The IIT Entrance Exam
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Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, who heads their search team and essentially rewrote the critical ranking algorithm in 2001, and a graduate of IIT Roorkee [1];
Sundar Pichai, who heads Android, Chrome/Chrome OS, and Google Apps [2] - a graduate of IIT Kharagpur;
Vic Gundotra - who heads Google+ and social and is a graduate of IIT Bombay [3];
Nikesh Arora, who is Google's Chief Business Officer, a graduate of IIT Varanasi [4];
Sridhar Ramasway - SVP for Ads & Commerce - a graduate of IIT Madras [5], plus dozens of other key people.
(The latter two are listed on Google's management team page at : http://www.google.com/about/company/facts/management/ )
Not to make too fine a point about it - but IMHO Google is one example of the influence and impact of IITians on the world.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Singhal
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikesh_Arora
[5] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sridhar-ramaswamy/2/220/972
Edit: Formatting
Given that they all did post-graduate study in the US and currently live in the US and work for an American company, I think their accomplishments say less about the quality of IIT graduates and more about the fact that a huge amount of human potential is being wasted in India.
I think your text would make more sense by using "the world" instead of restricting to "India".
I have thought multiple times about the quantity of great people that could be having a great impact in our lives and are "missing". We have examples all over our history (islamic mathematics, old greeks,...) of different civilizations that accomplished huge achievements with smaller populations.
Obviously, I don't think that there is a genetic factor for certain ethnics to be more intelligent, but we still see how jews (13-14 million?) are on top of the Nobel Prizes on science, while arabic contribution is symbolic. The same prizes a few centuries ago would have a completely different destination.
The current distribution of Nobel Prizes surely shocks me more than seeing some Indian IT people on top of great companies (1 billion). Not to remove merit from the individuals, but from the system; I have always thought that there is something more in a person than the results of a "simple" exam.
Just a counterpoint : IITs are state funded, i.e most of the student fees are paid for by the government. Once they complete their education, do they not have a duty to give back to the people ? Remember, brain drain is a serious problem for countries like India.
> do they not have a duty to give back to the people ?
I hate this attitude, not just in India, but anywhere in the world. Like Kennedy's "ask not what your country has done for you...". To start with, their own parents paid taxes to support the IITs too. Do we have a way of making a balance sheet for how my taxes were utilized? How much have I lost to supporting corruption? How much have I lost to supporting undeserving candidates who got in through reservation?
In case of IITs, you are, of course, neglecting all the private funding it gets.
> brain drain is a serious problem for countries like India.
Many Indians who have left have gone on to accomplish great things. Do you think they would have accomplished even 1% of that, had they stayed in India? Brain drain is not India's problem; it is an avenue for opportunity for many Indians. India's problem is corruption and unfettered democracy.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajeev_Motwani
Motwani joined Stanford soon after U.C. Berkeley. Motwani was one of the co-authors (with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Terry Winograd) of an influential early paper on the PageRank algorithm, the basis for Google's search techniques. He also co-authored another seminal search paper What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket with those same authors.[3]
He was also an author of two widely-used theoretical computer science textbooks, Randomized Algorithms (Cambridge University Press 1995, ISBN 978-0-521-47465-8, with Prabhakar Raghavan) and Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation (2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2000, with John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman).
Prior to his involvement with Google, Motwani founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS), an umbrella organization for several groups looking into new and innovative data management concepts. His research included data privacy, web search, robotics, and computational drug design
China 1.3B population
India 1.2B population
Africa 1.0B population
Surely there's a lot more here at work rather than the raw population. The environment, social culture, peers, educational opportunities, cost, language, parental expectations and lastly, great educational institutions all surely increase odds.
Africa is not one country and doesn't have any easy way of selecting their best or brightest, or even motivating kids to study very hard to win at the test. We might say its "culture" but it has more to do with resources.
Of course, most of that cost is not paid by those who get in. If we assume that every one of those half million test takers spent $6800 for coaching, they're being severely ripped off. You'd have to assume that the average IIT entrant spends over 50x as much as the average unsuccessful test-taker before that comes down to even half -- and at that point, the IIT entrants are paying $175k.
Either the article is leaving off the some important details -- perhaps the number quoted for the coaching industry does not just include the IITs -- or this is an economic disaster that no one has yet noticed.
