Indian Education System

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 26 Feb 2009 19:08

some of these people "financial engineers" never really did anything of lasting value imo. so how they can be called top predator? atleast the farmer can point to a cart of wheat and the doctor to a cured patient, the code coolie can point to some useful piece of work - these people played with vapour and purloined huge assets for themselves.

the rest of the "real world" never got 300% bonuses and did not expect it either.

pay them a normal salary, a 10% bonus and ask for real deliverables...soon the men will be sorted from those who came in just to feast on the free venison.

imo a lot of people (bright ones who have a choice) tend to go into the
profession that pays the most - either due to peer pressure, family expectations, ego, because they dont know, because they are misled .... its better for the elites to get into something they like doing. if the top10% are not deployed in best possible fields, it is a major waste.

old-school wall street veterans also seem ok that the flood of get-rich-quick types will now decrease and people will get into many other fields as usual.

manish · Post by **manish** » 26 Feb 2009 19:26

The 'financial engineering' was actually done mostly by a bunch of mathematicians and physicists or some of those who actually spcialised in so called MS(Financial Engineering)

types or the Ivy League/'Haavuhd' guys. Most of the Indian MBAs, at least at the entry level/fresh off the boat, had little or nothing to do with the 'Complex' and 'Structured'

products. I can only hope things don't get too bad from where we already are and that's why I said guvment should exercise some caution in the way they are going about opening new campuses - not just IIMs but IITs as well.

The i-bank types rarely, if ever, visited campuses beyond IIM - A,B,C. Although Lehman etc did hire from some of the other elite (non - IIM) campuses, it was almost exclusively for their Indian ops, which was apparently mostly back end i-banking stuff(whatever that means), equity research etc. Not that it didn't pay well - LB is said to have paid around 22+L p.a. for fresh graduates two years ago.

The real hit for the other campuses comes from the bursting of the commodity and mfg bubble - these guys were hiring rampantly as well but went just below the radar by flying terrain-hugging flight paths. Then there is the slowdown in the IT sector which was easily the No.1 hirer by sheer numbers alone. Telecom is the 'Last Man Standing' (see Bharti hiring more and more from b-schools - they are making hay while the sun shines by picking up some of the top notch fresh talent at 'low' prices

)and it remains to be seen when this bubble bursts - which in my opinion, will not happen soon - at least not until 2011-12 when the 700m+ subscriber target is crossed finally and the churn rate stabilises and incumbents start fighting for scraps amongst the remaining subscribers. Then the ARPUs will matter and the hiring binge will end. Anyways that's OT and this is not the thread for this I guess.

shaardula · Post by **shaardula** » 26 Feb 2009 19:30

i doubt if sdre tigers from bandipur called iim can become FEs. that needs tfta lions from gir.

this modeling markets was like a manna from heaven for applied math types. you cant blame them. most phds from applied math were solving hard/meta problems in fluid mechanics and other such kuffar fields already cramped in by engineers and straining hard to inviolably establish mundane facts.

meanwhile kuffars from allied fields., like the one i know from ee - systems and, the then popular, ai* types - who knew a bit of approximation and bit of uncertainty, were selling a 'model' for pretty penny about 10-12 years ago. in his day job he used to do sdre image processing!

when the wolf can find game at the pond, it is only natural that the tiger visits the pond. only between the wolf and the tiger the game at the pond has dried up. the game wisened and moved deep in to the dandakaaranya.

* btw nobody in amreeki sena wants to get within half a mile of ai these days. a whole bunch of klpd promising the moon in early days has left a sour taste in the mouth of jernails known for swigging on sours.

shaardula · Post by **shaardula** » 26 Feb 2009 19:42

all in all you are saying that just because the elephant eats grass the tiger has to be content with chicken, and let the gaurs prance around.

the tactical battle at kruger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM

this makes for good voyeurism but deep down you know who rules the jungle.

manish · Post by **manish** » 26 Feb 2009 19:44

shaardula wrote:i doubt if sdre tigers from bandipur called iim can become FEs. that needs tfta lions from gir.

Yegjaktly!
All the Indian tiger(cubs!) were wannabe FEs at most - by the time the fancy caught on here and IIMs started turning towards finance noticably(note the heavy no. of students opting for Finance majors across all b-schools, just before the Kredit Katrina

hit our shores). But after the Bideshi Gir sanctuary was burned down in a raging forest fire started by American Arsonists, all these people have found that they have been left holding the bag in Bandipur - Gir is gone and suddenly the eye tee watering holes closer home at Bangalore are looking good once again.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 26 Feb 2009 20:27

The bad economic situation should be manna from heaven for the eye-eye-tees etc. to attract and keep the top10% into research both pure and applied. These unpredictable, temperamental types who would not fit in anywhere else in a regular 8-5 job pattern, in fields like IT, Banking and other assorted coolie activities will need to be harvested as quickly as possible. This will decide the future of India as a real superpower or only a soup-er-power wannabe. The hard work has to begin at the universities to create wealth, there is no other way for any upstart country.

shaardula · Post by **shaardula** » 26 Feb 2009 20:59

aha! aha!! bade saar. you are now talking about real value of dal and vegetable stuff. lot of people laffed their heads off when cnr rao et al., were wailing when the action shifted from the institute @ malleshwara to the otherside of ORR. this finance thing is simply action shifting from orr to vashi and beyond.

you appear to be the kind that is really worried about real problems. dont hold your breath. our edu minister and his cohorts are working on other more important issues. even as our primary edu is going to the proverbial dogs. these guys dont want to solve the real problem - vast disparity in primary education. but have all sorts of answers for higher education.

whatever.

derkonig · Post by **derkonig** » 26 Feb 2009 21:00

manish wrote:Although Lehman etc did hire from some of the other elite (non - IIM) campuses, it was almost exclusively for their Indian ops, which was apparently mostly back end i-banking stuff(whatever that means), equity research etc.

Back office in i-banks typically deals with software packages & fin data, mostly backend software work. Back office technically isn't i-banking, the real action is in the front office where you will typically see divisions like sales, trading, research & structuring apart from M&A.

manish · Post by **manish** » 27 Feb 2009 12:43

shaardula wrote:...
....
...
you appear to be the kind that is really worried about real problems. dont hold your breath. our edu minister and his cohorts are working on other more important issues. even as our primary edu is going to the proverbial dogs. these guys dont want to solve the real problem - vast disparity in primary education. but have all sorts of answers for higher education.
....
...

Saar, today's Hindu carries an article on Out of School children surveyed as part of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. The results for the Dakshina Kannada district are discussed:
http://www.hindu.com/2009/02/27/stories ... 610300.htm

Majority of out-of-school children are Muslims

Staff Correspondent
Drive to be launched to get children admitted to schools
MANGALORE: Over 46 per cent of the out-of-school children in the district are Muslims, according to the latest child census report compiled as part of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.

The report states that 149 children between six and 14 years are out of school in the district. Of them, 69 Muslim children — 31 girls and 38 boys — are out of school, including 44 who have not been admitted to any school so far.

This trend, if unchecked, will prove to be the final nail in the coffin for the 'Minorities in the Mainstream' dream. Most here would know that Mangalore/DK District, just like the neighboring Kerala, has had a very high(near 100%) literacy rate for quite some time.

I went out and searched for the full report to see the national average, and this is what I found:
http://164.100.51.121/research-studies/ ... l-children

The second part of the report for the year 2005 has this in page no. 4
http://164.100.51.121/ssadoc/Report_Part_2.pdf

It may also be noted that the proportion of out-of-school children was relatively higher in Muslim and ST households compared to other social groups. Among Muslims, the proportion of children who were out-of-school was 9.97% which translated to 2,253,252 children, whereas the proportion of out-of-school children in the ST category was 9.54% accounting for 1,656,978 children. The next highest proportion was for the SC category with 8.17% of the children (numbering 3,104,866) who were out-of-school. Among OBCs, 6.90% of the children accounting for 4,602,260 children were out-of-school. Among those who belonged to ‘other’ social groups (higher social class), only 3.73% of the children (numbering 1,848,378) were out-of-school.

