Indian Education System

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 18 Jul 2012 22:09

Indian post-secondary education is modeled after British system of universities and colleges which is ill-suited for economies of scale for equipment and faculty as compared to the centralized model of US. Please take a close look at the top 25 universities in the report posted by Arjun. All of them would have more resources (both equipment and faculty) than the IITs and IISc. I would be happy if my kids go to any one of them.

In India, at every level, the demand far outstrips the supply of institutions which are of reasonable quality. One needs to increase the expenditure. If this can be done only by decreasing the spend in other non-essential areas let it be so.

ArmenT · Post by **ArmenT** » 19 Jul 2012 11:33

SriKumar wrote:This would involve looking at a nation's i) education system, ii) scientific and engineering research institutions iii) industrial R&D and iv) industrial production...the nuts and bolts/cars & trucks/computers stuff, and the interaction between these entities.

Picking Germany at random. Their univ. system seems pretty extensive. About 70 universities, for a population of about 81 million,that is 1 univ. per 1.15 million population. From here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_un ... in_Germany

Many of their universities are OLD....dating back to 1300s! Quite a tradition. This list of universities does not include the ones focussed on basic sciences, that is a separate system/list. HEre is a wiki entry on their education system- seems pretty detailed. This para caught my eye:
Germany has high standards in the education of craftspeople. Historically very few people attended college. In the 1950s for example, 80 percent had only Volksschule ("primary school")-Education of 6 or 7 years. Only 5 percent of youngsters entered college at this time and still less graduated. In the 1960s, 6 percent of youngsters entered college. In 1961 there were still 8,000 cities in which no youngsters received secondary education.[14] However, this does not mean that Germany was a country of uneducated people. In fact, many of those who did not receive secondary education were highly skilled craftspeople and members of the upper middle class. Even though more people attend college today, a craftsperson is still highly valued in German society.
Quite stunning, that the industrial powerhouse of the 60s, 70s was built mostly on high-school graduates trained extensively on industrial crafts. (One thing though: the influx of industry/cash from US/UK might have skewed things in their favor).

There is also the nature of German law, which dictates how one can enter a profession. In Germany, most professions require the person to undertake a period of apprenticeship and qualify as a journeyman, before they can seek full time employment. In many industries in Germany (and germanic countries like Austria & Switzerland), finding a job without going through the apprenticeship system is near impossible. This even includes jobs like retail salesperson, cook, barber or baker.

. This system has been in place since the middle-ages.

60-70% of the time the apprentices spend is doing on job training and 30% going to vocational school. Most apprenticeships last about 3-4 years and one must pass qualifying exams before one can be called a Journeyman. A journeyman can now apply for full time employment and even open his own business (in some industries, but not all), but cannot have assistants of his own. In order to hire apprentices, the person must first complete graduation from a master school, which takes another 3-4 years part time or 1-2 years full time, before he can be called a meister (master) at which point he/she can hire apprentices. In some industries which have safety issues (like electrician, mechanic etc.), a journeyman is not even allowed to found his/her own company, they must first complete the meister course requirements before they can do so. Hence, even if the person has finished only high-school degree, they get plenty of useful job training in some profession or other because of the apprenticeship system laws.

In India, there is an apprenticeship system in place, but it is nowhere as strict as the German system.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 19 Jul 2012 12:06

most plumbers, electricians, masons, painters , car mechanics, bakers, salesmen, carpenters in india learn as apprentices informally only.

SBajwa · Post by **SBajwa** » 20 Jul 2012 02:11

About 20% of basic research in the US is performed by corporates - but your point is taken that this percentage is low. Corporates are expected to be more oriented towards applied research and development.

Once a student gets its PHd in

1. Chemistry -- he/she gets a job with merck or such some pharmaceutical company in their area.

2. Computers -- Bell Labs or such computer company (Researchers at Bell developed radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language and the C++ programming language.)

and so forth.

SriKumar · Post by **SriKumar** » 20 Jul 2012 07:33

While there is something to what you suggest, I would caution that American domination is not just an illusion - it's a hard reality in most high-end industries.

Agreed, which feeds into this.

I don't know if Germany, France, UK, Italy experiences will be very instructive from an Indian standpoint. Their R&D advantage primarily stems from industries where they had a first-mover advantage more than a century back when these industries were starting up.

I think there may be something to learn, for example, how are they managing to compete against the economic Goliath that is the US.? Germany has held its own against the US (in auto, pharma, industrial electronics) for a long time now....it is difficult to maintain this parity for a century against the American juggernaut with its across-the-board dominance. France's aviation industry has not been squashed by the US industry even after a 100 years. Plenty of first-movers have passed into oblivion, but these countries' industries have not and successfully compete even today with little outsourcing (relatively speaking), smaller budgets, lesser manpower, low/no immigration, lack of currency dominance and limited natural resources (relatively) and a lesser university system- advantages that US has, in plenty. What are the factors for the success and longevity of their industries and _products_; I dont think 'first mover' explains all of this. (also, one wonders if the 'first-mover' advantage can be applied to countries, as it is done to companies)).

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 20 Jul 2012 07:39

I can cite even smaller examples - ferarri and ducatti in italy, the swiss and belgian chocolate makers , boutique swiss watch makers , hispano suiza of spain, wine makers, cheese makers .....none have been crushed by american advantages in finances and scaled home market.

negi · Post by **negi** » 20 Jul 2012 07:52

Not sure if it counts but if you go and buy good quality leather shoes in Unkil land be it brand names like Hugo Boss , Cole Haan or even J&Murphy a lot of them are made in India.

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 20 Jul 2012 22:16

SriKumar wrote:
While there is something to what you suggest, I would caution that American domination is not just an illusion - it's a hard reality in most high-end industries.
Agreed, which feeds into this.
I don't know if Germany, France, UK, Italy experiences will be very instructive from an Indian standpoint. Their R&D advantage primarily stems from industries where they had a first-mover advantage more than a century back when these industries were starting up.
I think there may be something to learn, for example, how are they managing to compete against the economic Goliath that is the US.? Germany has held its own against the US (in auto, pharma, industrial electronics) for a long time now....it is difficult to maintain this parity for a century against the American juggernaut with its across-the-board dominance. France's aviation industry has not been squashed by the US industry even after a 100 years. Plenty of first-movers have passed into oblivion, but these countries' industries have not and successfully compete even today with little outsourcing (relatively speaking), smaller budgets, lesser manpower, low/no immigration, lack of currency dominance and limited natural resources (relatively) and a lesser university system- advantages that US has, in plenty. What are the factors for the success and longevity of their industries and _products_; I dont think 'first mover' explains all of this. (also, one wonders if the 'first-mover' advantage can be applied to countries, as it is done to companies)).

Iridium learnt this the hard way, but geography is certainly not history.

All manufacturing companies survive because they have to be near their customer to keep up to them. This includes chemical , oil, metallurgy and heavy industries.

And besides, wages in the EU are lower than wages in the US. They survive because they are technologically as good, in many cases better than the American products; and they are located close to the customer and hence can understand and satisfy his needs.