- In India each state has it's own Under-Grad entrance test
- Lot of high school students just don't try for IIT Entrance Exam
- Would approximate that there are least 4-5 million students who enter poll of undergrad just for engineering
- That $3.4 B number in not just for the entrance exam it includes High-School curriculum and in many cases boarding
- Would guess the national average for two years for IIT focused cost is about $1,500 including boarding
Many of the students who are able to make it through the IIT-JEE examinations actually do not have to spend as much on the coaching. There are people who are in the top 2% in terms of their brains, irrespective of the exam, which have a high likelihood of being in the top 2% in the examinations too. They of course still have to work hard (1) to acquire the needed knowledge, and (2) to gain speed which is also critical via practice.
There would be people in the first 2% who do not fall in the second 2% and vice versa. All the students on the boundary need to work hard to boost their chances as much as they can. But then there are top 1% (number is made up), for whom chances of slipping outside of 2% would be relatively smaller. Reality gets more complex of course since it is not just one threshold "in-or-out", but also about being able to choose the field of one's interest after getting in.
A whole next class of people are those who believe in themselves a bit more than their real capabilities, because they do not know it just yet. These are the ones I believe who end up paying the most. They would gradually see that there are falling through the cracks while still having the desire to get in. A friend of mine took a bold step, surprising everybody around, by backing out on a timely basis.
Finally there are people who would be interested in getting in, but know they do not stand a chance with IIT-JEE. These better save both time and money and focus on something else, that may include other colleges or other fields of study.
Given the reputation of the college, there are coaching institutes which downright abuse the situation. I have heard of famous coaching centers promising money-back guarantees of making it through, which have their own entrance examination to select students that already have a very high chance of getting through! I have also heard of similarly reputed centers who would secretly promise a country-wide rank in the top 10 to as many as 50 students (!), again with a money back guarantee.
Serving as a single data-point would be my own case. I did not go to the IIT but to another reputed engineering college [1], but yet the idea is valid. My total expense for the coaching was about $150 [2], and my four years of undergrad, being subsidized by the government, was about $100 + books [3]. Yes, this is all four years of college, and this applied to ALL students in my college. Yet, some of my own cousins paid $5,000 to go to a local college of no reputation for a nominally similar degree that ultimately did not get them anywhere.
To summarize, the distribution of spending amongst prospective students is somewhat more involved, probably hurting those people the most whose idea of self-worth is not commensurate with reality.
[1] That's a separate story in itself.
[2] None of the numbers here are inflation-adjusted to today from ~15 years back.
[3] Books too were generally cheaper Indian editions, so not as costly.
EDIT: And this is on the higher end of the spectrum. I had the privilege of going to one of the best IIT coaching institute.
For example, I recently introduced two friends: One was an American who had gone to Princeton; the other was an Indian who had attended the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
Both colleges have fancy names and star standing in their own nations, but neither person fully understood the cachet of the other's education. I'm sure that employers wouldn't entirely understand it, either.
That's ironic when you consider how much we judge ourselves according to prestige ... you move to another nation and suddenly your clout evaporates.
No one I meet here has ever heard of my school, and I kind of feel like I have to prove myself again outside of school, if I want to have a chance of being noticed by the big companies here.
The whole effect is also increased by the fact that the size of french universities is at least ten times smaller than US universities on average (my school has 500 students per year), and virtually invisible in global ranking that are based on the number of published papers...
TLDR: It's hard to earn prestige by attending any university in Germany - but people hate that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutes_of_National_Importan...
I am NOT saying that the IIT admission process is easy, but I will say that this is the wrong way to show that the process is hard. Not all smart students vie to attend Harvard, MIT, and Stanford in quite the same way that many, many, many smart students vie to attend IIT. The base of applications is broader, by far, for IIT, partly because of the especially steep drop-off in quality and in prestige from the IIT echelon of universities in India to other universities. If we compared Harvard's number of admitted students in the most recent reported year, 2,029,
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/03/college-admits...
to the number of students who took the SAT college entrance test in the relevant high school graduation class, 1,664,479 students,
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/T...
we could calculate that 0.12 percent of all high school seniors in the United States who took a college entrance test were admitted to Harvard, quite a low base admission rate. The key, of course, is that many American students self-select out of applying to Harvard, and indeed don't self-select to submit an application to any "prestige" university.