Interesting to note that the disparity is the same nation-wide. But what is also interesting is the fact that other backward communities are almost on par with Muslims nationwide, unlike Mangalore, where it is heavily skewed. Even in a region that has historically considered education as a priority, this trend doesn't inspire much confidence. More a community stays out at the primary edu level, wider will be the social 'gap' between it and the others.

Also clear from the report above is the direct correlation between primary education enrollment and other social 'issues' - STs(heavy concentration in NE and the Naxal - affected regions of the country) and Muslims.

Any thoughts on this Shaardula-avare? How can the guvment make sure more of them enter the 'normal' schooling system? I am not too sure Arjun Singh's idea of pushing Madrassa edu by putting it on par with CBSE is going to make this situation any better.

Added later:
From the Hindu article...

According to the census figures, all the 44 Muslim children who have never been to a school are between seven and eight years of age.

The article states these are 'latest' figures, but I could not find any 'latest' reports newer than 2005 on the SSA site. If the figures really are from 2007-08, then I would say this is quite interesting to say the least - is it a mere coincidence or is something else showing itself through this?Acharya might be able to shed some light on it as well I guess...

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 27 Feb 2009 13:26

news from placement is that 1-cr+ type offers are in the low single digits in C/A/B/ISB. lateral hiring is steeply down (costs more).

people claim they are now looking for "role/environment/responsibility" (because the wild money is not there)

the 2nd tier places are going to have a really bad year or two. imho the
desi cos now getting a chance in the line should hire from these , people
more likely to stick around instead of decamping for finance sector abroad/insead etc when recovery happens or being too demanding on role/wages.

bideshi consulting cos are hiring. they need another set of people to clean up and restructure the mess which was created.

manish · Post by **manish** » 27 Feb 2009 13:42

Singha wrote:news from placement is that 1-cr+ type offers are in the low single digits in C/A/B/ISB. lateral hiring is steeply down (costs more).

people claim they are now looking for "role/environment/responsibility" (because the wild money is not there)

the 2nd tier places are going to have a really bad year or two. imho the
desi cos now getting a chance in the line should hire from these , people
more likely to stick around instead of decamping for finance sector abroad/insead etc when recovery happens or being too demanding on role/wages.

bideshi consulting cos are hiring. they need another set of people to clean up and restructure the mess which was created.

Yes Singha, the articles only mention in passing that salaries have taken a dip - the one crore+ salaries have always been a sort of a smoke screen. The batches of ~240-300 students at leading IIMs still had average salaries in the range of 14-20L p.a. even at the peak of the boom hinting that a significant number of people did take up salaries that were a fraction of those stratospheric figures that ToI loves to splash on its front page.

This year quite a lot of Desi IT firms withdrew/scaled down hiring from the No. 5 - 10 kind of b-schools because the IIMs which earlier slotted them on Day 3+ slots have started to invite them in Day 1 slots now.

Then there is the case of ISB - they are going to be in a spot of bother - they have 440 students to place in this batch and IIRC 560

in the next batch which was planned to be taken close to 1000 within the next couple of years (even Haavhud has ~900 IIRC!) - another case of ramping up too fast - those people have splurged around 18L for one year of edu at ISB, the RoI is going to suck!

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 27 Feb 2009 14:19

TOI claims avg salary is down by 8-15% this year. agreed about ISB and these are mostly all laterals with 4+ yrs of exp...not cheap to hire compared to FOB IIM cubs who moved there straight from UG colleges.

shaardula · Post by **shaardula** » 27 Feb 2009 19:15

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 27 Feb 2009 22:35

found on a blog.

The Corporate Boat Race

An American automobile company and a Japanese auto company
decided to have a competitive boat race on the Detroit River.
Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance.
On the big day, they were as ready as they could be.

The Japanese team won by a mile.

Afterwards, the American team became discouraged by the loss
and their morale sagged. Corporate management decided that the
reason for the crushing defeat had to be found. A Continuous Measurable
Improvement Team Of "Executives" was setup to investigate the
problem and to recommend appropriate corrective action.

Their conclusion: The problem was that the Japanese team had 8 people
rowing and 1 person steering, whereas the American team had 1 person
rowing and 8 people steering. The American Corporate Steering
Committee immediately hired a consulting firm to do a study on the
management structure.

After some time and billions of dollars, the consulting firm concluded
that "too many people were steering and not enough rowing". To
prevent losing to the Japanese again next year, the management
structure was changed to "4 Steering Managers, 3 Area Steering
Managers, and 1 Staff Steering Manager" and a new performance
system for the person rowing the boat to give more incentive to
work harder and become a six sigma performer. "We must give him
empowerment and enrichment." That ought to do it.

The next year, the Japanese team won by two miles.

The American Corporation laid off the rower for poor performance,
sold all of the paddles, cancelled all capital investments for new
equipment, halted development of a new canoe, awarded high
performance awards to the consulting firm, and distributed the
money saved as bonuses to the senior executives.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 27 Feb 2009 22:42

And someone here in BR was implicitly warning about salary cuts/ceiling for C-level deadwood would impact productivity. We have to hire all those guvermand's newly minted IIM becharas no ?

Vipul · Post by **Vipul** » 28 Feb 2009 01:30

Finance continues to rule in IIM Calcutta placements.

IIM Calcutta has wrapped up Phase 1 of its final placements process with a total of 207 offers being made to 265 students. This includes 56 pre-placement offers, lateral offers and students with multiple placement offers. Last year, the entire 290-strong batch had got placed in record four days. This time, those still remaining to be placed will participate in Phase 2 of the final placements, starting March 2.

An official statement released by IIM-C on Thursday said: “A noticeable change as compared to last time is the number of offers made (or accepted) per company. Many international firms affected by the downturn had reduced the number of offers made, while in quite a few instances, students rejected lucrative international offers to opt for more secure jobs in other firms in the same sector.

The expectations this time were not high after seeing the placements in other leading colleges across the country. But, in spite of all this, the results till now have exceeded expectations. Various new firms made their presence felt, making a large number of offers, both domestic and international.”

A total of 49 companies have visited IIM-C in the four days of Phase 1, while 25 companies came for recruitment during the lateral process. The campus saw participation from a large number of firms from various sectors.

Out of the 207 offers, 33 are for international locations with assignments in US, UK, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. India still remained the preferred destination for a majority of the students with a few PPOs getting rejected by students themselves due to the expected curb on H1B visas and location preferences.

Slot 0 saw 89 offers, including 50 Slot 0 PPOs and 39 Slot 0 final placement offers. Companies making the highest number of Slot 0 offers (PPOs and finals) are McKinsey, BCG, Frost and Sullivan, Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and Morgan Stanley. Firms such as Hindustan Unilever, Procter & Gamble, ITC and Nokia, too, participated in Slot 0.

“The current scenario called for extraordinary measures, and we braced up for it by effectively pitching with a larger pool of companies in varied sectors,” said external relations secretary Rohan Mahajan. The release claimed that the compensations offered by the companies have not fallen.