Theo_Fidel · Post by **Theo_Fidel** » 20 Jul 2012 23:40

I'm of the opinion that America has not tried to export its way out of its troubles. Europe survives because America has not attacked it in a merchantilist manner.

Living here in middle America I can tell you that stories about the death of manufacturing here are way way overblown. The manufacturing top line is actually larger than 2007 now with far fewer workers. I was driving down our local highway the other day and for about 20 miles there were metal box after metal box of manufacturing companies, all running around and doing just fine. The one I visited produced mechanically activated sensors and was a $150 million company. The technology behind it was freakishly hi-tech. IMO Germany does not hold a candle to the actual number of manufacturing companies in the USA. What Germany specializes in is equipment for manufacturers and machine operators. USA prefers to outsource this and focus on the direct consumers due to fatter margins.

This is why the vicious asset stripping wall street attack on USA industries has been so damaging. Marginally profitable companies are not tolerated and so companies that produce very advanced equipment for business, with its low turnover and small margins were the first to be annihilated.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 21 Jul 2012 01:25

well ultimately every industry must serve multiple purposes one of which is to employ people and generate jobs. a very lean operation while it may impart strategic or financial benefits to the country and shareholders would not serve the local community with well paying jobs. eg might be a highly automated wafer fab. more high tech the product more automation and QC it needs and likely the germans and japanese make a lot selling the production and test eqpt.

SriKumar · Post by **SriKumar** » 22 Jul 2012 09:33

mahadevbhu wrote: They survive because they are technologically as good

This is the basic point I was trying to make....that their products (in many areas) are world-class or pretty good anyway, irrespective of how close/far away they are to their end user. It behooves us to look for the reasons for their success in holding off the Goliath....there might be a multitude of reasons for Germany to be able to penetrate the US markets (cars, other mechanical equipment)....factors helping it might be even economic or political rather than technical; but the basic product has to be world-class to have a chance to fight a product war. It is in this context that I suggested (actually, singha suggested and I agree) that examining the education systems of these countries is a worthwhile exercise to see how did they get a good product, and keep it sustained that way for many decades against severe competition against a strong foe. Ultimately, countries can do other things to help their products mature like put import barriers (US did this quite a bit in late 1800's to protect their textile industry), so things like first-mover advantage is not exactly a death-knell for other countries' industries trying to play in the same space. I think we need to look at the fundamentals....like, education, training, infrastructure, R&D, govt. role in the above etc.

SriKumar · Post by **SriKumar** » 22 Jul 2012 09:37

Went through a bit on the German system of education (google chacha onlee):

Education is compulsory from about 5 years to about 15 years of age…and compulsory here means….… Teutonic kompulsory. Achtung! Attendance is taken, and parents are held responsible. About 12 years of education takes you to the door-step of higher-secondary education. At this stage, if you do not want to do a university education i.e. no Ph.D/daktary/prafsary, you still have to do either a fulltime vocational training, or a vocational training+ part time job training for 3 years. This is also compulsory. So, all German children go to school upto about 19-20 years of age. (page 31).
http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/education/eur ... /DE_EN.pdf
So 'even' the technical trades people have done their full schooling plus 3 more years of job training/apprenticeships.Schooling is FREE (in public schools) and school standard would seem to be reasonably good. (universities are also practically free, from what I could gather).

One interesting thing, at about 10 years of age, the child has to choose one of 4 paths which decides what they do after finishing secondary school- two paths end up in a technical trade-type goal, and two take you towards a university education (for engineers , researchers, profs,). This seems a bit young to make such decisions; but it looks like the students have flexibility to change later on, in that anyone can go in for the technical trades. Going to university seems to require a specific path (gymnamsium, gesamtschule).

An interesting article from ‘Economist’: http://www.economist.com/node/15640999
Chart shows Germany as producing the smallest %age of people with post-secondary education among the majors (US, UK, France, Japan). Quote from the article:

The result is superior German quality in haircuts as well as cars. Dual training “is the reason we're the world export champion”, says Mrs Schavan, the education minister.

The article mentions that some in Germany are re-thinking its education system and that makes it interesting. (Quote: “The dual system is for 200 years ago,” says Alexander Kritikos of DIW, a research institute in Berlin. “You have to ask: is it still the right system if we want to be innovative?”). But, truth be told, this is the system that been in place for decades/centuries and has brought Germany to where it is today.

Overall, reasonable to good quality across the board (and not just for a select few/ creamy layer etc.*), it seems thorough i.e. no gaps/cracks for anyone to fall through- all have to attend school for the first 19/20 years of their life, and training for trades professions are given just as much (if not more) emphasis as a university education- no elitism here. Some life-changing choices have to be made at middle school level but course correction could be made later, perhaps. [*- needs more digging, this is just my impression from some quick reading].

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 24 Jul 2012 09:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNDFyNJbH3M

Interesting points about adverse effects of coaching, stress and exams by Prof Yash Pal.

hnair · Post by **hnair** » 24 Jul 2012 09:49

x-posting from IT thread, my take on US's mix of gateway and specialization institutions :

Bade-saar/Singha-saar, I sort of dislike the prep-school/feeder school thingies for TFTA univs, but am a huge, huge fan of the Community college system in massaland. geez... it is an entire educational system based on test-driving a few subjects per quarter and help choosing what to delve into deeper! And what is even more nice is that it is dirt cheap and its credits are bona-fide for even TFTA univs.

If there is one thing that I would love to see in India, is this local community college style part-time (or full-time) and inexpensive govt/state schools that don't give out a degree as such, but provides credits that are acceptable towards full degrees. If we have evening time classes on various non-IT disciplines, I am sure a lot of mid-level IT-vity munnas (who had no choices when they jumped unhappily into careers) jaded by the rat-races would explore new areas that they always wanted to explore. Including, arts, political science, music, drama, soap-making.....whatever. People would leave their office-desks faster or get off their fat-asses off from in front of TVs and flourish. The evening tutors could be professors from more formal universities, who want to moonlight a bit. Heck, even industry can provide feedbacks for fast-turnarounds that is needed to increase talent pool for a hot new area!

khan's post-PG research and community colleges are "hi-lo" systems to study in depth, IMHO.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 25 Jul 2012 19:35

On Leaving Academia

svenkat · Post by **svenkat** » 29 Jul 2012 15:47

I know our forum does not like giving publicity to blogs.Also I know,school education is not a top priority to GOI.

I think the well to do can get their children admitted to decent schools.Also given Indias history,there are no simple solutions in the offing.

There is one blogger who has his pet peeves,prejudices about the GOI policy on quotas,caste,economic etc in schools,colleges.He makes valid points on the ad-hocness characterising the 25% reservation in private schools,the concept of value education being pushed through and continuous evaluation which is being implemented.

