Disgrace

The recent decision by the Joint Admissions Board (JAB) of JEE-2010 not to re-hold the examination is despicable. In what is clearly an unfair decision, and a serious blow to meritocracy, the JAB has also published a series of corrective measures, most of which are inadequate to ensure fairness at any level. It is apparent that the JAB is just being evasive about having to conduct the examination again, and hopefully, the Education Minister will listen to the pleas of the millions of affected students and direct the IITs to conduct a re-examination, which is, by far, the only fair solution to the problem.

When To Skip Classes

The Augustine Club, a study group at Columbia University, advises students to skip a class if the professor is so lousy that going to the class is a waste of time. Since Columbia is one of the best universities in the US, also an ivy league, this makes me wonder that while we keep lamenting the lack of good teachers at our Institute, is it possible for a teaching institution to not have any lousy teachers?

My own experience at what is supposed to be India’s best T-school, during my internship in France, as well as from inputs from some of my friends at top universities abroad, suggest to me that lousy teachers will always exist, even at the best places.

Now the question is, how many, or what proportion, of an institution’s faculty is likely to be lousy. In this regard, I used to believe that IIT Kharagpur is severely disadvantaged. However, I was amazed to find, at the Indo-German Winter Academy at Chennai last year, that other top institutions in the country were not much better off.

Why do we have lousy teachers?

I got the answer from Indo-German Winter Academy itself. Each of the participants at the academy was required to prepare on a topic and to deliver a lecture on it to the rest of the group. Ironically, the student lecturers, on the whole, were as bad as the professors. Not many made much of an attempt to ensure that their audience understood what they were talking about. Most of us were too concerned with doing our job, that is, to deliver the lecture flawlessly, than to ensure that it met the objectives it set out to achieve.

This is not to say that everyone was bad. There were some who really explained stuff really well. However, at least half, if not more, were not as effective.

This makes me concur that being good in academics, and being a good teacher, are completely uncorrelated things. True, one can enhance the effect of the other, but to a very limited extent.

The reason why we have lousy teachers is because our system does not select teachers. It selects researchers. To become a professor at IIT, you need to show publications and other such stuff. You do not need to show much of your teaching abilities. In the words of one of the professors of my department, doing research is more glamorous than teaching, so even professors who can teach well are not able to devote much time to teaching.

But isn’t doing research more glamorous because it is made so? Research projects sponsored by companies are lucrative because they allow professors to earn much more money than their salaries. Or, in other words, professors’ salaries are too low compared to the actual value of their skills.

If we think carefully why this might be, we would realize that students at IIT, who hail from many kinds of backgrounds, cannot afford the high costs that an education with good quality teachers would require. The government subsidises education to cover for this, but by compromising the quality of instruction, it fulfills the goal only partially. It is not hard to see that given the vast number of development projects that go on in a large and populous developing country such as India, such a situation in inevitable, and improvements will happen only gradually.

In other words, there will always be some lousy teachers at even the best institutions, and if there are more lousy teachers in Indian institutions than those abroad, it is just because India is in a phase of frenetic development, and such a situation is inevitable. So, for all of current KGPians, the situation is likely to remain the same throughout their life at KGP.

Now, what is a student who is interested in a subject to do if the professor for that subject is a lousy one, especially if attendance is compulsory? The answer is simple. As far as possible, try to skip the classes. Sleep or play with your mobile phone for the few classes you are forced to attend for maintenance of a minimum attendance. And most importantly, form a study group with like-minded people to study the subject together.

Also, it is important to be able to figure out whether a given a professor is lousy or not. As a thumb rule, if you are not able to follow without having to put an undue amount of stress on yourself, it usually means that the professor is lousy.

Disclaimer: The author does not assume any responsibility for any consequences of adherence to the guidelines in the previous paragraphs. Use your own discretion.

Dell Update

The following students are eligible for the refund of Rs 2,000 on the purchase of Dell laptops.

List of Students Eligible for Reimbursement from Wizertech

The following is taken from the Scholars’ Avenue website:

Above mentioned students must submit a copy of the voucher and their Identity card either at the Wizertech outlet (near the State Hospital) or submit it to Ex VP (TSG) Arnav (Room number C-135, RP Hall) or to the VP Shubham Matah ( Room Number D123, Azad Hall) at the earliest. The first deadline for the same is Wednesday (8th of April). The first lot of demand drafts will be sent for processing on Thursday. It is expected that processing will take about a week’s time.

The next deadline for submission of vouchers is Sunday(12th April). Drafts are expected to be issued in a week’s time from the last date of submission.

Students are requested to submit the documents at the earliest, preferably within the first deadline to help speedy recovery of the reimbursement.
Students are also requested to convey the same to fellow students to help accelerate the process.