Firms offering a posting similar to those offered the previous year ensured that the remuneration was competitive and, in many cases, better than their previous offerings, it said. Finance still continues to rule the roost and over 45% of the students placed till now have opted for finance portfolios.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 28 Feb 2009 08:03

with a total of 207 offers being made to 265 students. This includes 56 pre-placement offers, lateral offers and students with multiple placement offers

the PPOs are for people who interned at the offering co in previous summer right? so => only 150 offers for 265 people incl lateral offers and multiple offers in first phase.

this is a unheard of bad scene in a premier iim in recent memory.

manish · Post by **manish** » 06 Mar 2009 11:00

So the IIM-A placement is finally over. Looks like they took a real beating this time compared to last time. Sucks to be graduating right now if you are not from IIM-A/B/C or ISB.
http://www.pagalguy.com/plugins/p2_news ... cleid=1779

IIM A placements finally end, average salary down 31 pc
By PaGaLGuY.com News Service
Published: March 5, 2009
In the midst of a sombre economy, the longest ever placements at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad ended on March 5 with a modest note.

The earlier stories about salaries being lower by 8-10% were just that - stories.

The average domestic salary was reported as Rs 12.17 lakh, a 31 percent reduction over last year's Rs 17.85.

There were several offers in this slot of more than Rs. 1 crore.” The statement was quick to add that the crore figures were international salaries converted to Indian rupees using the current exchange rate.

manish wrote:
Singha wrote:news from placement is that 1-cr+ type offers are in the low single digits in C/A/B/ISB. lateral hiring is steeply down (costs more).
......
Yes Singha, the articles only mention in passing that salaries have taken a dip - the one crore+ salaries have always been a sort of a smoke screen. The batches of ~240-300 students at leading IIMs still had average salaries in the range of 14-20L p.a. even at the peak of the boom hinting that a significant number of people did take up salaries that were a fraction of those stratospheric figures that ToI loves to splash on its front page.
...
...

So even after 'several' one crore+ bideshi offers, the average salary worked out to be just 12.17 lakh - compare this with last year, when they had a much higher average salary, even with a MUCH stronger Rupee than now. One look at the number of PSU offers this time will tell you that the bulk of the offers have probably been in the 4.5L-8L range, since that is the range of salaries most of the smaller PSU banks like UBI, BoB (24 offers between the two of them alone!) offer. BoB is known to offer far lower salaries in some of the non - IIM tier - II b-schools, so even this figure is optimistic at best.

Now, see the very last sentence of the report:

It may be noted that IIM Bangalore has in the last few days gone on record admitting that it is making the acceptance of PPOs compulsory for students in order to provide opportunities for everyone.

This one sums it up. I am not too sure the PSU banks are being very smart in hiring in droves from the A/B/C type campuses. In the short run it may seem very attractive with such talent being available at such low prices, but at the first signs of a slight upturn in the economy, these guys will quit and run away to their coveted 'high-finance' jobs and these banks will be left holding the bag.

Stan_Savljevic · Post by **Stan_Savljevic** » 06 Mar 2009 21:59

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/2 ... 504900.htm

Funds aplenty -- R. RAMACHANDRAN

The Science and Engineering Research Board, established through an Act of Parliament, can sanction projects valued up to Rs.75 crore.

IN December 2008, nearly four years after the Prime Minister’s Science Advisory Council (SAC-PM), India’s apex science advisory body, recommended the creation of an autonomous research-funding agency free from bureaucratic controls, on the lines of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States (Frontline, April 22, 2005), the Union government approved the establishment of the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) through an Act of Parliament.

The idea of a new research-funding mechanism was, in fact, mooted by a section of the Indian scientific community as far back as the mid-1980s and brought up every now and then at various forums. The Science and Technology Policy of 2003 (STP-2003) took specific note of this and stated that the issue would be examined. But this did not spur any debate among the wider community of scientists on the need for such a body. Indeed, given the experiences of the existing mechanism, called the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) under the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and of the extramural research (EMR) funding mechanisms in other departments, the need for such a body is far from clear. In its wisdom, however, the SAC-PM, chaired by C.N.R. Rao, felt that the idea needed to be pushed and, in March 2005, articulated the idea in a four-page “concept note”. This was submitted to the Prime Minister for consideration and has resulted in concrete action now.

A scientist who had managed the EMR funding in one of the departments pointed out: “EMR funding mechanisms such as the SERC were designed for, and at a period of, science and technology development in India when money was in short supply and young people willing to, and capable of doing, research were plentiful. In contrast, the demand-side situation for the past decade or so has been the opposite – relatively no shortage of money but an increasingly acute shortage of young people willing and able to do research. The institutional design has to fit the new opposite situation – how to leverage the demand side and not just keep increasing the supply, however well-managed or de-bureaucratised it may be. The SAC-PM proposal too fails on this count. We need a new model.”

While this fundamental criticism remains unaddressed, the relevant new Bill, called the SERB Bill 2008, was moved by Union Minister for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Kapil Sibal, and was passed, without any changes, by the Lok Sabha on December 11 and the Rajya Sabha on December 19 in 2008. The legislation is likely to come into force in the next financial year (2009-10) after its notification in the gazette, the constitution of the Board and the appointment of the associated functionaries.

“India’s relative position in basic research among nations,” notes the Act in its Statement of Object and Reasons (SOR), “has slowed down in recent times due to a variety of factors which require immediate attention.” A key reason, according to Sibal, is the bureaucratic procedures in the Ministry’s existing funding mechanism, which is subject to normal governmental financing procedures. Sanctions for many project proposals, he said while moving the SERB Bill, took as much as three years, thus defeating their very purpose. “The heart of the Bill,” the Minister said, “is to break away from these bureaucratic controls… and set up a funding mechanism which is autonomous and independent.”

For nearly 30 years, the SERC has been administering the DST’s EMR funding across disciplines. The SERB, an autonomous body that will be outside the Ministry and without the attendant bureaucratic financing procedures, will essentially replace this except for the component of Fund for Infrastructure Strengthening (FIST), which accounted for nearly 40 per cent of the SERC’s budget during the Tenth Plan. The current level of funding through the council is about Rs.415 crore (as per the 2008-09 Budget), which accounts for nearly half of all EMR funding in the country. In fact, the SERC’s funding and the EMR funding of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) together account for about 75 per cent of the total EMR funding.

“The department’s funding system has twin roles: the competitive project proposals part and the promotional part,” said T. Ramasami, DST Secretary. “We were getting overawed by the procedures and processes for the large number of the former resulting in the neglect of the latter. Essentially, the Board will take over project sanctions so that we can focus on promotion, which is critical for the university system,” he added. According to him, the number of transactions under the SERC in a year runs into several thousands and the DST simply lacks the staff strength to handle this volume. The aim and scope of the new Board is stated very clearly in Article 7(2)(ix) – “to take over and continue the basic research projects and programmes funded by the existing SERC scheme of the DST”.

For the SERB’s 2009-10 budget, Ramasami proposes to double the amount that was disbursed by the SERC for projects during 2008-09, which means the Board will have an initial budget of about Rs.600 crore for 2009-10. The SAC-PM had, on the other hand, recommended a higher annual budget of Rs.1,000 crore. “There should be an absorptive capacity for Rs.1,000 crore. Given the SERC’s experience, I don’t think there is,” Ramasami observed. “We will see how this amount is utilised, and if there is demand for more, the funding can be increased next year,” he added. This is also made clear by Article 9, which states: “The Central government may… in this behalf make to the Board grants and loans of such sums of money as the government may consider necessary.”

Significantly, the Board is vested with far greater financial powers than before by the de-bureaucratisation move. The Board can now, on its own, sanction projects valued up to Rs.75 crore, five times the present limit, though it is not clear why this limit was increased. Given that the average value of research projects funded by the SERC is under Rs.1 crore, and there has been no instance in which the project value exceeded the current limit, it is inconceivable that a project requiring this large a sum will ever come up.

Sibal asserted in the parliamentary debate that the new mechanism was “exactly on the lines of the NSF”. In so claiming, Sibal was not being entirely truthful. Indeed, the fact that it is not like the NSF is precisely why the prime movers of the concept seem to be unhappy about the Board’s approved structure. It is learnt that C.N.R. Rao and others from Bangalore have raised certain objections, in writing to the Ministry, over the Board structure.