If this interests our members,they can make comments.Many are from higher education,but I would still like to see their comments on admission policy in iITs,compulsory admission to schools on not clearly defined basis,value education,the scheme for continuous evaluation.

http://realitycheck.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/are-you-fit-to-live-in-society-upas-new-value-edu-experiment/

Under the cover of a phenomenal media shroud, the most outlandish social experiments are being not only planned but actually insidiously put in place. Without further ado – let me introduce the latest scheme. Value Education

CHENNAI: From this academic year, the Central Board of Secondary Education exam will not just tell students whether they are eligible for higher studies. It will also test them if they are fit to live in the society. In the Class 10 and 12 board exams 5% of marks in each of the core subjects will be allotted for value education. The idea is to prepare students to live in a multilingual, multicultural and multi-religious country.
What this means to kids at XII level no less.

In each subject, 5% weightage will be given at the summative assessment level or board exam to answers to value education questions integrated with the content. The questions will be for five marks in a 100-marks paper and 3-4 marks in a paper of 70-90 marks.

A potential question in economics is: a father in his will gives 40% each to his son and daughter and 20% to his servant who has been with him for long. Why has he done it and what is the value addition? Answer: Gender equality and charity.

Source : TOI ( I didnt believe it until I grabbed the letter sent by CBSE to schools PDF 22_2012_Value_based_qs

Needless to say this is extremely disturbing. They want to assign marks to desirable types of social outlook. Watch this example from a Physics board exam.

Three astronauts are descending from a space station to earth when, suddenly, one of their air tankers bursts. Now, this may seem like a developing question to test the knowledge of a physics student – specifically how much force the astronaut will have to maintain for preventing a direct fall, or how it will affect his body mass – but the actual focus lies elsewhere.

Through this, the student will be ‘tested’ with regard to the values embedded in him. He will, instead, be quizzed on what what the other astronauts should do in such a situation, and how the experience could weave a life-long camaraderie between the three. So, though the subject is fundamentally that of physics, the question would be more on the lines of value education.

Source: HT

http://realitycheck.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/rte-meets-creamy-layer-in-tn/

A professional couple earning about Rupees 30Lakhs per year approached Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Rajaji Vidyashram located in Kilpauk Chennai. They were seeking admission for their 5 year old son in LKG class. They had applied under the “disadvantaged” group stating that they were members of a Mudaliar community which is currently classified as SEBC (OBC) in the state of Tamilnadu. They were claiming benefits against Sec 12 (1) (c) of the RTE Act. The school conducted a lottery in the presence of two members of the School Management Committee and AIADMK MLA Mr P Vetrivel. The couples child did not win the lottery, so they approached the court questioning the basis of selection. The court did not allow their petition and also made a crucial comment on Tamilnadu’s notification of RTE. You can read the entire judgment here. Times of India story here.

The fact that weaker section was defined by the State as the annual income of parents or guardians is less than Rs.2 lakhs, in the absence of the State prescribing any creamy layer under the list of social economical backward classes, the same income ceiling should also apply to SEBC categories. Of course, such an income limit cannot be prescribed for SC and ST as noted already by the judgment of the Supreme Court. It is left to the State to specify the creamy layer under which certain members belonging to SEBC categories will be excluded from getting the benefit provided for the said class.

Judgment: Pp 26
What about the poor ?
As I have blogged in the past, critical clauses in the RTE Act were papered over by the media and almost the entire pool of columnists. It was portrayed as a program only on economic grounds.

But as we watched the quota policy get horrendously trapped in competitive politics, didn’t we say we would rather have an economic criterion for reservations than it being caste-driven? Well here, for the first time there is such a basis.

NDTV Journo writing in HT “Writes of passage”
Now the facts tumble out of cases like this :

The number of vacancies for LKG was only 216 for the academic year 2012-2013. Out of 216 seats, 54 seats were assigned for admission under 25% category under Section 12(1)(c). There were 91 applications under the RCE Act category, of which 5 belonged to Scheduled caste, 2 from the economically weaker section and 84 applications were received under the backward class and most backward class category. They have allotted two seats for economically weaker section and 5 seats for SC and ST. In respect of 47 seats meant for BC and MBC, there were 84 applications and that lots were held
So out of 54 reserved seats a grand total of TWO were allotted on the basis of poverty. 52 seats were allotted purely on the basis of caste.

Fallout of case
One should keep in mind that the couple approached the court only because they failed to secure an admission under RTE. If they had won the lottery, we would never had heard about this case. So it can be surmised that there must be others of similar wealth who did win the lottery and are enjoying free tuition.

While analyzing this case it is important to keep a calm head. The reality is that Tamilnadu does not exclude the creamy layer from seeking benefits under its various reservation programs. So the couple can be said to have nursed a legitimate expectation with respect to RTE. The text of the central government act as well as Tamilnadu’s notification did not exclude the creamy layer.

The judge has now said that both the “disadvantaged group” (vertical quota) as well as “weaker section” (horizontal quota) now have the same income limit of 2L/yr. If you look a bit closer this isnt a very robust position. In the absence of a sub quota, it just means all communities earning below 2L /yr qualify. It just merges the two categories together with the exception of SC.

http://realitycheck.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/hrd-and-iit-council-invent-a-horrendous-new-exam/

Unfortunately, the news reports are not very good in explaining how this works. Let me give it a shot.

The overarching rule is this : Only students who rank in the top 20% of their respective boards are eligible to even enter the IIT.
There will be two exams after the board exams, called the ‘main‘ and ‘advanced‘.
All students can write the ‘main’ exam. Presumably used for NIT.
Only the top 50,000 ranks of the main exam (or as per some reports 1,50,000) can write the ‘advanced’ exam.
The merit list is prepared based on the advanced exam only. After the merit list is prepared those students did not rank in the top 20% of their respective boards are kicked out (even if the student got a ‘advanced’ rank of 1)
This is the most bizarre selection machine ever to be designed in my opinion. It will fail to solve any of the problems which necessitated such tinkering in the first place. Not satisfied with being merely useless, it will introduce massive social problems as you will see in the rest of this post.

Boards and percentiles
Today there are about 40-50 different boards in India. I dont know of any board that states a percentile score. Note that a percentile is nothing but a rank. This necessitates a massive change in state board infrastructure and some states like Tamilnadu are sure to oppose giving a rank to each student. It is supremely ironic that the HRD Ministry which trumpets the grading system on the logic that a student scoring 91 is the same as student scoring 99 – is eager to introduce a percentile system ( to 8 decimal places no less) to even be eligible to take a shot. This is beyond cruel if you factor in rampant grade inflation.

Also keep in mind there is no underlying sanctity behind the canonical cutoff percentile of 80%. Tomorrow someone could change it to 90%, 95% and one would have no grounds to either support or oppose the move.

Not an open exam anymore
Most if not all selection processes in India stipulate a nominal minimum qualification mark followed by open exams (which can be multi paper). I use “open exam” in the sense that any Indian student who meets minimum qualifications gets to take a shot. This new proposal turns the concept of open exams on its head. This exam unfairly and in my view unconstitutionally excludes students not on grounds of minimum qualification but on performance of others. For even trying to access a publicly funded resource.

Blow to the needy
Like all schemes designed by anointed intellectuals in India, this one robs the very people it pretends to help. It is so embarrassingly easy to prove this. You can substitute the word “Rural” for your favourite victim group.