Cheat to Win

Student batches are dynamic in nature. Each batch is different from its immediate junior or senior batch, and specific qualities can be attributed as unique to a particular batch. Since a batch of students normally interacts the most with its immediate junior and senior batches, often, certain trends come up when one looks at a particular trait chronologically.

When I was in my second year, I had the opportunity of interacting with one particular 5th year student of my department who was assisting us for a few lab experiments. I was amazed at how different our modes of thinking were. He was a very academically inclined person, and was sincere about his work. The passion that he showed for simple 2nd year experiments at that stage of his career was inspiring. However, when I try to find someone in my batch like this, I am completely unsuccessful. Even the toppers of our current classes are visibly disinclined from studies and seem to have no genuine interest in academics. Doesn’t it sound a little odd, given that we are presumably the best technological institute in the country?

At some point of time during my second year, I was a little perturbed about the fact that I had not yet been able to secure an internship offer. A number of people, including my friends, had offers from places in foreign countries, and I had no idea of what my summer will be like. Now, as we all know, it is not compulsory to intern somewhere during the summer after the 2nd year, but well, everyone was doing it as if it were the most important thing in their lives. It is natural that when everyone around you is doing something which you aren’t, you get a little concerned, even though it might not be all that necessary to do it. I asked this 5th year student during one of our lab classes, how important it is to intern somewhere during the summer after the 2nd year. He said, it is good if you do something useful, but it does not have to be something academic, or something internship-like. He told me that during his time, only a handful of people went for internships after their second year. He told me that there used to be the famous VLSI course then also, and it was supposed to be a key to a good job, but he did not want to stay in Kharagpur during the heat of the summer, and therefore, went trekking somewhere.

Things are even more different now. Even first year students are going for internships, and you are considered worthless if you do not go for an internship after your second year.

This is not the only thing that has changed. I remember Professor G S Sanyal telling a few of us an anecdote about a guy who teased a girl during his time, ie, the 60s, appeared in a Disciplinary Committee meeting, and said in front of a number of professors, “Sir, woh akhiyon se goli mare”!. I remember a senior telling us about the opium that grew in the garden of Nehru hall. I also remember the alumni of my own hall, telling us the songs they wrote, having lots of Hindi expletives, and how they had the audacity to perform them in front of the Warden during their own farewell party. And there are many more. All of these suggest to me that our seniors were far more adventurous than we are. The most adventurous thing that we hear about nowadays is people coming back drunk from a bar and creating a scene somewhere, which is despicable.

I wanted to write about these things for a long time. But what really gave me the impetus is something that a close friend told me. He has met a number of alumni, who have been surprised at the fact that we submit all our lab reports on time. What they probably do not know is, how we complete those lab reports.

Now, it is no secret that the curriculum at IIT Kharagpur, and for that matter, at most Indian colleges, is overloaded. It is almost impossible to do five courses well within the short semesters that we have. Even MIT, which is supposed to have a very rigorous undergraduate curriculum, prescribes only four courses per semester. It is natural that we cannot complete the assigned work in time. But does that mean that we start copying to submit our assignments and lab reports?

If you carefully notice the kind of things our seniors did, and the way they were in their outlook, you will find that there was an element of honesty in each of them. Whether it is the guy who spoke something outrageous during a Disciplinary Committee meeting, or the guys who performed outrageous songs in front of the Warden, they were, in a way, just speaking the truth. Having the audacity to say the truth is something that I feel our current generation has completely lost. We prefer to claim someone else’s work as our own, than to admit that we were unable to complete the work. This, I think, is the biggest difference between us and our previous generations.

I think it is unfortunate that companies such as Amazon come to our campus for placements and have to go to our professors to tell them that there is something wrong with our system because even our nine-pointers seem to know very little. Are we not intelligent enough to realize this ourselves? I think it is wrong that our professors give us inflated grades because they do not want to have to take summer quarter classes. I think it is extremely wrong that students use Google Translate to email professors in their native language, so that they might get a positive reply for an internship application. All of these are examples of how this inability to speak the truth has permeated our mentality and our outlook.

I was recently chatting with one of my friends at USC who told me that it is easier to cheat in the US, because there is no one looking, but still, people never cheat. I have time and again heard from my friends in US universities that Indians are probably the only people who copy assignments. The Americans prefer to submit incomplete assignments rather than cheat, and the Chinese always complete the assignments themselves. Thus, maybe it is the society and what we bring from the places we come from, that is leading to such trends. Knowing all this, I am fully convinced that we have somehow succeeded in creating a society that condones, and even encourages, dishonesty. While this might lead to apparent gains initially, the habits that we form now and promote in our future generations are going to create huge problems in the future.