The original structure envisaged by the SAC-PM was a replication of the NSF model, which is managed by a body of scientists. It recommended the establishment of a National Science and Engineering Research Foundation (NSERF), which would be “managed by a non-whole-time Board (National Science and Engineering Research Board) chaired by a scientist of repute, with its membership comprising leaders of Indian science and chosen representatives of S&T agencies and industry”. The SAC-PM Chairman had then remarked: “A foundation that manages its own accounts and is run by scientists is the only way to reverse the rapid decline in Indian science.”

Decline in Indian science is because of a variety of factors, and research funding is the least significant of them in the current context. This rationale of the SAC-PM for a new funding body, which Sibal has faithfully echoed, does not hold water. Notwithstanding this, the Board structure according to the new legislation is, indeed, drastically different from the SAC-PM’s recommendation that it should comprise only scientists. The approved SERB structure will have up to a maximum of 16 members and will include the Secretaries of the DST (who will also be the Board chairperson), the DBT, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), the Department of Health Research (DHR) and the Department of Expenditure in the Ministry of Finance (or his/her nominee), the Member-Secretary of the Planning Commission, and up to three members each to be appointed by the government from academic institutions, government research laboratories and other socio-economic sectors including industry. The Board, in consultation with the government, will also appoint an eminent scientist as its Secretary.

Besides, in a bid perhaps to appease the proponents of the NSF model, the Act provides for an “Oversight Committee of Experts (OCE)”consisting of scientists and academics “to advise and assist the Board”. It will have a “scientist of eminence and international repute” as its Chairperson and a maximum of nine members. The OCE, which will be constituted by the Board, will include, besides the DST Secretary, who will be the vice-chair, the Presidents of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), the Indian Academy of Sciences (IASc) and the Indian National Academy of Engineering; up to three distinguished experts in different areas of S&T; and the secretary of the Board. While, unlike the Board, the OCE will predominantly include practising scientists, it is only the Board that has the powers to take decisions.

It is not surprising, therefore, that there are objections to the Board’s present form and function. “It is a wonderful thing. Now we have a statutory body that can explore new modalities of funding. We have been talking about it for 25 years,” C.N.R. Rao said. “However, it is not properly constructed. Instead of this oversight committee with ex-officio members, there should be an advisory council managed only by scientists. We have suggested some changes and the Ministry has agreed to make these changes in the next [Parliament] session,” he added.

The note sent to the Ministry apparently raises the following demands: the term “Oversight Committee” should be changed to “Advisory Council”; the Council should be constituted not by the Board but by the government; and its constitution should not have ex-officio members (including academy heads) but only eminent scientists chosen by name by the government. While the first demand would seem to be facile and in the manner of quibbling, because the Act clearly says that the OCE would advise and assist the Board, the other two, sources in the DST say, are unlikely to be changed.

“The DST cannot simply give money to a body that cannot be made accountable and be a mere spectator. Autonomy does not mean no accountability,” said Ramasami. “If my department is giving money, I should be in control on how it is spent so that I am answerable to Parliament. That is why Secretary, DST, is the chair,” he added. “It all boils down to how and who is authorised to sanction expenditure,” pointed out a former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) official well versed in government financial procedures. Apparently, there exists a ruling of the Madhya Pradesh High Court of some time in the mid-1970s to the effect that “a delegated power cannot be further delegated, unless the power to delegate is itself delegated”. It is this ruling that apparently T. N. Seshan, then with ISRO, used to tweak the Department of Space’s financial rules to enable sequential delegation. “This could have been easily done with a stand-alone legislation and the issue of accountability could have been appropriately handled,” he said.

“The scientific community is not homogeneous,” pointed out a DST official. “There are camps and lobby groups and even sycophancy. After all, the Secretaries of the scientific departments are also scientists of calibre in their own right,” he added. Apparently, some scientists have pointed out that at least in the SERC there was a level playing field but in the SERB, funding might become vulnerable to the pressures from the Oversight Committee. “It would have been even worse if it had been left entirely to the scientists,” the official, who did not wish to be named, remarked.

Noted biologist M. Vijayan, however, preferred to reserve his comments on the SERB. “Its functioning is yet to be seen. Among the systems we have had so far, the SERC and its system of PAC [Project Advisory Committee] certainly worked reasonably well and achieved a healthy growth and spread of basic competitive research. Admittedly, its functioning could be improved; I am not sure whether we need an altogether new body,” he said. According to Ramasami, the SERB is also likely to adopt, at least in the near term, the well-honed project-scrutinising and approval mechanisms of the SERC.

According to Ramasami, in the originally drafted Bill the Board’s structure was somewhat more along the lines of the SAC-PM’s recommendations, but changes had to be made to include ex-officio members on the Law Ministry’s suggestion. The Minister, too, while replying to a Member’s charge in Parliament that the formation of the Board had taken a long time, stated that the Ministry had a Bill ready in 2006 itself but because of the objections raised by the Committee of Secretaries it had to be cast differently and presented again. In its final form, the SERB remains firmly under the DST’s charge, rather than with an independent body of scientists as the SAC-PM had proposed, but with more financial autonomy than the SERC.

The changes sought by the Committee of Secretaries, the Law Ministry and the Cabinet seem to have resulted in some glaring oddities in the Act. The noticeable minor error in the references to certain clauses in Article 3(5) suggests that two members – Secretary, DHR, and Secretary, Department of Expenditure – were added at the last moment to the composition of the Board but without much thought. It is reliably learnt that the inclusion was made on the Union Cabinet’s suggestion.

In his explanation of the present structure in Parliament, Sibal stated that since all departments had their own EMR funding mechanisms (which would continue to function even after the SERB becomes operative), the inclusion of departmental secretaries would ensure that there was no duplication of research projects and that there was coordination between SERC projects and those funded by the other departments. If so, one could ask why the Departments of Space (DoS), Atomic Energy (DAE) and Defence Research as well as the University Grants Commission are not represented in the Board. Similarly, while the DHR has been included in the Board, the National Academy of Medical Sciences is not represented in the OCE.

Surely, the Cabinet note on the Bill would have been circulated to all these departments as well. It would seem that the three did not want any part of the SERB money, since money is not a constraining factor in conducting basic research in space, atomic energy and defence. The omission of the UGC is particularly glaring when the SAC-PM had observed that the new mechanism “would provide a dramatic boost to science in the vast Indian university system, which will be a key to future progress in science and technology”. It is clear what importance the Finance Ministry gives to this entire exercise from the decision to have a representative from the expenditure department. Its nominee is likely to be a junior joint secretary. An interesting provision in the legislation is Article 3(4), which is somewhat unusual. It states that the head office of the Board shall be in Delhi or in the National Capital Region.

This is clearly in view of the SAC-PM’s recommendation in its 2005 note: “Following the model of the DAE and the DoS, the main offices of the NSERF can be located at a suitable place in India.” Observers in the scientific community had, however, perceived this recommendation as a bid to locate the agency in Bangalore.

Article 16, however, is the provision that defines the extent of autonomy that the Board can enjoy – a “killer” provision, if one may say, to the total independence and autonomy that the SAC-PM desired. It says:

(1) … the Board shall, in the discharge of its functions and duties under this Act, be bound by such directions on questions of policy as the Central government may give in writing to it from time to time; provided that the Board shall, as far as practicable, be given an opportunity to express its view before any direction is given….

(2) The decision of the Central government, whether a question is one of policy or not, shall be final.