That said, direct examination of the IIT examination item content
http://www.askiitians.com/iit-papers/iit-jee-papers.aspx
may suggest what level of performance on specific item content is necessary to be part of the small subset of the large number of IIT joint entrance examination test-takers who gain admission to an IIT campus. On that basis, I agree with the statement that the IIT undergraduate programs are highly selective and likely to collect on one campus many very smart young people who provide a good peer group to one another so that everyone on campus picks up habits of aiming high intellectually, as the IIT alumni I know here in Minnesota all seem to do.
Self-selecting out is true for IITs also. Let's not forget that IITs are focused purely on engineering stream and a bit on technology management courses. IVY Leagues on the other hand are broader universities covering other streams such as liberal arts, life sciences, law etc.
If you compare the size of student-body which grows up each year (the ones qualifying 10+2 intermediate school) in India, and the fact that only a fraction of it applies and appears for the IIT entrance, you will get a clear comparison on which university has the lowest acceptance rate going by this metric too.
However, let's not blind ourselves with ratios and percentages alone because absolute numbers have a bearing on competitiveness too.
I remember there was a study a few years ago suggesting that countries like India and China are so populous that the number of honor kids they produce is higher than the number of kids we have in west [1]. Also check out this video which shows how IVY leagues form a backup option for most IITians with Vinod Khosla, Narayan Murthy et al.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK3rX1sg5kg
Not saying that universities like Harvard do not have a high enough benchmark or a lesser quality admission process, but if we were to compare quality of entrance exam/criteria of only the engineering streams of Ivy Leagues/others universities with what the IITs have, then the latter would be right on top.
[Disclosure: I am an IITian, so apologies for the conflict of interest w.r.t to my statements above.]
[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/06/26/are-your-kids-smar...
Till 2012, AIEEE was the other most important entrance exam in India and it was the basis for admission to all national colleges other than IIT. ~1,100,000 students applied for it compared to ~500,000 who applied for IIT
Source: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-04-28/entra...
Not much to say, other than that those kids are gunning hard for a middle class life and legacy.
I guess what I am trying to say is that the exams are not as hard as they are made out to be, and the students, at least some students, are not as studiously dumb as they might seem in retrospect. I know that most of us who cleared the exams with decent ranks were just luckier that those who didn't.
Oh, by the way, I almost didn't join IIT because that year the tution fees were hiked by 10x (from $30 to $300 per semester).
No doubt intelligence to a certain degree is a pre-requisite, but beyond that privilege and wealth contribute a huge amount (emphasised in the article when discussing tutors.)
When I attended university I saw how important it was to strategise in exams, the actual technique of exam taking itself is clearly something you can work on, regardless of intelligence. Any test like this can be, and inevitable is, gamed by its candidates; the exams become more a matter of how good you are at guessing what will come up and being good at the art of answering exam questions rather than what the exams ostensibly examine.
I raise this because I find the whole 'elite universities, passed difficult tests = wonderfully smart people who should be given every opportunity in the world to shine' as suspect, biased towards the privileged, and false beyond a a certain base level which is probably not the 'cream of the crop' levels of intelligence people ascribe to those attending this institutions. It smacks of pomposity and self-serving arrogance.
I say this as somebody who went to an 'elite' or at least well regarded university here in the UK (Imperial College.)
Full Disclaimer: I myself may be somewhat biased as I under-performed at university because of quite horrific family issues which inevitably results in an emotional reaction to this kind of thing, however I don't think that invalidates what I'm saying.
I ask these questions because they seem relevant in understanding the motivations of many taking the exam. Does it reflect poorly on an Indian family if a child (especially a son, I presume) does not sit for the JEE? If so, it might be socially rational for an academically mediocre child to go through the motions of test preparation. This incentive is heightened if no one would have to find out just how badly the child did on the test. Is it a source of pride or honor for a family that a child is preparing for the JEE?