Rural can throw up more in the top 20% in boards
Rural will fail to rank well in IIT Advanced without coaching
So Urban who access coaching and pull into top 20% (not that hard) can absolutely dominate the rankings because if any rural student who by chance makes it will rank lower.
Since the advanced exam is the sole criteria it is a massive win for Urban.
The fallacy of the advanced exam
I was initially confused about this. Why would a student who knew that he was not in the top 20% even bother to write the advanced exam ? I talked to a parent who told me that it is a matter of exam dates. Many boards do not announce the results until after the entrance exam season. With this new harebrained scheme, students will have to write the exams and pay exam fees knowing they can be made retroactively ineligible. Even if they top the advanced exam, the scores in which are ironically the sole basis for the merit list. To borrow a phrase from a media personality. Wah !!

The quota problem
Last but not least, I am amazed that such concentrated brain power in one room could ignore the impact of percentile system on reservation.

If you select the top 20% ranks, will you not disqualify a massive chunk of SC/ST/OBC from the colleges ? If you raise this pertinent point, the smart ass answer would be a swift “Fine, lets prepare different percentile lists for each community”. It appears we make laws by thinking on our feet as and when anomalies crop up. Suddenly each student has to be issued two percentile marks – his overall percentile and his community percentile. How many boards will want to do this ? If you end up doing this, you still need to adjust for the relative percentages of quota due to the fact that reserved candidates can also take open seats. The whole system needs a supercomputer (CDAC project?) to work.

Even if you ended up issuing a community wise percentile, the effect on meritorious open category will be nothing short of tragic. A student of community X might be studying in IIT with 75% in board exam but a student of community Y will be debarred from even appearing despite scoring 95%. Once again note that it is not a matter of getting a lesser course, but one of outright disqualification to even try. More fuel for communal heartburn, more demands for reclassification and sub quotas, caste and religious divides and blockades.

This is what the government is doing to the country as the media sleeps.

http://realitycheck.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/jiten-gulped-his-tiffin-dangers-of-cce/

Why you need to pay attention to the dangers of the Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE)
In a far reaching move the Congress led UPA government replaced the tried and tested exam system in CBSE schools with something called Comprehensive and Continuous Evaluation (CCE). The purported idea to de-stress the students and to measure all aspects of a childs development.

As per the CCE, students are evaluated through Formative Assessments (FA) that is conducted throughout each term, and Summative Assessments (SA) carried out at the end of a particular term. Scholastic areas covering all academic subjects and non-scholastic areas, including life skills, arts and sports will be considered in the evaluation. While the FA will be carried out by the teacher for class participation, projects and discussions, SA will largely be done through a paper-pen test. The FAs (accounting for 40 marks) and SAs (for 60 marks) thrice, covering three terms and the cumulative scores would be converted to grades, on a 10-point scale.
Here is a quick summary :

Students evaluated on multiple “personality” criteria continuously for 40%
The written tests (not comprehensive exams) that make up the remaining 60% are set and evaluated by the school
No standardized exams of any kind till Std XII
A student has the option of taking a standardized exam in Class X – but only if he/she wants to migrate to another board.
Lets list out the key issues that arise out of such a system:

Does the continuous evaluation make sense at all, esp with children ?
What impact does measuring extra curricular talent have on the poor ?
How will you compare schools if there are no standardized tests ?
What impact will grade inflation have on education and students?
Lets see how this system works and quickly hit up on each of the above issues. Once again, ask yourself why NONE of the Indian media thought it fit to opine on this law that impacts every school going child.

How does it really work ?
Firstly, it is no mean feat to devise a system that can objectively evaluate millions of students uniformly on personality traits. What do teachers exactly observe in kids and how can they possibly assign a metric to behaviour ? Lets start off by looking at official documents. These are excerpts from the CCE guidelines issued to teachers for Class IX and X taken from here (the CBSE website). This section talks about observing behaviour in the “Life Skills” category, one of the dozen personality areas.

——————

Constant evaluation of “life skills (page 49 inside Inner_Pages_IX_X.pdf)

Day to day observation: Please keep ‘a watchful eye’ on your student, whenever you notice a significant behaviour that may shed light on any one of the fifty (50) descriptors under the 10 domains. Record it in your diary. It should not be time bound; it should be as and when such a thing happens. Here are a few examples:

Rohan shared his tiffin with his friends today.
Jiten gulped his tiffin quickly and then looked at others.
Though Sara did not figure in the list of awardees, she was all smiles and helped me in organizing the event.
George visited his sick classmate at home and briefed him about the home work.
Sarbari differed with my viewpoint; she argued but never got irritated; but Shanti got angry because Sarbari was arguing with me.
Mohammad connected the computer to the LCD projector, set the screen so proficiently that I could use it in the classroom.
While you rate such behaviour, please remember ‘5’ stands for desirable behaviour and less than ‘1’ for the undesirable ones. For example in the above case Sarbari gets ‘5’, but Shanti gets ‘2’ or ‘1’. Although you would observe on a day to day basis and record, you would only accumulate it at the end of the term and then convert into a grade. All these statements reveal certain styles of behaviour of a student, e.g. effective communication of Sarbari, excellent interpersonal skills exhibited by Mohammad and Sara’s ability to manage her emotions, etc.
In other words, its like having a video camera on all students at all time. Discrete incidents are noted down and sought to be either penalized or rewarded. I am not an expert on pedagogy but this sets off alarm bells . Whatever happened to kids will be kids. If Jiten gulped his tiffin or pulled Rita’s hair should have no impact on his grades. Of course teachers must pay attention to disturbing behaviour and escalate to parents if required. But they have as much right to score it on a desirability matrix as the students have to score the teachers on one.

It is also impossible for teachers to avoid allegation of bias. The government’s canned response to such things is always, “Arrey baba, so and so official will make random checks and penalize so and so. Whats your problem?“. Exactly how this has worked is anyone’s guess. Another grand anomaly is, in a society divided along communal lines by the UPA government , it is next to impossible to ignore either the teachers or the students affiliation.

Lets quickly look at another example.

————–

Collection of detailed anecdotal records (page 91 )

The teacher records anecdotes of students and makes his/her own comments against if they are worthy. This becomes part of a child’s portfolio, and presumably the teachers too. Here is an illustration from the guidebook.

Objective Description
When I walked into the class, the students greeted me. All of them were in a joyful mood and did not want to study. I agreed. I divided them into groups and asked them to play games in groups. Suddenly, I noticed that Shivang was studying a Science book and was totally engrossed in his studies. I became very curious and asked,” Why don’t you play games with your friends?” Shivang replied, “I do not enjoy playing these games. I enjoy reading my Science books.”
Comment:
Shivang is an intelligent boy who has got a scientific temper but lacks social skills. He does not like to interact with others. He prefers to study Science in depth and thinks a lot.
Unless the event indicates a major mental or physiological problem, the fact that teachers can not only make such remarks but enter them into a permanent record is alarming. Even the above normative example is silly – Shivang said he doesnt enjoy playing these games, maybe he likes playing some other games and the teachers remark about his lacking social skills is bollocks. The problem is the child has no appeal against it.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 02 Aug 2012 02:50

x-posting from gdf/nukkad

Raja Bose wrote:oh, you will still find the average to be pretty good but it has definitely fallen plus one encounters graduates from there now who like I mentioned "would put the worst grads from worst colleges in India to shame" - now that latter category one would never ever see in the past. Research standards are I would say better in one aspect than before namely, the stress is lower. Earlier CMU CS/ECE grad students (esp. pee-chaddis) had one of the highest rates of psychiatric cases anywhere.