Purchase of Ambulances

The minutes of the meeting on 23rd March include the following point:

The following committee be appointed to work out the number and type of ambulances required :
a)Prof. B. Maiti, Dept. of Mechanical Engg. - Chairman
b)Prof. M. Bhattacharyya, President, TSG - Member
c)Mr. Alok, Students’ Representative - Member
d)A student with medical background - Member

They should submit the report including full specification for purchase by 31st March 2009. The procurement etc. shall be initiated by 1st week of April 2009.

I would like to ask the committee if the report has been submitted. If it has been submitted, I would also like to ask them to please make it public.

Was It Justified?

“Was the mode of protest on the 22nd justified?”. The Scholars’ Avenue have polled for this question on their blog, and it set me thinking. Not that it had never crossed my mind before; I had reservations about some parts of the protest ever since I reached the protest venue that afternoon. But there were simply too many other emotions in my mind during the last week to think deeply about this.

The protest was a mass protest. More than 1000 students participated in it, which means that this is a complex question simply because of the too many degrees of freedom involved. Let us try to break down these people into groups. As I see it, the entire “gathering” at the Director’s bungalow can be classified into three major groups of people.

The first group was there right at the front. These were the people most interested in talking to the Director, and were present at the venue right from the beginning. Their initial intention was to express their anger and frustration with the lack of basic health-care facilities at the Hospital in a bid to evoke a strong reaction coupled with a tangible plan of action from the Director. For convenience, let us call this group X.

The second group was there right behind the first one, comprising about 100-150 students who were also very agitated at the happenings, but had arrived a little later. Let us call this group Y.

The third group includes the rest of the participants. This group was the largest of all. Members of this group had arrived at the venue at different times out of genuine concern. Some of them were having fun throwing stones and breaking window panes. Others had reservations regarding the method of protest. But they did not leave because they still felt they were serving a useful purpose by just being there and adding to the crowd. Let us call this group Z.

Let us concentrate on group X now. Since they were proximally closest to the Director, and interacted with him the most, it was they who mostly decided the course of the protest. Their initial aim was probably to complain against the lack of health-care facilities and to get the Director to respond favourably to their complaints and address them well. As we all know, the Director’s initial response was not exactly what they had hoped for. They were not prepared to give up, so along with the support of group Y, they started shouting demanding the resignation of the Director. This represents the most important juncture of the entire protest, because it changed the aims of the protest in a major way.

Let me explain. This crossed my mind even as I was right there, watching students demand the resignation of the Director. One of the professors also raised this question in the Open Session held later in the night. Why did we demand the Director’s resignation? Was it really his responsibility?

When terrorists attacked Mumbai last December, revealing significant loopholes in our security infrastructure, did Manmohan Singh offer to resign? Did we demand his resignation? No, because it was not his direct responsibility. Similarly, the failure of the hospital was not the direct responsibility of the Director; he has so many other things to worry about. It could probably still be the responsibility of the Deputy Director, since he was also the Chairman of the hospital. Then why did we ask (or rather, force) the Director to resign?

In short, when people started shouting for the Director to resign, the real aims of the protest came out. It was no longer just about Rohit’s death. True, Rohit’s death and the initial response of the Director triggered it, just as the rumour about the new bullets triggered the First War of Indian Independence. But the reasons for the protest were likewise different.

Students were frustrated with the heavy handed administration of Damodar Acharya. Meaningless rules, enforced strictly, and unwarranted curbs on the freedom of the students, coupled with the recent results of the Disciplinary Committee meetings and the punishments announced for the “defaulting” students, had created a very bitter atmosphere with the student body hating almost all aspects of the administration. And that is something for which the Director was, indeed, responsible.

This is not to say that the hospital issue was not important; it was still the most important issue for us protesting students, but just by itself, it did not justify the demand for the resignation of the Director. This is also not to say that the demand for resignation of the Director was not justified; for everything that he has done, it is my personal opinion that the demand was completely justified.

Students of group X cordoned off the Director and made sure that he was safe. Students of group Y kept persisting, and without their support from behind, we would never have been able to break into the Director’s house. Students of group Z stayed there, leading to a huge crowd and mounting pressure on the Director as well as the rest of the administration. The way I see it, apart from a few miscreants, everyone present there made the best decisions individually and exercised a good deal of personal restraint. Together, we put sufficient pressure on the Director to make him resign, without really bad things taking place. Some property was destroyed, due to some guys who were having some sadistic fun destroying things, but that was it. Most of the people there did the best thing they could.

Now here’s the deal: we did not like the Director, so we forced him to resign. While doing that, most of us made the best and morally correct choices as individuals. But does that mean we made the best choice as a group? Did we have any other option that might have worked?