If these social motivations are present, perhaps a talented student's actual chances at getting into IIT are much higher than the overall numbers suggest. I argue that admissions percentages at top-tier US schools are similarly affected. Little Sally, even after spending hours with a private SAT tutor, got only a mediocre score. Yet, her high-achieving parents demanded that she apply to Harvard, Princeton, etc. This way, they could signal to others that they deemed their child of high calibre and (the real incentive here) themselves parents so good that they want only the best for their child. Because the acceptance rates are so incredibly low, it will not be a mark against either Sally or her parents when she is rejected from all her "first choices" and ends up at a mediocre university somewhere -- her "safety school". Sally's parents might also be rational to avoid mentioning that she applied to and was rejected from a couple schools only slightly more selective than BeerCanU as these rejections would be seen by others as a legitimate measurement of their daughter's mediocrity.
It is definitely a source of pride/honor, and so NOT taking the JEE is definitely seen as somewhat shameful. For example, I grew up in India, and went to the US to study at Williams College. My parents were a little sad about me not writing the JEE, and it was seen as somewhat of a cop out. (I decided at the end of 10th grade that I was going out of the country for college so I didn't write it.)
Far from it. IITs are not even in the top 20 in Asia[1].
[1] http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/asian-uni...
Their goals simply don't line up with the metrics being measures by those rankings.
Since a and b satisfy that equation, you know that
a^2 = 6a+ 2, b^2 = 6b+ 2
and hence
c_10 - 2 * c_8 = a^8 * (6a + 2) - b^8 * (6b + 2) + 2b^8 - 2a^8 = 6c_9.
Dividing by 2c_9 gives 3.
Edit: asafira beat me to it!
(a^10-b^10) = (e a + f b) * (a^9-b^9)
Multiplying out the RHS, e = f = 1 are the best choices, but there remained a residual. At a second glance though, this residual was proportional to (a^8-b^8). Problem solved.
Since its a quadratic, you know alpha is about 6 and beta is about -0.3. Then, since the answer is a whole number, and we're raising to high powers, you throw away the -0.3 and approximate a_n = 6^n.
Divide through by a_8 and you get (6^2 - 2) / 12, which is very close to 3.
Then c[n] satisfies the recursion c[n] = a c[n-1] + b c[n-2].
For instance, if a = b = 1, then that sequence is the Fibonacci sequence, and the quadratic is x^2 - x - 1. r is then the golden ratio, s is -1/r, and (r^n - s^n)/(r-s) is the famous Binet formula for the n'th Fibonacci number.
This applies directly to the ITT problem, giving the recurrence a_{n} = 6 a_{n-1} + 2 a_{n-2} for the a_{n} sequence from the problem, which in turn readily yields the answer.
alpha^(n-2)(alpha^2 - 6alpha - 2) = 0 = alpha^n - 6 alpha^(n-1) - 2 alpha^(n-2)
Hard to see without latex typing...
MathJax to the rescue:
\[\alpha^{n-2}(\alpha^2-6\alpha-2)=0=\alpha^{n}-6\alpha^{n-1}-2\alpha^{n-2}\]
To render with MathJax, use the bookmarklet available here: http://checkmyworking.com/misc/mathjax-bookmarklet/
Here goes (text from my memory): There is a rolled carpet of length, L, kept on an even floor. A person gives it a gentle push, and the carpet starts to unroll. What will be the velocity of the unrolled piece of the carpet, when the carpet is half unrolled? (You can ignore the contribution of the initial push, for this computation)
PS: I will look for answers, here tomorrow ... :-)
[1] - http://www.qucosa.de/fileadmin/data/qucosa/documents/5134/da...
(Anecdotal case in point; I wanted to do Mechatronic engineering at university, requiring me to place in the upper 0.75% of university applicants. This requirement was purely because of the popularity of that course. I noticed that a combined BE/BSc degree was less popular, requiring only a top 20% score - and yet the combined degree let you study exactly the same courses, and you could drop out of the BSc part if you wanted! Lazy ol' me took that option...)
When someone already knows what they want, there's often a simpler way to get it. Unfortunately, that's not expected of 17/18 year olds and in fact, parents in India will say "Oh you want X now, but what if you want Y later ? Better go to an IIT so that your options are open".
It's not something you can really comprehend until you spend time in a country like India or China.
The logical part of me says that they should be building more of these academies (if they can without sacrificing quality).
Also, people who are just outside that 2% mostly do fine. There are a number of other highly competitive (and pretty good) schools of sciences and engineering that are not IIT's and most of the people you are talking about (smart, motivated students who had a bad day at the test or such), do end up with good careers regardless.