Singha wrote:my favourite univ is UC San diego. doesnt have the glam sham of mit/haavaad/stanford, but gets the job done. they have some excellent faculty. GA tech, ut austin, univ of wisc are probably in the same mould as well. low key and disconnected from the political power networks.
Thats the big trump card massa enjoys over others is the excellent quality of its state schools outside the TFTA Ivy Liga schools, in terms of research and classroom/practical education. It is not like we have the IITs & then we have the rest.

Good pointers.. I think we need the next generation nehruvian theorist to take up important policy decision making position soon.

Along with infrastructure of engineering kind that is failing, but basic education should at least follow well established maasan setup. Absolutely nothing wrong in xerox-ing strat-e-jis even from an enemy planet, if it is all for education.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 12 Aug 2012 03:53

Theo_Fidel wrote:And then we had matrimc demonstrate that 'single digit' JEE topper (apparently a badge of honor that has been revealed to all and sundry) is now random management type working on job interviews. Nothing against matrimc, but really. Is this is end product of the JEE selection process. How asinine is this,...

Missed this. Oh, the dangers of theorizing based on incorrect assumptions. When I said our company I was speaking literally, not as an employee. Since Theo has said he/she uses CAD/CAE, I would like to say that we have made significant contributions to advance the cause of push-button analysis in Mechanical CAE.

Don · Post by **Don** » 20 Aug 2012 19:39

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes ... nd-science

India backs out of global education test for 15-year-olds

Hemali Chhapia, TNN Aug 3, 2012, 02.13AM IST

MUMBAI: After an earlier, embarrassing show, India has backed out of this year's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global evaluation process by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Secretariat that gauges where schoolchildren stand alongside their peers from other countries.

This academic Olympics measures the performance of 15-year-olds in their reading, math and science abilities.

Indians were put to test for the first time in the last assessment in 2009. On the global stage, they stood second last among 73 countries, only beating Kyrgyzstan on reading, math and science abilities. India ranked second last among the 73 countries that participated in PISA, conducted to evaluate education systems worldwide by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Secretariat.

This time around, sources said India shied away from the assessment as government officials felt our children were not prepared for such a test.

"India didn't sign up for the PISA 2012 assessment because when countries were asked to sign up for that assessment, India had only signed up for the PISA 2009 assessment, which it carried out with a year later delay in 2010," said Juliet Evans, who handles communication and administration for the PISA Secretariat. Unlike India, several other countries like Costa Rica, Malaysia, Georgia and the UAE who had carried out the PISA evaluation in 2010 did sign up for the upcoming assessment. It is also yet unclear whether India will put itself up for the assessment in 2015. In the last assessment, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, showpieces of India's education and development, were put through the PISA evaluation and they performed miserably. The idea was that the entire country would participate in the next round of assessment. However, that plan was also dropped.

The assessment is based on two-hour tests that half a million students are put through. China's Shanghai province, which participated in PISA for the first time like the two Indian states, scored the highest in reading. It also topped the charts in math and science. "More than one-quarter of Shanghai's 15-year-olds demonstrated advanced mathematical thinking skills to solve complex problems, compared to an OECD average of just 3%," noted the analysis.

In math, considered India's strong point, the states finished second and third to last, beating only Kyrgyzstan; the English test threw up the same result. Girls were better than boys and science results were the worst, where Himachal stood last. , behind Kyrgyzstan.

TN was slightly better and finished third from bottom. The average 15-year-old Indian is over 200 points behind the global topper.

Experts estimate that an Indian Class VIII student is at the same level as a South Korean Class III student in math abilities or a Class II student from Shanghai when it comes to reading skills. Elementary education is a fundamental right in India, but clearly that says nothing about what our children are studying in school every day.

SBajwa · Post by **SBajwa** » 21 Aug 2012 20:51

In my opinion the Indian education is too much focused on academics and not enough on hands on. Thus the majority of the labor force in India is unskilled. Skilled workers are the back bone of any economy and more emphasis should be put on the experience. I am yet to see a well qualified educated electrician or plumber in India.

In my opinion most of the engineers graduated from Indian engineering colleges are not experienced enough to even support certified electricians or plumbers in any western economy.

Aditya_V · Post by **Aditya_V** » 22 Aug 2012 17:53

Svenkat-> I can see how Kapil Sibal is a disaster for Indian education.

Don-> regarding your article it seems a lot of psy-ops, what objective data was there to equate a class XIII - 12 year old Indian student with a6 year old Korean student.

Lets see where we need to catch up, I doubt we Indians as Dumb as the article tries to point out.

Don · Post by **Don** » 22 Aug 2012 19:10

Aditya_V wrote:Svenkat-> I can see how Kapil Sibal is a disaster for Indian education.

Don-> regarding your article it seems a lot of psy-ops, what objective data was there to equate a class XIII - 12 year old Indian student with a6 year old Korean student.

Lets see where we need to catch up, I doubt we Indians as Dumb as the article tries to point out.

You should discuss with The Times of India if you have problem with the article. I did not write it.

Aditya_V · Post by **Aditya_V** » 22 Aug 2012 19:34

Question not to you, but just pointing out the anomalies in the article.

Don · Post by **Don** » 03 Sep 2012 19:32

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/teachers-play- ... 42768.html

Teachers play truant in India's schools

By Adam Plowright | AFP – 23 hours ago..

On any given day in a state primary school in India, up to one in four teachers is missing. The cost for a country that sees its young population as its ticket to superpower status is huge.

In the poor and agricultural district of Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh, a state that is home to nearly 200 million people, or one in six Indians, absences afflict pupils and fellow teachers alike.

One frustrated headmistress showed AFP the register for her staff: two out of seven full-time teachers are routinely away. One has been seen only a handful of times in 2012 due to back-to-back medical and childcare leave.

"There are so many teachers who don't want to work," she complained in her simple and dimly lit office, asking not to be named because of the sensitive nature of the information she was sharing.

"The government provides books, uniforms and midday meals to all students for free. They are spending so much, but if teachers are not dedicated then all the money is just being wasted."

In other schools dotted around the area, about a two-hour drive from New Delhi, teacher shortages due to absences or under-recruitment mean class sizes are often double the recommended level of 30.

A recent scandal in the area saw 77 teachers sacked after an investigation by a local training college revealed they had forged their own school certificates.

Today's dysfunctional education system is storing up problems for the future, say experts.

"We have this very young population and it has so much potential," Rukmini Banerji from leading Indian education and research group Pratham told AFP.

