From what I have seen, a significant revamp of the JEE system has been looooooong overdue.
"I am looking for students with raw intelligence and not those with a mind prepared by coaching class tutors. The coaching classes only help students in mastering (question paper) pattern recognizing skills. With this, you cannot get students with raw intelligence," said IIT-Madras director, M S Ananth.
There cant be a better nail in the coffin than this. The problem is this: If the JEE goes for a toss, we are going to have all the folks who have fought hard for the obc quota and what not come back and say this is a brahmin conspiracy. Just wait and watch. I can already see the pmk-dk types up in arms bringing the name conspiracy to anything and everything. If the JEE are left to the IITs to run, which is what a naive reader may think is happening, then there should be no problem revamping the bloody system. Unfortunately, the meddling of the GoI has become so blatantly irksome that in some quarters, there is more of hopelessness even as diktats keep flying to the JEE organization committee "Make things better." The autonomy that characterized IIT education is more or less done away with these days, some of it is welcome, some of it too intrusive to help the system adapt to systemic changes in society. On top of all this, political correctness {even in internal meetings} + too many noisy vessels with less idea of the global scheme of things means that more saner + erudite voices get drowned out.
The fact that coaching agencies like Bansals, kota productions, ramaiah et al will rule the roost at the end of the day is no surprise. The surprise is the lack of googlies from the JEE papers. I remember seeing super googlies around the time I prepared for JEE. The best possibility at this stage can be introduction of face2face interviews a la IIMs. We cant sift out the chaff from the grain with the current system. Till we can revamp it, alternate fixes like EIQ etc are the only way out, irrespective of how manpower-intensive such a process is going to be. This country deserves better than the junk that comes ouf of this system, that I happen to come across in day2day life.
saying that the coaching institutes were enabling many among the less-than-best students to crack the test and keeping girls from qualifying.
This "preventing girls from qualifying" canard is an euphemism for PC. The fraction of girl students is low, yes. But there is no overt/covert discrimination in the JEE. The syllabus is well-known, the classes are taking place, the profs + the system go out of the way in being helpful to girls {who need help}. So despite all that if there are few girls, then one must blame peer culture. Not the system or the coaching classes. The coaching classes are money-minded, as long as anyone pays cash, they dont give a rats behind for who the student is. What I find irritating is the BS that gets passed on in the US in the name of AA is going to take root in some form or the other very soon. But wait a minute, did nt the SP nip the 33% thing in the bud? But when it will come to quotas in IITs, I am sure they too care a rats behind for whats good or bad. They will go for which direction the wind blows {no pun intended}.
"You may not be able to do away with the JEE but I am wondering if we should be conducting an examination for 3,00,00 aspirants and selecting just 5,000. Instead, we must evolve a system where only the top 1% of students from different state boards and CBSE are permitted to appear for the JEE," he said.
Thats terrible. Preventing some folks from writing JEE is like waving a red flag at a raging bull. What Prof. Ananth is suggesting is that they have shortage of manpower to sift through the incoherent mess thats called JEE. So he wants to cut down the numbers to something saner. But cutting down on those who take the exam arbitrarily {based on 10th + 12th marks} is rubbish. A student may have performed terribly in English and 2nd language, and so he may not be in the top 1%, so wtf?! He may have been a bulb at Bio/Chem/whatever else and ended up out, so wtf?! For all I know, there are few branches that need Chem, even fewer Bio. Phy/Math seem more or less universal to many fields. So how is this decision going to be made? 1% 5%, how about differentiating between CBSE vs state boards vs ICSE? I cant find of a more un-scientific solution than this.
From what I have seen, many of the smartest folks in my class {and for whose intelligence I have respect even to this day} did neither well in the board exams or had super high 9+ CGPAs at the end of four years. They were some of the gifted folks, with like 2 hrs of mug they could go take an exam in a completely vague subject and do it pretty well deriving basic formulas from scratch using (if you have heard this word before) "dimensional analysis."
Thats the set of folks that JEE need to get hold of, cos if you make them feel enthusiastic about something, then its jackpot. If else, they will be like walking cadavers. A JEE system in its current form is letting these folks get sunk into the IT-vity stuff where their talents are super-wasted.
Professor V G Idichandy, dean (students), IIT Madras, was more vocal, demanding that JEE be abolished. "One of the reasons for the poor intake of girls in the flagship BTech programme is that parents don't send daughters for coaching classes. The best way to increase the intake of girls is to have direct admissions," he said.
Sorry for being misogynist, but is this admission for engineering or is it admission for something else? If there is direct admissions, it should be based on potential prospects for being a good engineer, not whether they have anything extra or not. In education circles, as people get older, they start feeling guilt about the lack of girls they have mentored etc etc. And some of them take that guilt to a super-Stockholm level of empathizing and sympethazing with all and sundry vocal about things. Many of their beliefs are based on poor logic. I keep reading the Chronicle, a newsletter of sorts on edu matters that get posted. I keep hearing whinefests about how there are so few womenfolk in faculty etc etc despite the % of PhD graduates is skewed etc. Whats worse, there has been a tribe of insulted women academicians who get to be statisticians delight picking numbers about how much % of tenured faculty is women, how many of tenure-track is women, whats their payscale etc etc. At the end of the day, they have a baichara conference that goes by the name advance where everyone sinks into the statistics, blame everyone for all their woes, and finally go home after this "conference" all at NSF money. What hardly gets noticed is that getting a tenure track position is an equal slugfest for men {if not more painful cos most open positions are AA-centric} these days. The moral at the end of this story is that some people make it, if they have the patience to sit with the injustices that have been meted out to them. If they give up and run away, they can form AA-anonymous and keep whining and blaming everyone else.
We have nt had such a situation in India yet. There are no overt quotas for women etc afaik. When this Amrikan bug hits us {which wont be too far away}, we are in for more nightmares. Whats also forgotten in this mess is that women have been actively discriminated against in Oiropean society ever since independence time. Universal suffragete came around the earlu 1900s when most of these countries got independence in late 1700s. Same for Blacks. I dont see how that translates to something tangible in Indic terms. We did nt have freedom till like 60 yrs back and when we did get it, we started with universal suffragete on day 1. Of course, one can blame sociological factors, but then moi no JNU jholawala to pick this cudgel for anything sensible.
Ashok Misra, was more cautious on bringing in wholesale changes. "If we can develop another system that is not overhyped, I am for it. But doing away with the JEE does not seem appropriate at present. We have been constantly working on tweaking the JEE as per the students' needs and also to cut down on pressure," he said. Evidently, we haven't heard the last word on this issue.
The best solution in the long run is to dump JEE altogether and get a new non-GoI-intrusive admission process. JEE is doomed to failure now that HRD folks have seen it as a bequest to partition to give to select set of the populace. We need engineers, a large number of them. JEE produces third-rate engineers these days, let it keep churning out 1000s of em. We need all we can get hands on. Let the JEE be upped on a mass scale and let it dump crap for use by Indian companies. We need an alternate system where folks who can do cutting edge research need to be discovered. In all fields, not just engg. STEM fields - all across the board. We need a select few, super selective where they have decent resources for a decent {upper middle class} living. That will also stem the flow of Indic talent from inside India to offshore locations for polishing. The role model should be Nalanda where outside folks came to India to learn our arts and sciences. But yea, if wishes were horses, my unkil will be my aunty. Its gonna take a looooong while to get there, at least 20-30 years.
