of learning.
I think we have to blame the Indian education system largely for this. The root cause is - The quality of the system is poor and is broken. But it should only get better over-time and its happening.
Indian Schooling system is not ready to bring out Quality Engineers. It doesn't encourage Creative thinking and promote an intellectual environment.
There are many IT companies that fill this void by giving 6months intensive training because they know the education system.
Another social-cultural reason being - Indians are spoon feed-ed right from birth. They aren't independent much and depend on schooling more. This promotes a conservative mindset.
But this norm will gradually change for the better, I'm already seeing today's young undergrads getting involved in Startup space by asking internships and are doing some really great work!
In my startup, we have given internship projects to undergrads but we never value their paper degrees or schooling. We only value their github page, OSS work and appreciate self-taught programmers.
Copying is endemic. Amongst the final year students in my CS class of nearly 50 I think maybe 1 person did it on their own.
The rest knew a guy who knew a guy who had a copy of the project.
This is for your undergrad degree.
For my 10th standard practical exams, which I did in one of the more strict institutions, the invigilator who came from another school left the room for a short time, and my physics professor came in and took a look at what we were doing.
he didn't give us advice directly, but with enough stern looks and exasperated sighs he let people know what they were doing wrong, and why certain experiments were doomed to fail. Then again given the sorry state of some of the equipment like the calipers, I doubt we could have gotten too precise a measurement anyway.
Similarly for the chem practicals and bio practicals.
I also know that our professors would go to other schools and invigilate there, where they would return the favor.
Onward to practical exams in undergrad - Comp sci was probably easier to copy and cheat. The engineering courses were similar though - you could find a talented student/graduate who would make your projects for you at a price.
This is still nothing, because every year there is a scandal where the question papers are leaked for almost every exam. This is constant.
People will find a bribe-able teacher or peon and get X or Y exam paper from them. Again constant and ongoing. This is often the option of the desperate, who also resort to interesting ways to cheat - such as having your text books hidden away in the toilets and so on, or on your phones, or scratched onto the desks or the walls.
------
I can't find it anymore, but there was a great article written by a professional paper writer in the US. He used to work for a firm that wrote papers and articles for college students who could afford them.
He never looked down on his students - some of them were quite wealthy and he knew that they would go on to do something else once they graduated. So for him this was just an extension of them learning useful real world skills and he appreciated those clients who made no pretense and could give instructions on how he would like an article to be written and what emphasis to be given.
If this leads to outsourcing of student projects, and thus a habit to outsource professional tasks, then that education system is a failure - and an indictment of outsourcing in general. As engineers are replaced with "business people", the world becomes less capable.
Students simply did not have the experience of someone looking at their work carefully and checking that they were following the rules. The students also didn't have the skills to understand how to work with sources and how to paraphrase. Some students were willing and able to change their behavior in order to contribute good content, but that was only 24% for the economics school and 2% for the engineering school. Many students just did not have the English language skills to complete the assignment.
You can read an independent report here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:India_Education_Progr...
Technically you can do a project of your own but most professors of engineering in India are clueless about real world engineering projects and don't do any research or have projects of their own. Most students are not pigheaded enough to buck the system by formulating their own projects and risking failure. (note: I said 'most', IIT s etc are different. Here one is talking about the equivalent of a school in Hicksville in the middle of nowhere and totally disconnected from industry).
There are tens of thousands of students needing such an internship/project in a given city every year. Most schools just wash their hands off the whole deal and ask their students to 'go get a project done' with no additional guidance. Most professors, with class sizes of 30 - 50, don't care about formulating or supervising projects.
How is a 19 year old supposed to get a non existent company to give them an internship on a sharply defined project?
In CS it is often possible to get some kind of project thanks to all the software companies in India, but in other fields like mechanical or electrical engineering, there simple are no projects available. These 'project providers' step into the void and provide 'internships' which exist only on paper and provide a complete project report to the student, who pays substantial (in local currency) fees, submits the report to his clueless profs and ticks off his 'project complete' checkbox.
Now, added to this structural problem is the fact that most engineering schools in India approach the teaching of engineering as 'book learning'. Students memorize formulae and regurgitate them in exams without the faintest clue of how to actually build anything (hence the 'can't build a circuit' description in the OP). Just to complicate things, students have no training in technical writing, and even assuming they have a thesis, and know how to do confirming experiments and so on they still have trouble writing a hundred pages in English.