"If you want children 10 years from now to have 21st-century basic skills, you've got to begin now in grades one and two. If we don't do this, we are going to lose a unique opportunity."

In general, state primary schools in India are "abysmal," says Karthik Muralidharan, a professor at the University of California and long-time researcher on the Indian system.

His studies on teacher absenteeism, done in conjunction with other academics and the World Bank, provide authoritative figures for the problem because they rely on unannounced visits to schools across the country.

In 2003 a survey found an average of 25 percent of state primary school teachers were absent at any one time. A re-run in 2010 found the figure had improved slightly to 23.7 percent. In Uttar Pradesh, the rate was still more than 30 percent.

Some of the absences are legitimate -- sickness, maternity or childcare leave, for example, but an estimated 60 percent are for questionable reasons.

In the worst cases, politically connected teachers take other jobs and pay off school inspectors and continue to collect their salaries.

The overall cost of absent teachers to the government could be as much as 85 billion rupees ($1.5 billion) a year, Karthik estimates in new research which is yet to be published.

The left-leaning government has ploughed billions into education as a pillar of its "inclusive growth" agenda aimed at ensuring the benefits of economic development reach the poor, who rely most heavily on state education.

The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, listed the achievements during his Independence Day speech last month.

A total of 51,000 new schools had been opened and about 700,000 teachers hired in the past two years, Singh said. For the first time, a Right to Education Act guarantees state schooling for children from six to 14.

"Our children are the biggest strength of our country," he declared.

The problem is that genuine improvements in infrastructure and enrolment levels have not yet translated into better skills.

One of India's most significant characteristics, and something that sets it apart from fellow Asian giant China with its one-child policy, is its huge and growing young population.

It is home to the world's highest number of children who, in the next few decades, will enter the work force and begin productive labour -- something the government and economists refer to as a "demographic dividend."

This supposed dividend, however, is set to come from the north of the country, the so-called "cow belt" of badly run states with high rates of corruption, malnutrition and illiteracy such as Uttar Pradesh (UP).

The prospect of a demographic disaster -- millions of badly educated young people with higher aspirations than their parents who are unable to find jobs -- is a danger that looms over the country of 1.2 billion people.

"Where is the demographic dividend? It's in... states which are lowest down on the ladder on human resource indices," admitted Kapil Sibal, the education minister, earlier this year.

Pratham conducts an annual survey of rural state primary schools, which finds that after five years of school more than half of children are still unable to read a basic text in their own language.

The results for UP are even worse.

And disturbingly for the government and its spending splurge, the national results show an "alarming" fall in standards year-on-year in 2011 with India already "very poor on an international absolute scale."

The consequence is a surge in private education. More than 50 percent of primary school pupils in cities are enrolled in fee-charging institutions and 25 percent in rural areas, according to different studies, placing a huge burden on poorer families.

But most continue to attend state schools such as the ones in Baghpat, where the children of agricultural workers and labourers sit on the floor in dimly lit classrooms, learning from a text book that leaves many of them baffled.

...

RoyG · Post by **RoyG** » 12 Sep 2012 00:01

http://profit.ndtv.com/news/economy/art ... topstories

How coaching classes are widening the class divide in India

Reuters | Updated On: September 11, 2012 11:47 (IST)

Kota: With a sprawling five-acre campus, 10,000 students and state-of-the-art LCD projectors in its lecture rooms, Bansal Classes is bigger and slicker than most schools in India.

But the institution, now a landmark in Kota, a city in Rajasthan, is neither a school nor a college. It is the jewel in the crown of India's private coaching industry, a $6.4 billion business that exacerbates the social divide.

Cram schools have become a magnet for tens of thousands of mostly middle class families in a country where two decades of rapid economic growth have failed to improve a dysfunctional state education system and a shortage of good universities.

Such cram schools coach students for fiercely competitive entrance tests to a handful of premier technical and medical colleges. Their modus operandi is rote learning. At Bansal's, hundreds of teenagers are trained intensively to solve complex multiple-choice questions on physics, chemistry or mathematics.

Yash Raj Mishra, a Kota cram student, lives in a tiny room with no television or laptop and spends almost 16 hours a day attending classes, revising or tackling question papers.

"Physics is my first and last girlfriend," said Mishra, leaning against a wall plastered with notes on Kinematics.

"I feel bad and frustrated when my friends score even slightly better than I do," added the 17-year-old, who calls his friends only to ask about their academic progress.

Two-year coaching programmes in Kota cost $3,000-$4,000, in addition to which students have to pay for their regular schools and spend at least $2,000 a year on accommodation. That makes the total expenditure a small fortune for most in a nation where the annual per capita income is around $1,250.

"A child is a stack of thousand-rupee notes," said Manoj Chauhan, a mathematics tutor in his late 20s who could have joined a software company or multinational but chose instead to teach in Kota, where many teachers' salaries top $6,000 a month.

Such cram schools compound the inequalities of an education system plagued by absentee teachers and high drop-out rates, which have left a quarter of Indians illiterate and lacking the skills to match the country's growing economic needs.

A global survey by ManpowerGroup, one of the world's largest staffing service providers, estimated India's shortage of skilled labour at 67 per cent—the second worst in the world.

The skill shortages threaten to blunt what is seen as one of India's biggest economic advantages - its demographic dividend.

With 60 per cent of India's 1.2 billion population under the age of 35, the country has an opportunity to reap the kind of demographic dividend that brought the dramatic transformation of East Asian economies towards the end of the 20th century.

The average age of an Indian in 2020 will be 29 compared with 37 in China and the United States and 48 in Japan, bringing a chance to boost productivity and the savings rate. But India may never realise its dividend if the bulk of these youths are poorly educated, stuck in low-value jobs or under-employed.

Rite of passage
Every year more than 50,000 students from across the country enroll in Kota, many of them under parental pressure. The riverside town has become the capital of the multi-billion-dollar coaching industry, thanks to the success of Bansal Classes, which was set up by a former engineer who held the first classes across the table in his own dining room.

The city of nearly one million has flourished partly because of its blandness, with parents seeing the relative lack of distractions for students a bonus. Despite housing thousands of teenagers, it has hardly any of the shopping malls and cinema complexes that sprouted across the country as the economy grew.

The goal of attending cram schools is cracking the tough exams set by top colleges such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), whose degrees can be a ticket to a lifetime of fat pay cheques or jobs in the United States.

"There were 50 children who committed suicide in Kota last year," said Vinod Kumar Bansal, founder of Bansal Classes. "When a child realises he can't make it to IIT, the guilt of spending his father's money on coaching can lead him to end his life."

Bansal founded the school in the 1980s, leaving his job at a nylon-making firm after being diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, and it was his success that bred Kota's coaching juggernaut.

The centre shot to fame after a string of successes in getting students admitted to India's toughest colleges - spawning a host of other institutions that were inspired by Bansal's success. Its website says 16,000 of its students have gained admission to IITs, more than any other cram school.

In 2012, more than 500,000 students took the IIT entrance exam and less than 10,000 cleared it, making admission statistically harder than getting into America's Ivy League colleges.