Stan_Savljevic · Post by **Stan_Savljevic** » 06 Mar 2009 22:03

Education drive --- RAJESH AHUJA

The Haryana government’s education city coming up near Sonipat will be a hub for higher learning and research in cutting-edge technologies.
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/2 ... 510300.htm

Will India get the $1-billion university?
http://us.rediff.com/money/2009/mar/06f ... ersity.htm

Stan_Savljevic · Post by **Stan_Savljevic** » 10 Mar 2009 01:02

Higher-Education Reform Panel in India Says Universities Need More Autonomy
http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id= ... _medium=en

New Delhi — A high-level committee set up to reform the regulation of India’s heavily bureaucratic higher-education system said in its final report that universities should be self-regulatory bodies, The Times of India reported today.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 10 Mar 2009 07:06

Got a mail reading:

Prof. Krishnamurthy Sastrigal, Retired Principal of Madras Sanskrit College, a scholar Par excellence in various sastras and a man of untiring zeal for Sanskrit was conferred the title of Mahamahopadhyaya by the Rashtriya Sanskrit University, Tirupathi on28/01/2009.

Born into a traditional scholarly family in 1944 at Mullaivasal, Tanjore District of Tamilnadu, Dr.Krishnamurthy Sastrigal, a renowned Vedic scholar and Vedantin, learnt Krishna Yajurveda under his father Sri Rajagopala Ganapatigal in the age old tradition of Gurukula.

In addition to it, Dr.Sastrigal has proved his academic mettle by acquiring and standing first in various degrees in reputed Sanskrit Institutions like Veda Bhashya Ratnam of Kanchi Mutt, Vedanta Siromani of Madras Sanskrit College, Meemamsa Siromani of University of Madras, Veda Bhashya Vidwan,Vedanta Vidwan and Mimamsa Vidwan of the T.T.D. to name a few. He received his Ph.D. degree in Advaitha Vedanta from University of Madras. Dr.Sastrigal has been teaching sanskrit in various institutions and retired as the Principal of the famous Madras Sanskrit College in 2004.

Mahamahopadhyaya

Dr.Sastrigal’s scholarship and erudition has been widely and consistently recognised over the last 40 years. He continues to actively preside over vidwat sabhas at various Sanskrit conferences and seminars. He has also published books , monographs and research papers.

For his distinctive scholarship, Dr. Krishnamurthy Sastrigal has been honoured by awards like

1.’Vedanta Visarada’ by H.H.Sri Shankaracharya of Sringeri Sharada Peetam

2.’Veda Sastra Parangata ‘ by Samskritha Sahithya Parishad of Trichy

3.’Advaita Siddhi Ratnakara’ by Sudharma Rakshana Parishad, Tenali

4.’Veda bhashya Rathnakara’ by Ahobila Jeer Swami and others.

On the occasion of the conferring of the title of ‘Mahamahopadhyaya” on Dr.R.Krishnamurthi Sastrigal, I offer my humble pranams to this great scholar

vina · Post by **vina** » 10 Mar 2009 09:47

Cross posting..
Yaawnn.. For smart aleck Fyzzicists like Bade Saar and other stat /math/ science types. Atleast now folks know whom to throw mud at. It is not the Milan & Sangam and boor YumBeeYeas, but the Fyzzicists and Science types.

The New York Times
March 10, 2009
They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Emanuel Derman expected to feel a letdown when he left particle physics for a job on Wall Street in 1985.

After all, for almost 20 years, as a graduate student at Columbia and a postdoctoral fellow at institutions like Oxford and the University of Colorado, he had been a spear carrier in the quest to unify the forces of nature and establish the elusive and Einsteinian “theory of everything,” hobnobbing with Nobel laureates and other distinguished thinkers. How could managing money compare?

But the letdown never happened. Instead he fell in love with a corner of finance that dealt with stock options.

“Options theory is kind of deep in some way. It was very elegant; it had the quality of physics,” Dr. Derman explained recently with a tinge of wistfulness, sitting in his office at Columbia, where he is now a professor of finance and a risk management consultant with Prisma Capital Partners.

Dr. Derman, who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs and became managing director, was a forerunner of the many physicists and other scientists who have flooded Wall Street in recent years, moving from a world in which a discrepancy of a few percentage points in a measurement can mean a Nobel Prize or unending mockery to a world in which a few percent one way can land you in jail and a few percent the other way can win you your own private Caribbean island.

They are known as “quants” because they do quantitative finance. Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money.

This flood seems to be continuing, unabated by the ongoing economic collapse in this country and abroad. Last fall students filled a giant classroom at M.I.T. to overflowing for an evening workshop called “So You Want to Be a Quant.” Some quants analyze the stock market. Others churn out the computer models that analyze otherwise unmeasurable risks and profits of arcane deals, or run their own hedge funds and sift through vast universes of data for the slight disparities that can give them an edge.

Still others have opened an academic front, using complexity theory or artificial intelligence to better understand the behavior of humans in markets. In December the physics Web site arXiv.org, where physicists post their papers, added a section for papers on finance. Submissions on subjects like “the superstatistics of labor productivity” and “stochastic volatility models” have been streaming in.

Quants occupy a revealing niche in modern capitalism. They make a lot of money but not as much as the traders who tease them and treat them like geeks (that part is very true). Until recently they rarely made partner at places like Goldman Sachs. In some quarters they get blamed for the current breakdown — “All I can say is, beware of geeks bearing formulas,” Warren Buffett said on “The Charlie Rose Show” last fall. Even the quants tend to agree that what they do is not quite science.

As Dr. Derman put it in his book “My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance,” “In physics there may one day be a Theory of Everything; in finance and the social sciences, you’re lucky if there is a useable theory of anything.”

Asked to compare her work to physics, one quant, who requested anonymity because her company had not given her permission to talk to reporters, termed the market “a wild beast” that cannot be controlled, and then added: “It’s not like building a bridge. If you’re right more than half the time you’re winning the game.” There are a thousand physicists on Wall Street, she estimated, and many, she said, talk nostalgically about science. “They sold their souls to the devil,” she said, adding, “I haven’t met many quants who said they were in finance because they were in love with finance.”

The Physics of Money

Physicists began to follow the jobs from academia to Wall Street in the late 1970s, when the post-Sputnik boom in science spending had tapered off and the college teaching ranks had been filled with graduates from the 1960s. The result, as Dr. Derman said, was a pipeline with no jobs at the end. Things got even worse after the cold war ended and Congress canceled the Superconducting Supercollider, which would have been the world’s biggest particle accelerator, in 1993.

They arrived on Wall Street in the midst of a financial revolution. Among other things, galloping inflation had made finances more complicated and risky, and it required increasingly sophisticated mathematical expertise to parse even simple investments like bonds. Enter the quant.

“Bonds have a price and a stream of payments — a lot of numbers,” said Dr. Derman, whose first job was to write a computer program to calculate the prices of bond options. The first time he tried to show it off, the screen froze, but his boss was fascinated anyway by the graphical user interface, a novelty on Wall Street at the time.

Stock options, however, were where this revolution was to have its greatest, and paradigmatic, success. In the 1970s the late Fischer Black of Goldman Sachs, Myron S. Scholes of Stanford and Robert C. Merton of Harvard had figured out how to price and hedge these options in a way that seemed to guarantee profits. The so-called Black-Scholes model has been the quants’ gold standard ever since.
(the Black Scholes has a whole list of assumptions behind it, that would make even a JNU /DSE/ISI ding dong blush)
In the old days, Dr. Derman explained, if you thought a stock was going to go up, an option was a good deal. But with Black-Scholes, it doesn’t matter where the stock is going. Assuming that the price of the stock fluctuates randomly from day to day, the model provides a prescription for you to still win by buying and selling the underlying stock and its bonds.

“If you’re a trading desk,” Dr. Derman explained, “you don’t care if it goes up or down; you still have a recipe.”