The official channel would have been by lodging a complaint to some higher authority. I am not sure whether it could have been the Board of Governors, or the Central Government, but I do not have any faith that it could have worked.

That is the crux of the situation. We do not have any control over the selection of the man who can affect our lives at so many levels. There is nothing else we could have done to get him removed. Even now, it is not clear that he has gone, and by the way the administration has responded to the Centre’s queries, it is likely that he is going to make every attempt to be reinstated. The solution is either to give students some degree of control over the selection of the Director, or to decentralize his powers among many independent entities with proper and fair selection processes for all of those so that no single person is able to control student life to such a degree. In the absence of these, this is the only thing we could have done, and I say that it was completely justified given the responsible way in which most of it was carried out.

Some of you might think that we should not talk about these issues because that would distract us from the major issue of improving the health-care facilities. But then, the letter that was given to the Chairman of the Board of Governors included a specific point about the resignation of the Director and the Dean of Student Affairs (DOSA). It seems that the representatives who are deciding the demands of the student body are trying to get these two people removed using the hospital issue to avoid evoking too much opposition from the administration. But, besides the possibility that it may not work, even if it works, this will be a temporary solution. There is no guarantee that the powers-that-be will not select another shrewd and/or incompetent Director and/or DOSA. The long term solution will be to have a proper power distribution in the administration, and proper selection processes for each post.

Bruised and Awakened

I did not know Rohit Kumar. Yes, he was in my class, and I must have attended numerous lectures sitting in the same hall as him. But I still did not know him. Nevertheless, my heart bleeds today. Why did he have to go?

I always used to think that it is a good thing to speak up against what is wrong, and that is just what this blog is really about. But what happened today made me realize that it is not simply just a good thing; it is much more than that. Standing for what is right and speaking against what is wrong is absolutely necessary. It is sometimes hard, like Scholars’ Avenue realized three years back when they published the article on the lack of facilities at B C Roy Technology Hospital, but I shudder when I think that we all might not have witnessed such a Black Sunday, had a handful of people had the persistence to continue speaking up and trying to get the administration to make amends to improve the health-care facilities.

I am going to shed the chalta hai attitude that has encompassed my life so far beginning tonight. I hope that more people start thinking the same way. In this vein, I am going to publish at least two articles every week on something that is wrong and might be improved.

I would like to close this post with a quote from Ben Franklin’s Contributions to the Conference on February 17 (III) Fri, Feb 17, 1775. This goes out to those who were not there at the Director’s bungalow today because they were scared they might end up getting into trouble.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. “

Driving Age for IITians: 22

We all know that students at IIT Kharagpur are not allowed to drive motor vehicles. It affects us all. We try to find ways to get around the rule. We sometimes get caught. But do we ever think why such a rule is in place? Do we even bother to question?

The ban on using motor vehicles was effected as a fallout of a number of accidents due to students riding motorbikes under the influence of alcohol. Now, thousands of accidents take place every day in cities all over the world due to drunk driving. Does any of those cities ban its citizens from using motor vehicles?

Whether it is the ban on students staying outside campus after mid-night, or the ban on vehicles, it seems to me that IIT authorities fail to realize the obvious fact that the deeds of a few should not lead to the punishment of many. There will be a few miscreants in every society. Why should the rest suffer because of them?

Every society deals with the problems created by miscreants by having institutions such as the police that take care of the security of the people. By placing a blanket motor vehicle ban on all students, the IIT authorities are simply shirking responsibility. They can afford to do so because students, making up the most powerless community on campus, cannot really do anything about it.

Most IITians get admitted to college around the time they attain the legal driving age. Taking away the right to use motor vehicles simply means taking away one of the most basic pleasures of entering adulthood. Is it justified at any level?

The Hidden Curriculum

I found this interesting article a couple of days back which reviews a book on the student life at MIT. I believe that many things that this article describes are as relevant in the context of IIT Kharagpur, only less pronounced because of the generally lower level of drilling we are subjected to in comparison with our American counterparts.

Right-click the image, select View Image and zoom it to read it.

8 Weeks or 40 Days?

In my last post, I raised the issue of Schlumberger being allowed to offer a 6-week internship as against the Institute requirement of 8 weeks of industrial training. Aashish clarified saying that since Schlumberger follows a 7-day work week, the internship is actually a 42-day internship, and satifies the criteria. Interestingly, I happened to find a TnP notice dated March 12, 2008, that specifically defines what 8 weeks means.

The last point of the notice says: “Third year B.Tech/Dual Degree students may please note that Eight weeks is 8 working weeks and cannot be interpreted as 40 days or in any other manner. A week means Monday to Friday/Saturday as prevalent in an organization.”

Will someone care to explain?