Today Bansal's school, whose eight storeys are connected by wheelchair ramps, has become a thriving business with annual earnings close to Rs. 100 crore—and that despite a sharp slowdown in India's economic growth.

"In the long run, it has to undermine faith in the education system as a meritocratic system, where hard work and talent are rewarded," said Chad Lykins, co-author of an Asian Development Bank report on private coaching in Asia. "Instead, the reward goes to the person who can go outside the system and get exam tricks and tips."

Critics also argue that the cram schools offer false hope to many students and parents, promising results even though the candidate may not have an aptitude for engineering or medicine.

"Actually in a coaching institute you are treated like a rat," said Ashutosh Banerjee, who fled Kota within a month after getting fed up with his cram school. "Teachers have a lot of attitude and they shout at everyone and make fun of everyone."

But for most students, the teachers are above reproach and can become mini celebrities in Kota, where their pictures are plastered on city walls.

"On streets, students point at me or stare," said Chauhan, the maths tutor, who has billboards with his picture around the city. "They have made videos and uploaded on YouTube."

Rat race
Seeing the potential in the Indian market, Etoos, a South Korean coaching giant, invested Rs. 30 crore to set up shop in Kota in 2011, focusing on video lectures and e-learning.

"In terms of revenue, India is going to cross over South Korea," said Etoos' business head Nitin Chaturvedi. "The Indian population is huge and geographically also it is 4-5 times of Korea."

Coaching firms have flourished in other cities too. FIITJEE, a household name for would-be engineering students, has over 60 franchises across the country. It plans an initial public offering (IPO) in the next few months.

"People are chasing us like anything," said R. Trikha, head of distance learning at FIITJEE. "Coaching is actually there because the school systems are not doing their job. Society should be grateful to us that we are fulfilling this need."

But the popularity of India's cram schools has helped make a bad situation worse in the state education system. Better pay tempts schoolteachers to moonlight as private instructors, neglecting the poorer students they are meant to be teaching.

"It is forbidden, but enforcement is another issue," said Anshu Vaish, secretary at the Ministry of Education. "Typically, what teachers do often is that they won't teach in the classroom and they will make students come to their homes later to study the same thing."

The poor quality of state teaching has resulted in a generation where about two-thirds of 10-year-olds cannot do a simple division problem, according to Wilima Wadhwa of ASER, a Delhi-based education research centre.

The experience in poorer schools can be bleak. Teacher truancy is common in most villages, while poverty can force families to pull children out of school early to find work. Pupils from lower castes face bullying and discrimination from their teachers, and are sometimes forced into doing menial jobs such as cleaning school toilets instead of attending classes.

The lack of good schools and colleges means that the quality of the average Indian degree is so low that even those students who manage to get one could find themselves without a job.

"Only 25 per cent of our engineering graduates, on average, are actually fit to fulfill the requirements of the IT industry," said Binod Khadria, a sociology professor at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. "So you can imagine the amount of wastage. Those who are left over ... what are they going to do?"

Copyright: Thomson Reuters 2012

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 12 Sep 2012 10:13

Yash Raj Mishra, a Kota cram student, lives in a tiny room with no television or laptop and spends almost 16 hours a day attending classes, revising or tackling question papers.
"Physics is my first and last girlfriend," said Mishra, leaning against a wall plastered with notes on Kinematics.
"I feel bad and frustrated when my friends score even slightly better than I do," added the 17-year-old, who calls his friends only to ask about their academic progress.

>> ok - so he has a tremendous sense of personal discipline and work ethic . full marks for that.
>> but my prediction based on the third line is he will be a basket case if / when he gets through into a top college where every student is a topper from back home, yet still there will be a band and grade ranking. plus wont he suffer from burnout having to slog like a dog just to get past the velvet rope and then smacked around by a merciless lineup of 400 and 600 level courses in engg school?

"when running a long race its good to leave some 20% in the tank" - imho.

the sociology professors statements reflects the common reality that students of all branches of sc and engg are trying to crowd into the IT industry.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 12 Sep 2012 16:47

Societies which have taken competitions to such obscene levels, miss one crucial point. Though competition is always good to get the best out of you, or a bunch of kids. At the extreme end of that like we have in India, it yields only so much more. Burn out or not, it really does not give much in return for the individual or even the system using this selection process. Yet we have so many who support this blindly just so that it works.

In sports ultra bleeding edge competitive training is good, as the performance is for once ( as in youth) and you are not expected to do the same all life. In real life for which education is just a stepping stone, the product (student) has to last a lifetime and increasing in quality output with time till his retirement at least. That should be the benchmark. We have got it ass backwards like in many other solutions to our problems.

vera_k · Post by **vera_k** » 13 Sep 2012 22:21

Since quotas are the seasoning of independent India, let the government have a Kota quota. Said quota would reserve seats for students studying in coaching classes. Once a student identifies himself as a coaching class student, he would not be eligible for the open seats.

Of course, a simpler method would be to simply hold a lottery that randomly picks students from the top X% that apply.

Virupaksha · Post by **Virupaksha** » 14 Sep 2012 06:22

vera_k wrote:Since quotas are the seasoning of independent India, let the government have a Kota quota. Said quota would reserve seats for students studying in coaching classes. Once a student identifies himself as a coaching class student, he would not be eligible for the open seats.

Of course, a simpler method would be to simply hold a lottery that randomly picks students from the top X% that apply.

I have a better idea. Create 1000 iit level institutions so that the thirst for education for all reasonably.

We right now have a situation where top 5-10 (IITs/IIMs) are decently good. The second tier with a huge decrease has 15-20 institutions. Beyond that the institutions become crap.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 14 Sep 2012 07:47

thats precisely what is being done with the fast expansion of the IIT/NIT system.
also I dont see any reason why each state should have only one IIT/NIT - this is not monogamy law we are dealing with here.
if say IIT delhi is short of land (which it is), let another IIT-D2 be setup wherever the Govt can find land. the campuses are anyways self-contained in almost everything...one could say a remote area is better as it prevents the glitz and girls of DU/JNU distracting the penances.

we need to build scale at a upper-medium quality level before we get upset about quality. if every engg college in India were say at the level of NIT warangal or trichy, that itself would be MASSIVE improvement in the average quality of output. ok so most of them wont make partner at Gsachs and loot billions but this enhanced army will cause a lot more damage than today.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 14 Sep 2012 10:15

Singha wrote:Yash Raj Mishra, a Kota cram student, lives in a tiny room with no television or laptop and spends almost 16 hours a day attending classes, revising or tackling question papers.
"Physics is my first and last girlfriend," said Mishra, leaning against a wall plastered with notes on Kinematics.
"I feel bad and frustrated when my friends score even slightly better than I do," added the 17-year-old, who calls his friends only to ask about their academic progress.

Sigh.....

pgbhat · Post by **pgbhat** » 14 Sep 2012 18:27

"I feel bad and frustrated when my friends score even slightly better than I do," added the 17-year-old, who calls his friends only to ask about their academic progress.