None of this is to excuse any of the participants in this farce. This needs to be exposed, and corrected. Just identifying some underlying factors. If the professors decided to clamp down on such fraud, there is no way this will continue. But most are happy to play along.
An offshoot of this is the business of creating personal essays for admissions to US schools. Professors in the US, if you see a hundred admission letters starting with "Two Roads diverged in a wood " ( I am NOT joking. I've seen 'professionally prepared' essays that start this way,) you know your prospective student has outsourced his personal essay.
Some of these outsourcers get admitted to US universities, or get good jobs and so their path gets validated for younger generations as the 'smart thing to do'.
And so the dance continues.
somewhat tangential, personal 'external project' anecdote from a long time ago
I studied Industrial Engineering in a decent but not great school and my profs were well meaning but not particularly clueful. They saw Industrial Engineering as an offshoot of Mechanical Engineering and shot down all my proposed 'build a compiler' type projects (I wanted to do a software project), because 'That is computer Science, not Mechanical or Industrial Engineering. You have to do a project in Mechanical Engineering'.
So I compromised by forming a team with a couple of sharp guys, writing a small but sophisticated (given the circumstances) CAD program in Turbo C on a 486 PC ( hey it even had a scripting component - I did get to write a compiler after all), printed out all the code, added an introductory page and that was my 'project report'.
The profs were a bit taken aback at the hundreds of pages of C code (which they couldn't read or grok) but the software worked, I could answer all their questions, and CAD was "mechanical engineering" so I got top grades for the project. [1]
I later heard from some of my juniors that the profs used to tell them about this 'very talented bunch of guys who did a great project and you should emulate them' but I don't think anyone took that advice ;).
[1]That was the only 'course' for which I had anything like a top grade. I was bored to tears and rarely attended class and spent all my time chasing girls and scraped by in some of the "write down from memory the formula for stress in a cantilever beam" type examinations by deriving enough stuff from scratch to get a passing grade. Most classes (and exams) I completely ignored.
I completed my degree only because my employer(Cybercash, now defunct, but was one of the pioneers in payment processing, HQ in Virginia, with the devs in Bangalore) begged me to, so I could get a visa to go to the USA, and you couldn't get a visa without a degree. I wrote 22 exams in two weeks and got my degree. To this day I don't know anything about Mechanical Engineering.
PS: In retrospect I should have just (minimally) played the game of dutifully attending classes and so on and spend half an hour or so every day memorizing the facts and formulae required to get good grades. Would have saved a lot of stress.
Instead I rebelled against the insanity and quit attending class except to meet my friends. As pg said in one of his essays, (paraphrasing) when you rebel, you are still playing someone else's game,only with a logical 'not' added to the rules. You are still dancing to someone else's tune.
I don't have any regrets, but then I was thoroughly confused by the way engineering was taught and learned and what behavior was lauded and what was punished.
This was before the internet arrived in India. Now Coursera etc offer me a veritable cornucopia of insanely great teachers, Amazon has all the books and I am as happy as a pig in a mud pit learning new stuff well after my hair turned grey.
Actually answer to this question lies in understanding a simple thing. Most of us really study to just get a job. That is the fact.
Most people get into software after hearing stories from the 90's. How some some uncle of theirs, or somebody from their far relatives, or neighbors or someone from their village did CS engineering, Got into an IT company. And then went to the US, after which within 5 years the guy became a manager. Stories of how such people 1.5-2L a month, has a very posh home, car etc. And then talks of all the beautiful infrastructure, glass buildings. Lets be frank, most of the people join software for that reason.
The problem now is they don't really know what they are getting into. They lack the desire or interest to genuinely work towards solving problems. So at the end its all about 'Somehow get a job'.
The days of 90's are long gone. And there is no such rapid growth these days.
On the one hand, many of the people participating today are probably highly motivated and doing it out of a desire to learn new things and solve problems. They may not have access to formal education, for whatever reason, but are determined to become more educated anyway.
On the other hand, some of the participants probably don't care at all about learning anything and just want a credential that will stand up to scrutiny. The goal for this group is to get a job, not necessarily to become qualified for a job (subtle difference).