Just seems extremely unfair that the social outcome for getting into an IIT is so different for people of almost identical intellectual capability.
Unless you could quote a proper scientific study, that seems like a highly unsupportable assertion.
Just anecdotally, I know multiple people who chose not to go to IIT despite being inside the cut-off for one reason or another (e.g., not having a high enough rank to get into their preferred line of study) who've gone on to have extremely good careers nonetheless. Although admittedly, I'm struggling to think of any IIT graduates who did not end up with a solid to brilliant career, regardless of their actual academic performance while at IIT. Some to my great surprise! So what I'm saying is... there's not enough data to make a statement like you did.
The discussion at hand was about the small set of people who perhaps have the capability to get into IIT's but for various reasons don't manage to get in the top 2% in that particular test. I asserted that such people end up in other decent colleges (and there are plenty of good ones outside of the IIT system and they still form only a fraction of the sum total of Engineering education in India) and generally tend to end up in good to great careers. Any opinions on that discussion ?
I'd rather have other universities collaborate/compete with the IITs. Not very different from how CMU is competing with IVY league universities here.
I am immensely interested in computer science. I studied it a fair bit throughout the two years. I made an image editor as my project. But this backfired me as I couldn't devote my time to JEE preparations.I couldn't crack JEE Advanced.
JEE arises in students a feeling of competitiveness which prevails in them even when they are in colleges. Do you still think that this trade of coaching institutes is fair and that students should participate in this rat race?
1. Did the person who made it in the top 4000 of the JEE actually want to pursue engineering at all ? I have numerous friends in IITs who join the bandwagon for nothing but the brand. They are clear in their minds to pursue a MBA right after their undergrad (IIT+IIM makes parents, family, girls droool). Then there are people who get into it because of family pressure. Its not a very healthy environment at home for two years at any engineering aspirant's home. Trust me.
2. What about those people who didn't get in ? That feeling of not getting into an IIT can be heart-breaking. Those two years of getting up early and sleeping late, numerous hours spent on mind-numbing problems. Missing family functions and gathering for the sake of your coaching exams. That peer pressure of making it into the next FIITJEE All-India list. Everything in vain ? We live a very black and white life in India. You are either an engineer from an IIT or you are from any-other-college. What about the person who didn't get in ? Does this mean that he just isn't good enough ? Wait, let me re-emphasis does a 6 hour test get to decide that i am good enough for my dream ? This is unfair. One exam cannot definitely be the make it or break it. Anyone can have a bad day.
3. Boards or JEE ? For people who may not be aware, the other exam results which are 'supposed' to be critical in your making it big in life are the class 12th boards. Deciding in classes 11-12th on what to study for is a major dilemma since the level of the courses are somewhat different. It isn't easy going into this thing. The horrendous pattern change in 2013 actually shows how the education ministry is actually using kids for experiments of their own.
All said and done. The JEE does a great job bringing like minds together and IITs automatically becomes the hub of the brightest minds the country has to offer. Delighted to see this on HN.
But having said that, I do observe that an undergrad degree from an IIT serves as a reasonably reliable indicator of Engineering strength.
I dont get why the Indian government will spend millions on subsidizing and educating its students and then allowing them to migrate to USA - if that occurred in the USA there would be an uproar on why the government is using the tax-payers money to fund another country's workforce. Something the Indian tax-payer needs to think about, eh?
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-11-25/india...
If the Indian citizens started being more demanding about how their money was being spent, on whom and the ROI per rupee of tax collected, the government and the politicians would be forced to change. See, http://openspending.org/
Otherwise known as three two-hour papers - hardly the stuff of legend! I'm not suggesting the papers are easy, just that by any measure, at this level the length is nothing remarkable.
Its just a numbers game, the universities are not even smart enough to increase seats in a country of 1.2 billion.
And no, IITs don't have any nobel laureate to boast about, largely because of the lack of core sciences and graduate/post-graduate programs when compared to MIT/Stanford etc.
I think you can now appreciate the level of concentration that the exam requires because no question is easy. (well, to be fair, maybe 2-3% are..) So when you have to think really hard about each question, and think really fast to solve it, it becomes a bit tricky. I don't know if they have penalty marking now but before if you got a question wrong, you'd get a negative mark too!