Real world will be full of disappointment for this kid.

vera_k · Post by **vera_k** » 26 Sep 2012 06:41

X-Posting from the Understanding the US thread. The article delves into the increasing capacity of humans to deal with the abstract over the last century. IMO this may explain India's poor performance on the PISA tests, in that students have lower IQ simply because most have only recently started going to school.

Acharya wrote:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087 ... lenews_wsj
Are We Really Getting Smarter?
Americans' IQ scores have risen steadily over the past century. James R. Flynn

By JAMES R. FLYNN

IQ tests aren't perfect, but they can be useful. If a boy doing badly in class does really well on one, it is worth investigating whether he is being bullied at school or having problems at home. The tests also roughly predict who will succeed at college, though factors like motivation and self-control are at least as important.

We are the first of our species to live in a world dominated by hypotheticals and nonverbal symbols.
.Advanced nations like the U.S. have experienced massive IQ gains over time (a phenomenon that I first noted in a 1984 study and is now known as the "Flynn Effect"). From the early 1900s to today, Americans have gained three IQ points per decade on both the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales and the Wechsler Intelligence Scales. These tests have been around since the early 20th century in some form, though they have been updated over time. Another test, Raven's Progressive Matrices, was invented in 1938, but there are scores for people whose birth dates go back to 1872. It shows gains of five points per decade.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 27 Sep 2012 12:18

this yr bhatnagar awards
http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/kar ... 939252.ece

krisna · Post by **krisna** » 30 Sep 2012 02:11

Why It’s Never Mattered That America’s Schools ‘Lag’ Behind Other Countries

The United States has never ranked at the top of international education tests, since we began comparing countries in 1964, yet has been the dominant economic and innovative force in the world the entire time.

The reason for the apparent disconnect is because schools don’t prepare students for the real world, so broad educational attainment will have a weak correlation with economic power. Research has consistently shown that on nearly every measure of education (instructional hours, class-size, enrollment, college preparation), what students learn in school does not translate into later life success. The United States has an abundance of the factors that likely do matter: access to the best immigrants, economic opportunity, and the best research facilities.

While the United States has a dismal track-record of inequality, we treat our brightest minds quite well. The “average test scores are mostly irrelevant as a measure of economic potential,” write Hal Salzman & Lindsay Lowell in the prestigious journal, Nature, “To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy.”

A quarter of CEOs in technology and science are foreign born and 76 percent hold key positions in engineering, technology, and management, according to Stanford researcher and TechCrunch contributor, Vivek Wadhwa.

“More than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. were founded by immigrants or their children, and these firms alone employ over 10 million individuals. Some of our country’s most iconic brands – including IBM, Google, and Apple – were founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. And nearly half of the top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S. had at least one immigrant founder,” wrote Aol founder Steve Case (Aol is the parent company of TechCrunch).

And, our brightest native and immigrant minds are greeted with extraordinary research and economic opportunity. After World War II, the United States emerged as an economic superpower. Massive investment poured into universities and scientific research, which became the genesis for the Internet, itself.

While it’s difficult to speculate why the U.S. persists as a titan of innovation, we need not be scared into trying to be like other countries. America has been at the top in spite of a lack-luster education system.

Lesson for sdres who continuously berate ourselves masocistically about our education sytem.
Many sdres do well in uncle land due to ample opportunities for research facilities etc.
To have that, good education is a foundation which is provided but definitely can be improved.
At least immigration is oit of question other than illegal bdees which impairs our standards. But others we can do much more.
for a start berating ourselves should stop.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 30 Sep 2012 03:03

^^^ But that begs the question, where is the innovation even at 10% the levels seen in the US system in the Indian system over the last 50 odd years. We have been educating all and sundry right for so long no ?

I think the conclusion you are trying to reach is the wrong one for India. US benefits immensely by the acumen of its top 5% of the native born population, in addition to the bonus of top cream from immigrants as a continuous, almost never ending stream, over the last hundred years at least and will continue into the future.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 06 Oct 2012 04:27

This quote is from the strat thread, but it is more useful to debunk this here.

Original thought is not a problem for Indian students - our problems are lack of systems thinking and inability to work in teams. It is a reflection of the secular education that has cut us off from our roots.

If the above were really true, then a great majority of the kids of NRIs must fail this test. From what is seen over the past two or three decades, they are all doing perfectly well despite getting a secular education and more importantly has also been largely cut off from their true roots. This has not affected their thinking abilities, or team playing heck even creativity. Many are doing fine in academia as well, from such a low base population.

nakul · Post by **nakul** » 06 Oct 2012 13:59

^^^

The hallmark that 'secular eduaction' has failed is when one makes mistakes and is not even aware that he is making them. They curse their motherland for backwardness while look upto the west which is thousands of years behind in civilizational development. Gandhi ji on asked about western civilization remarked "It is a good idea!"

krisna · Post by **krisna** » 11 Oct 2012 04:43

Minority politics must not control education

n what seems like a reaffirmation of the secular values inherent in the Indian Constitution, the Gujarat High Court on Monday ruled that as far as monetary benefits are concerned the Government cannot show favour towards any community on the basis of religion. Article 29(2) of the Constitution prohibits any citizen from being denied aid out of State funds on religious grounds. In addition, giving monetary benefits to a community on the basis of religion is against Article 15(1) of the Constitution.

The Court was responding to a Public Interest Litigation filed by Gujarat Congress member. The PIL sought to have the Government directed to implement a Centre sponsored pre-metric scholarship scheme, something it has been resisting for a long time on the grounds that it would benefit a mere 9 per cent (52,260 out of 6 lakh) of eligible students.

The Gujarat Government curently gives scholarships to all students, regardless of the community or religion they belong to and has taken a secular stand in court saying it will not discriminate among students on the basis of their religion or community.

As part of its ruling, the Court said that the UPA Government seems to be of the opinion that “there is no necessity of socio-economic upliftment of persons of even the poorer and socially backward strata with the help of Government sponsorship unless they belong to the five minority religions.”

The PIL has been referred to a larger Bench which would decide whether preference given to students from minority communities was in violation of the secular Indian Constitution.

shameless congis continue to pander to minorities.

ShyamSP · Post by **ShyamSP** » 11 Oct 2012 05:27

Bade wrote:This quote is from the strat thread, but it is more useful to debunk this here.
Original thought is not a problem for Indian students - our problems are lack of systems thinking and inability to work in teams. It is a reflection of the secular education that has cut us off from our roots.
If the above were really true, then a great majority of the kids of NRIs must fail this test. From what is seen over the past two or three decades, they are all doing perfectly well despite getting a secular education and more importantly has also been largely cut off from their true roots. This has not affected their thinking abilities, or team playing heck even creativity. Many are doing fine in academia as well, from such a low base population.

How can you make that assertion? Mere physical separation from India doesn't mean kids are cut off from their roots. NRI kids generally get good education while keeping their roots outside, say, the public school. NRI kids do get better opportunities (in terms of education, sports, thinking, cultural) than their counterpart in India at least in those places they have numbers.