Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

From the article: "Only two percent of students will be rewarded for their hard work. In 2012, Harvard accepted 5.9% of applicants. Top engineering schools MIT and Stanford had acceptance rates of 8.9% and 6.63%. The acceptance rate at the IITs, as represented by the pass rate in the JEE, was 2%. Every year, when the results are announced and the media swarms the accepted students, 490,000 students receive disappointing news."

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.

> 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.

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...

>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.

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...

This seemed like a key omission when comparing IIT to Harvard. As for self-selection, it seems that developed countries have more options for viable education, and a more independent youth at that age, thus it becomes possible for future students to spread more evenly across the system. Not something that's possible at this point in the developing world, where these kids carry a much bigger weight on their shoulders.

This is my thought exactly, and made me immediately suspicious of the article's analysis.

Agree with you. There are around 12 IITs while Harvard is a single institute(?). The article omitted JEE mains phase. 12.5 lakh students appear for mains, in 2013. 75,000 qualified for JEE advanced.

1.25 million, for those (like me) forgot how much a lakh is.

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