The Black-Scholes equation resembles the kinds of differential equations physicists use to represent heat diffusion and other random processes in nature. Except, instead of molecules or atoms bouncing around randomly, it is the price of the underlying stock. (I had already slammed this rubbish in BR. Of course it will resemble the heat equation idiots, because you assumed at a molecular level that stock prices have exactly the same properties as Brownian motion, which is the mathematical model for heat )

The price of a stock option, Dr. Derman explained, can be interpreted as a prediction by the market about how much bounce, or volatility, stock prices will have in the future.

But it gets more complicated than that. For example, markets are not perfectly efficient — prices do not always adjust to right level and people are not perfectly rational. Indeed, Dr. Derman said, the idea of a “right level” is “a bit of a fiction.” As a result, prices do not fluctuate according to Brownian motion. Rather, he said: “Markets tend to drift upward or cascade down. You get slow rises and dramatic falls.” (ah, after trillions of losses, Fyzzicists realize this , not much diff between ISI/JNU ding dongs and Ivy league Fyzzicists aye ?)

One consequence of this is something called the “volatility smile,” in which options that benefit from market drops cost more than options that benefit from market rises.

Another consequence is that when you need financial models the most — on days like Black Monday in 1987 when the Dow dropped 20 percent — they might break down . The risks of relying on simple models are heightened by investors’ desire to increase their leverage by playing with borrowed money. In that case one bad bet can doom a hedge fund. Dr. Merton and Dr. Scholes won the Nobel in economic science in 1997 for the stock options model. Only a year later Long Term Capital Management, a highly leveraged hedge fund whose directors included the two Nobelists, collapsed and had to be bailed out to the tune of $3.65 billion by a group of banks.

Afterward, a Merrill Lynch memorandum noted that the financial models “may provide a greater sense of security than warranted; therefore reliance on these models should be limited.”

That was a lesson apparently not learned.

Respect for Nerds

Given the state of the world, you might ask whether quants have any idea at all what they are doing.

Comparing quants to the scientists who had built the atomic bomb and therefore had a duty to warn the world of its dangers, a group of Wall Streeters and academics, led by Mike Brown, a former chairman of Nasdaq and chief financial officer of Microsoft, published a critique of modern finance on the Web site Edge.org last fall calling on scientists to reinvent economics. (most of 'em two left legged critters cant find their asses with their two hands beyond their narrow fields of expertise. Talk about "reinventing" anything !)

Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, who was one of the authors, said, “What is amazing to me as I learn about this is how flimsy was the theoretical basis of the claims that derivatives and other complex financial instruments reduced risk, when their use in fact brought on instabilities.”

But it is not so easy to get new ideas into the economic literature, many quants complain. J. Doyne Farmer, a physicist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the founder and former chief scientist of the Prediction Company, said he was shocked when he started reading finance literature at how backward it was, comparing it to Middle-Ages theories of fire. “They were talking about phlogiston — not the right metaphor,” Dr. Farmer said.

One of the most outspoken critics is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former trader and now a professor at New York University. He got a rock-star reception at the World Economic Forum in Davos this winter. In his best-selling book “The Black Swan” (Random House, 2007), Dr. Taleb, who made a fortune trading currency on Black Monday, argues that finance and history are dominated by rare and unpredictable events.

“Every trader will tell you that every risk manager is a fraud,” he said, and options traders used to get along fine before Black-Scholes. “We never had any respect for nerds.”

Dr. Taleb has waged war against one element of modern economics in particular: the assumption that price fluctuations follow the familiar bell curve that describes, say, IQ scores or heights in a population, with a mean change and increasingly rare chances of larger or smaller ones, according to so-called Gaussian statistics named for the German mathematician Friedrich Gauss. (oops.. dont tell that to the social "sciences" monkeys in JNU , ISI and other ding dong places, you could get lynched)

But many systems in nature, and finance, appear to be better described by the fractal statistics popularized by Benoit Mandelbrot of IBM, which look the same at every scale. An example is the 80-20 rule that 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work, or have 80 percent of the money. Within the blessed 20 percent the same rule applies, and so on. As a result the odds of game-changing outliers like Bill Gates’s fortune or a Black Monday are actually much greater than the quant models predict, rendering quants useless or even dangerous, Dr. Taleb said.

“I think physicists should go back to the physics department and leave Wall Street alone,” he said. . Perfect

When Dr. Taleb asked someone to come up and debate him at a meeting of risk managers in Boston not too long ago, all he got was silence. Recalling the moment, Dr. Taleb grumbled, “Nobody will argue with me.”

Dr. Derman, who likes to say it is the models that are simple, not the world, maintains they can be a useful guide to thinking as long as you do not confuse them with real science — an approach Dr. Taleb scorned as “schizophrenic.”

Dr. Derman said, “Nobody ever took these models as playing chess with God.”

Do some people take the models too seriously? “Not the smart people,” he said. (the lyin sonofabitch . In India , "experts"/ statisticicans, "economists" and other charlatans sold the modeling rubbish for 40 years and ruined everyone's happiness. And oh, they did play god with the command economy rubbish)

Quants say that they should not be blamed for the actions of traders. They say they have been in the forefront of pointing out the models’ shortcomings.

“I regard quants to be the good guys,” said Eric R. Weinstein, a mathematical physicist (oh, yeah. being so objective aren't we , when we cover the ass*s of our own kind)who helps run the Natron Group, a hedge fund in Manhattan. “We did try to warn people,” he said. “This is a crisis caused by business decisions. This isn’t the result of pointy-headed guys from fancy schools who didn’t understand volatility or correlation.” (of course it was you lyin sack sh*t)

Nigel Goldenfeld, a physics professor at the University of Illinois and founder of NumeriX, which sells investment software, compared the financial meltdown to the Challenger space shuttle explosion, saying it was a failure of management and communication. (now that is seriously friggin funny and fundamentally retarded)

Prisoners of Wall Street

By their activities, quants admit that despite their misgivings they have at least given cover to some of the wilder schemes of their bosses, allowing traders to conduct business in a quasi-scientific language and take risks they did not understand.

Dr. Goldenfeld of Illinois said that when he posted scholarly articles, some of which were critical of financial models, on his company’s Web site, salespeople told him to take them down. The argument, he explained, was that “it made our company look bad to be associating with Jeremiahs saying that the models were all wrong.”

Dr. Goldenfeld took them down. In business, he explained, unlike in science, the customers are always right.

Quants, in short, are part of the system. “They get paid, a Faustian bargain everybody makes,” said Satyajit Das, a former trader and financial consultant in Australia, who likes to refer to them as “prisoners of Wall Street.”

“What do we use models for?” Mr. Das asked rhetorically. “Making money,” he answered. “That’s not what science is about.”

The recent debacle has only increased the hunger for scientists on Wall Street, according to Andrew Lo, an M.I.T. professor of financial engineering who organized the workshop there, with a panel of veteran quants.

The problem is not that there are too many physicists on Wall Street, he said, but that there are not enough . A graduate, he told the young recruits, can make $75,000 to $250,000 a year as a quant but can also be fired if things go sour. He said an investment banker had told him that Wall Street was not looking for Ph.D.’s, but what he called “P.S.D.s — poor, smart and a deep desire to get rich.”

He ended his presentation with a joke that has been told around M.I.T. for a long time, but seemed newly relevant; “What do you call a nerd in 10 years? Boss.”

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of Satyajit Das.

Sachin · Post by **Sachin** » 10 Mar 2009 10:18

manish wrote:This trend, if unchecked, will prove to be the final nail in the coffin for the 'Minorities in the Mainstream' dream. Most here would know that Mangalore/DK District, just like the neighboring Kerala, has had a very high(near 100%) literacy rate for quite some time.

