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Comment by jbattle | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little confused - you are saying the article is overstating things, but that degrees in science, engineering, academia, and possibly medicine are "mostly useless"?

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I'll clarify.

I'll make no comments about medicine - I know nothing about education in this field.

The bachelors programs in the IITs are great, by global standards. IISc does some cool work too. Leaving those aside, a BS in engineering (called BE or BTech here) is not bad. We have some outdated courses, we don't have the freedom to choose courses, etc. But for most of our courses, we use the same textbooks as Americans, Brits, Australians, etc. I suppose we have similar kinds of lab sessions too.

Academia (includes bacherlors, masters, PhD, post-doc, professorship, research papers, conferences, journals, funding, etc.) in India is generally terrible. ME/MTech in India is mostly useless. BE/BTech in India is not bad.

> I suppose we have similar kinds of lab sessions too.

No! Not by far. The "lab sessions" in a typical non-IIT Indian engineering institutes are a joke. Ever heard of the Borland Turbo C compiler? Yeah, that's still used to teach students C/C++, with outdated (and non-standard) code.

I've had similarly horrible experience in any and all labs, be it circuits and systems, networking, or whatever else you might think of.

Thank god for the Internet, otherwise I would have never have known better.

This is a random sample. How different was your lab session compared to http://engr.case.edu/merat_francis/eecs245/EECS%20245%20Syll... ?

The mere fact that the instructor has a schedule put up and sticks to it makes it better than any lab session I had.

Oh, and it's not just something I alone experienced, so writing it off as a "random sample" makes no sense. This is /the/ situation with most colleges here. Which is kinda the entire point of the article.

> The mere fact that the instructor has a schedule put up and sticks to it makes it better than any lab session I had.

You seem to be impressed by the oddest things! FWIW, our labs adhered to a schedule too. Engineering colleges in India fall on some range within the spectrum. You seem to have studied at one of the poorer ones. k4rtik, below, seems to have studied at one of the better ones.

When I made judgements, I made it on the basis of the output of Indian and western colleagues. Compiler versions are a non-issue for me. µA741, though outdated, taught me well enough.

> This is a random sample.

Some pedantry: It was an anecdote. A random sample is multiple data points drawn randomly from a population. GP only provided one, and you suspected it might be an outlier.

Not quite. I meant that my the course description that I provided was a random sampling. I googled for EE programs, picked a university randomly, went to its list of courses, and picked a course randomly.

Haha.. am still tempted to say that still doesn't ensure a random distribution as it's a lot more likely you picked a link from the first few pages for search results. :P. Either way, your point is valid.

I don't think that is random sample. All the colleges in Southern state of Tamilnadu come under Anna University and most of the colleges (about 15 - 20) I have had a chance to visit and interact with - they were using Turbo C! Unless the student has good exposure or he/she take it upon to learn, they will not be employable.

> Ever heard of the Borland Turbo C compiler? Yeah, that's still used to teach students C/C++, with outdated (and non-standard) code.

So THAT'S where all the bizarre Turbo C++ questions on Stack Overflow are coming from! I've always wondered.

And Java is taught by giving short notes to students.

Java is an object oriented platform independent programming language invented by XXX in year ####. It runs in a JVM. blh blah blah..

> We have some outdated courses, we don't have the freedom to choose courses, etc.

I disagree. I have just finished (few weeks back) my BTech from an NIT and can at least vouch for my CS education and those from some other respectable NITs. We had a great amount of freedom in choosing the courses and had some of the best faculty to learn from.

Generalizing the education in India to this extent certainly paints a wrong picture. I agree that there are only a few institutes which are good, but they are surely not limited to just IITs and IISc.

I will put in a word about medicine. Government run medical colleges are good because they have a lot of patients. Private medical colleges for the most part are in the business of selling seats to the highest bidder.

Recently, the central govt proposed a single nationwide entrance test to curb the seat selling. Private colleges filed a case against it and won.(search for NEET exams)

I seriously cannot understand something like admission to medicine being decided by how much one pays. This leads to a lot of doctors who don't know a thing about medicine.

My cousin's son had a protruding spinal cord from the back, and the doctor had not noticed that after doing more than 10 ultrasonography. The doctor was just that ignorant, thanks to which the son was born with both his limbs paralyzed. The doctors who delivered the baby after a huge operation did not believe how a doctor can miss that.

So go to any small town, and you have really lousy doctors, thanks to our education system.

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