Unfortunately, as the "value" of the education offered by online companies (i.e. recognition by employers) increases, the share of people in the second category will almost certainly rise quickly.
Ideally, the market will discount this form of education appropriately (as it theoretically does with all other forms of education). The "value" of a Coursera certificate, for instance, would be constrained by the risk of accidentally hiring a person from the second category above, who may have graduated, but failed to learn any useful skills.
However, the business model for these companies seems to be based on providing education to a massive number of people. If the market heavily discounts the education they provide, the business model might become impractical.
It seems to me that the biggest concern for Coursera and similar should be finding ways to enforce academic integrity standards to make sure that even the students in the second category actually end up learning something.
While this will, perhaps, result in fewer students initially, it will also keep the market from heavily discounting graduates of online programs, thus destroying the market for their services in the longer-run.
I wonder why they even bother. And don't forget "In-plant training".
For the good of Indian tech education, I hope that one day these people will get to design curricula and setup colleges of their own!! I hope I'm not dreaming in vain.
>> Most classes (and exams) I completely ignored.
I can relate to this. I was in a CS degree and I was busy making basic websites, doing an internship at a local startup, playing for the college football team and trying out dramatics. I realized I wasn't going to get much out of class anyway and I'd be better off having fun while trying out a bunch of things. But all this changed when it came down to the final sem when I was actually required to do something on my own.
I pulled a friend along with me and we hacked together a basic AI search engine for the same startup, using Ruby, Rails and Princeton's WordNet database. The code by itself wasn't the most palatable, but it worked.
But, here's the real kicker. While, the overwhelming majority of my peers, cherrypicked a project from a catalogue and bought it from an "institute", some of them even managed to score more than me. I personally don't attach much emphasis to grades, but the worrying part is, not only does our system tolerate the plague, going by the grades, it vindicates it.
So, how do we remedy this system? I certainly don't have a blueprint but I do feel, there is a desperate paucity of examples. We need more startups, entrpreneurs, hackers, scientists and we need them to do really well nationally/internationally. Currently, whatever little we have of the above mentioned, a lot of them, in my experience happened in spite of our education system.
PS: I mentioned to my prof about CS project opportunities at the startup I work. I hope a few students do turn up.
I was bored to tears and rarely attended class and
spent all my time chasing girls
Is your experience unusual? I know that in a lot of conservative societies (like some of the Arab countries, particularly in the Gulf) men & women are not supposed to have relationships before marriage.
naah all my friends were chasing girls. And the girls had their own agendas I assume. Lots of sex happened then (and happens today), though there were a few people who 'went without'. But even then I assure you that was due to being unable to score, not by choice.
Arranged marriages do happen, even today. That has nothing to do with what happens when you are not married. Traditionally there was a lot of emphasis on women's virginity, as in many patriarchical societies so it was a rewarding strategy (in the game theory sense) for women to pretend that they were/are 'pure' before marriage. With the onset of modernization and urbanization, this is all honored in the breach, in the cities at least.
"I know that in a lot of conservative societies (like some of the Arab countries, particularly in the Gulf) men & women are not supposed to have relationships before marriage"
'supposed to' being the operative word, even in Islamic countries. Teenagers are horny everywhere in the world, and the rest is just negotiation and risk taking ;)
Analyzing this problem, I think it can be attributed to widespread plagiarism in engineering schools in India. In the US, plagiarism is dealt with severely and can even lead to expulsion. This forces Indian students who used to indulge in malpractices in their undergrad to put on their thinking hats for once and be creative, for the fear of expulsion(which would be a disaster after so much preparation). Thats when one realizes the consequences of ones action. Such a system should be enforced in colleges in India.
But, I must also say that there are some universities where the students perform exceptionally.
But when it comes around to getting a job, they are the ones who usually struggle. I've seen so many students with average grades ultimately be recruited for the best jobs available on the market because they preferred to spend their time on TopCoder instead of gaming the system.
In some ways, I feel sorry for them. Most of them do it due to the herd mentality, everyone is outsourcing their projects so they must outsource their projects too. Clearly, this doesn't work out very in the long term and what they gain by taking the easy way out, they lose in terms of denying themselves the opportunity to gain some practical experience.
Sorry these are precisely the kind of guys who end up being mid level managers in large corporates.