Just to add.. in Kerala based on the infamous Sachar Committee report, a "Paloli Mohammed Kutty" commission was formed, and here are two of its recommendations.
1. Madrassah teachers with 10 years service would get a monthly pension of INR 4,000/-. As far as I know, they are not state govt. employees.
2. Amount worth crores have also been ear-marked to be given as scholarships for Muslim students.

All this when the average Mallu (Hindu/X-ian) is spending is hard earned money to get his kids some quality education and then send him/her outside the state to get some decent paying job

.

Sriman · Post by **Sriman** » 11 Mar 2009 03:19

X Posting from Nukkad:

suvod wrote:Interesting discussion this - IIMs vs the Ivy Leagues. I did quite a bit of research on both the options before settling on a 3rd, i.e. the ISB. If you ask me, I'll rank the top-rung US/Eur Bschools over the IIMs any day. And there are multiple reasons for that.

1. The peer group - an MBA is not just about books and the faculty. A major part of it is peer-learning. The avg age and workex at the IIMs does not fare well compared to any US/Eur top B-School. If you see in the US, you just can't get into a top school if the only thing that you bring to the table is your excellent acads. This adds significant value to the MBA.

2. Diversity - with excessive stress on CAT and Quant, IIMs are encouraging a particular stereotype and ignoring a lot of diverse talent. A manager/business leader will need a lot of skills other than just superior quant abilities. If you ask me, a particular coaching institute boasting of 900 IIM calls does not bode well for the CAT. CAT is also going the Kota-JEE way.

3. Focus - placements, and not mgmt research, is the primary focus in all Indian B-Schools, not just the IIMs. Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago have become what they are, not by placing their grads but by producing new ideas in management. Don't measure performance by how exchange students do. Search for IIM alumni who have been accepted as faculty in any top intl B-School. Rare, to say the least.

The IIMs enjoy tremendous brand value in India. And there are valid reasons for that. They truly are centers of excellence in an Indian context. But to compare them with Ivy Leagues is stretching it too far, IMHO.

@dmurphy: Thanks and yes, the ISB expects an avg workex of 5/6 years, but you can apply if you have a minimum of 2. And you guessed correct, got in through GMAT.

rgds
Suv

negi wrote:Why should every Indian bastion of excellence be compared with a elite institute in massa in terms of the selection process ? And if GMAT or CAT scores are the only true performance markers then ISB receives better students than most of the schools in IVY league (at least the average GMAT scores in 2008-09 point towards the same).

So the claim that Indian institutes are obsessed with 99.9 percentile rankers is imo misplaced and infact does not factor in the prevailing education and employment scenario in desh.

suvod wrote:Negi,

The only reason is that for Indian industry to be world-beaters, we need a world-class mgmt cadre. Leaders who can take the goras on and beat them at their own game. It is natural to benchmark the institutes that are supposed to produce these leaders, against the top-rung schools in massa/eur. The selection procedure plays a significant role in the quality of grads the colleges produce. Right now, the overemphasis on quant scores (cat or gmat) is not helping our schools.

Don't go by gmat scores alone, while comparing student quality. For example, how will you compare between me, with my 710 gmat and 7 years IT exp with an Army captain with a 660 gmat and 5 years frontline exp at the LOC? It demands a more holistic approach to selection and admission. For our batch at the ISB, the avg gmat score will be close to 730, which may be one of the highest in the world, but still, ISB can't compare with a Wharton or a Harvard. At least ISB has a holistic admissions process which factors in work ex and other parameters. For the IIMs, its just acads, acads and more acads. But mgmt is not just abt crunching numbers.

rgds
Suv

negi wrote:Why should every Indian bastion of excellence be compared with a elite institute in massa in terms of the selection process ? And if GMAT or CAT scores are the only true performance markers then ISB receives better students then most of the schools in IVY league (at least the average GMAT scores in 2008-09 point towards the same).

So the claim that Indian institutes are obsessed with 99.9 percentile rankers is imo misplaced and infact does not factor in the prevailing education and employment scenario in desh.

derkonig wrote:
suvod wrote:Interesting discussion this....
Each of these criteria involves tradeoffs:
1. Peer group: Well when you have India's finest studying around you, what more can you expect? Having ppl. with work ex. is good, the trend at the IIMs is certainly towards higher workex these days. Check out the profile data that IIMB has put out. Btw, yes, the RTI case made IIMB open up its selection criteria info. Besides, peer learning can happen at any age & more importantly, given that for most ppl. the first exposure to most subjects happens for the first time when they take up those course, it really does not matter, what & how much of work ex you bring with you. Most importantly, cos. often display a slight preference towards freshers/low-work junta during placements.

2. Diversity: Reservations are the Indian version of the amirkhan diversity programmes. Diversity vs. merit is a tradeoff. Sorry to say this but often phoren universitites tend to emphasize their commitment to maintaining & encouraging a 'diversity-rich' class when they put up their roadshows in India. That is not a good sign.

3. Focus: We being SDREs are often a bit lax when it comes to hogging the limelight than the more TFTA MBAs. Further, massa B schools are often ~100 yrs. old & no IIM can match that. As the IIM alum reach further up the corporate ladder, things will get better. & FYI, most of the new faculty at the top dawg IIMs have had teaching exposure at TFTA b-schools in khanland.

The 'SDREhood'ness for the IIMs is nearly over, its a matter of time before the world has turns topsy turvy.

derkonig wrote:
suvod wrote:Don't go by gmat scores alone, while comparing student quality. For example, how will you compare between me, with my 710 gmat and 7 years IT exp with an Army captain with a 660 gmat and 5 years frontline exp at the LOC? It demands a more holistic approach to selection and admission. For our batch at the ISB, the avg gmat score will be close to 730, which may be one of the highest in the world, but still, ISB can't compare with a Wharton or a Harvard. At least ISB has a holistic admissions process which factors in work ex and other parameters. For the IIMs, its just acads, acads and more acads. But mgmt is not just abt crunching numbers.
There exists no method till date which can measure 'absolute merit' accurately, so it is always some proxy for merit that gets used. IIM selections certainly are not based on acads alone, though the calls for the selection process are greatly influenced by past acad performance. The idea is to take in candidates who have performed exceptionally well in the past & train them over 2 years, so that when they go out, they can demonstrate their exceptional performance again & in many more fields than before.

That apart, I would like to ask you, how would you compare a 1yr. exec MBA@ISB with the 2yr. PGP@IIMs when it comes to the amount of knowledge that one acquires from the course? Don't you think that given the vast range of subjects that one learns during the MBA, it certainly helps to give some more time to these subjects that just rush through them over a series of month-long terms?

The fact that ISB may not be right up there with the Ivy League is mainly due to the fact that the ISB is barely a decade old. The Ivy League have built up their 'repute' over a period of time, they were not born that way. Same will be case with ISB.

IIMs, these days, do get a lot of candidates who left ISB & even ivy league for the IIMs. The reverse is barely ever to be found. And there are also lots of ppl. who gave the CAT several times, but could not make it to the IIMs & ultimately went to ISB. Don't get me wrong, but IMHO, the IIM's selection process is no better or worse than the Ivy League or any top b-school in the world.

Raja Bose wrote:derkonig,

Re. your comment that IIM-B is transparent. The question is not about transparency but the criteria they are using to select admissions. You are talking about people who are consistent.....the groundbreaking stuff in this world is not done by people who are consistent. In fact, in the education thread, I once posted re. how exam-taking and good grades are very poor indicators of research ability and the ability to think independently. In school, my classmates from just my section made up close to 30% of top-20 JEE ranks, about 50% of AIIMs admissions. Some of them were consistent (using the criteria that they did well throughout their schooling), some were not. However, now that we have all graduated...guess who are the ones doing the real cutting-edge stuff. They are the ones who were never toppers (they were fair/good students) but had the ability to innovate and think outside-the-box (or bun!) - some of them never even went to IITs/AIIMS/IIMs.