>>But when it comes around to getting a job, they are the ones who usually struggle.
Interview in India are a joke. Body shops pick up people for marks, and familiarity with objective questions roaming around on the internet.
If it's any consolation, those large corporations get what they deserve: they end up with middle managers who cheated their way out of an education. There's some justice in this.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
A lot of professors join teaching during the gap between graduating and getting a job. They are neither motivated or smart enough to figure these things out.
I was a chemistry student in a mostly technical (engineering) college. Nobody in this college would dream of the kinds of blatant cheating I hear about at other places. Yes, people helping each other in their projects... imbalanced project teams with one brilliant student putting in most of the effort etc, that level of dubious behaviour was not uncommon (but not _too_ common either).
I got to play around with computers as my final year project. It was computational chemistry. I built a simulation model of a large number of molecules floating around under each other's forces and watch their emergent behaviour over simulated time. I'm rather proud of that project to this day.
And I was not alone by any means. A few of my batchmates' project work ended up in published papers (yes, our professors were expected to carry out international level research along with teaching). I interacted a bit with the computer science people too (since I was working on high performance compute clusters etc.). Some of the software I saw them build was impressive but I didn't know _how_ impressive at that stage in my life.
Later I switched fields and ended up doing a masters in computer science in a US university (picked up the under-graduate material through self-study and audited classes over a few years of pretending to do science research and TA'ing :-) )
Then I realized that the computer science students I came across back in my Indian college were doing some very impressive work for undergraduates.
So there. I hope it provides a reasonable counter-point to all the negative stuff about Indian students/colleges. My school is definitely not the common case... but it and many others like it do exist. (I'm posting from a throw-away account for reasons best left unstated.)
One of my favourite movies ever is a bollywood film on this topic. 3 Idiots. Here's a snippet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35sfBjmVWpU
I went to Stanford in the early 2000s for undergrad and majored in EE.
EE classes would normally have up to 50-60 students in lectures. Lectures would be taken by professors, many of whom were leading experts in their field, and some would be visibly bored or annoyed at having to teach ridiculously simple undergrad classes. You can imagine Nobel prize winners trying to teach basic physics.
Students did not learn much from these professors, some of whom would just recite from the textbook (which they had written). So students stopped coming to class. And Stanford even then recorded and streamed most engineering lectures, so by middle of the term only 5-6 students would show up to class. Then you go for the final exam and there are like 100 students who show up, everyone surprised the class was so big!
They had problem sets every week, and tutorial sessions where you could get one on one attention with graduate students. These were the most personalized attention you could get during the course.
You had a choice at Stanford. You could either choose to learn, or you could choose to have good grades. Only the top 5% of the class, the real geniuses could learn and get good grades at the same time.
I was not that smart. So I spent the first two years taking classes I was interested in. Mostly skipped the lectures, and took as many classes as possible. I was a solid B student. Then I got tired, and decided EE was not for me. Thought about switching majors but it was too late. So decided to get through on the bare minimum of effort.
As soon as I flipped that switch, I met the other group of people, the ones focused on good grades and enjoying life.
In order to get good grades, you have to do well in problem sets, midterm, final exam and project for each class.
Problem sets - It's ok to copy answers. We used to have a basket in the EE office where people turned in answers. Just go one day early and grab someone else's paper. Copy, return. If the guy turned it in a day or two early, he must have known what he was doing.
Project - Even easier. Stanford had so many socially inept engineers. Guys who don't even speak in class and usually very quiet or weird. These guys need friends too. Be their friend. Be in their project group. You don't even have to do anything. The smart guy will do all the work, won't even complain or tell the prof. Why? Because most of the really smart guys are really arrogant that their smart, and they believe they don't need anyone else. They're annoyed they have to have project partners. As long as they have to have a partner, then one who is friendly but doesn't interfere with their ideas or vision for the project is the best.
Mid-term and finals - The last week before the mid term or final, show up for the tutorials. Most of the grad students teaching them will focus on the problems most likely to come out in the exam.
Voila. I was an A student the last two years. And graduated without knowing anything. I told my faculty advisor I just wanted to get my degree and get out!
And the funny thing is, I have friends who have made a career out of "getting grades" this way. Think about all those venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Those were the kids who were friends of smart engineers. Think of Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt etc. The managers without significant technical knowledge.