Considering the fact that IIMs are the premier institutes of management for a billion people, their agenda can hardly be to just churn out good managers (hence, my earlier reference to Macaulay). They need to turn out management leaders, people who think out-of-the-box and who invent new concepts....I dont think your class 12th and 10th results will give you that. As some posters here have indicated, it is not all about management placements, it is also about management research. if you look at the IITs, this is the exact same area they have failed miserably. Comparing with massa is not always a good thing since the environments (work/culture/etc.) are so different between India and massa. But do also recognize the fact that in massa, ingenuity of thought and lack of adherence to convention is given its due. Any top school gives a lot of preference to people who have done their own exploratory projects and independent work even if their GPA is not 4.0 because it shows a desire to learn beyond the classroom and the ability to challenge and think for oneself! These indicators cannot be reliably estimated through your GPA or marksheets. Does your class 12 marksheet provide any indication re. your management ability or your ability to innovate or to lead? I don't think so....it only provides an indication of how good you are at studying what others have discovered. Hence, using that as a criteria required for admission just shows a very blinkered approach where grades are God and everything else comes later.

Also notice that B-schools in massa which are worth their salt (Stan/MIT/CMU/whatever) require a decent amount of work-ex, whereas IIMs continue to take in folks who have just completed their BTech. Why is that? If you are studying MBA, you aspire to manage....if you have never held a proper job for a requisite number of years and do not have the experience of coming up the ranks of the ones you now aspire to manage, how will you effectively manage them?!

derkonig · Post by **derkonig** » 11 Mar 2009 03:59

the groundbreaking stuff in this world is not done by people who are consistent. In fact, in the education thread, I once posted re. how exam-taking and good grades are very poor indicators of research ability and the ability to think independently. In school, my classmates from just my section made up close to 30% of top-20 JEE ranks, about 50% of AIIMs admissions. Some of them were consistent (using the criteria that they did well throughout their schooling), some were not. However, now that we have all graduated...guess who are the ones doing the real cutting-edge stuff. They are the ones who were never toppers (they were fair/good students) but had the ability to innovate and think outside-the-box (or bun!) - some of them never even went to IITs/AIIMS/IIMs.

But does that mean that those who did not go to a top institute are not doing well? Mavericks are everywhere, but they are the exception, not the norm. I'm sure that most of us would agree that these top institutes have a great reputation & that is mainly because they have produced great alumni. Just because somebody who didn't go these places but still does well, does not in anyway, negate the achievements of these top schools.

I don't think so....it only provides an indication of how good you are at studying what others have discovered. Hence, using that as a criteria required for admission just shows a very blinkered approach where grades are God and everything else comes later.

This is a misconception. Firstly,IIM selections are not a pure acad based game. Do check out the student profiles that the IIMs publish, they have adequate 'diversity'. Besides, this trend of hyping 'diversity' in classrooms is rather dangerous. 'Diversity' is no magic formula that can give you a concrete assurance that the school or its alumni will do relatively better than the supposedly acad-performance-fanatic IIMs.

They need to turn out management leaders, people who think out-of-the-box and who invent new concepts....

What exactly is a new concept? One that gets mentioned in the McKinsey Quarterly, Hahvaad Biz Review? One that leads to paper publications? One, on which cases get written & those which get discussed threadbare in classes? As I have said, IIM MBAs are no less ingenous than the MBAs from the top b-schools worldwide when it comes to 'innovations'.

Also notice that B-schools in massa which are worth their salt (Stan/MIT/CMU/whatever) require a decent amount of work-ex, whereas IIMs continue to take in folks who have just completed their BTech. Why is that? If you are studying MBA, you aspire to manage....if you have never held a proper job for a requisite number of years and do not have the experience of coming up the ranks of the ones you now aspire to manage, how will you effectively manage them?!

I have a fair amount of work ex myself, but let me tell you that, work ex is no assurance towards a better performance during or after the MBA. IIMs may have followed a policy of catch-em-young, but what makes you think that people with higher work ex will certainly do better than the freshers? Given the fact that most people have never been exposed to the subjects, that they learn during their MBA, before joining the MBA, it pretty much puts all students at the same level.
Besides, would you like to join a class where half the class pretty much already knows all that one has to learn during the MBA, especially if you don't? Such lopsided classes are not fair.

As for leading people, well, IMHO, age & work ex alone cannot assure better leadership. If that was the case, the IIM grads would have never ever become managers & lead people, while the Ivy Leagues & 'diversity' rich schools would have churned out ready-to-lead-5000000000000-people-400%-onlee-from-Day1 kind of grads.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 11 Mar 2009 05:20

derkonig,

My issue is that IIM-B is using class 10th/12th marksheets to form an opinion on someone's ability period. Unfortunately a class 10th/12th marksheet is not a reliable indicator of any ability in context of MBA or higher studies/research. So using it does not help the process but might hinder the process (false positives or negatives).

Re. work-ex you are looking at it from a purely academic point of view. It is not a question of whether a person with work-ex is familiar/knowledgable about the subjects he will learn in MBA or not. If he knew everything he would not do an MBA! Performance is not how well he scores in his MBA courses. It is how well he performs when he leaves. It is indeed a question of maturity. If you have never worked and have no/little experience in the work environment....how effective will you be if you are thrust straight to a management role?? It is like training someone who has no algebra knowledge to be a cryptographer or awarding a PhD to someone who has 0/1 year of research experience. In fact, the most trouble, in my experience, comes from newly minted MBAs who have no work-ex (a sight quite common in India) - these guys are the ones who have the rank but none of the experience, leading to swollen headed delusions of one's abilities and no maturity/experience to fall back on. Everything cant be taught in classrooms and during 3 month internships.

derkonig wrote: But does that mean that those who did not go to a top institute are not doing well? Mavericks are everywhere, but they are the exception, not the norm. I'm sure that most of us would agree that these top institutes have a great reputation & that is mainly because they have produced great alumni.

What in your opinion is great alumni? You are using the placements to define greatness. I define it based on the impact one's work has. If one is to go by statements brought out by IIM, the criteria solely seems to be how many crores one earns! Do remember that earning crores doesn't imply that the person is engaged in something great and his work has greater impact! In recent memory, Amazon was offering $115K+$40K sign-in or so for new college grads for a database programming position whereas MSFT was offering $100K+no sign-in for working on one of their top incubation teams....which position has greater impact?

Personally I think ISB is going in a better direction and will prove its worth in a decade or so.

This is a misconception. Firstly,IIM selections are not a pure acad based game. Do check out the student profiles that the IIMs publish, they have adequate 'diversity'. Besides, this trend of hyping 'diversity' in classrooms is rather dangerous. 'Diversity' is no magic formula that can give you a concrete assurance that the school or its alumni will do relatively better than the supposedly acad-performance-fanatic IIMs.

Diversity is not an issue. The issue is using subjective criteria like class 10th/12th grades which are unreliable estimators for any of the abilities one desires in a successful MBA. When criteria like these grades are not reliable estimators even in determining qualities required for academic research how do you expect them to be reliable for more non-academic qualities such as those required in management?? Why have such criteria in the first place....exactly whom are the admissions committee trying to filter out on basis of such unreliable critera??

As for leading people, well, IMHO, age & work ex alone cannot assure better leadership. If that was the case, the IIM grads would have never ever become managers & lead people, while the Ivy Leagues & 'diversity' rich schools would have churned out ready-to-lead-5000000000000-people-400%-onlee-from-Day1 kind of grads.

You are confusing managers with leaders....given the recent commotion in Army thread over this, I will leave it at that.

negi · Post by **negi** » 11 Mar 2009 06:10

Raja Bose.. chillax bro, do not read too much into the 10th and 12th grade marksheet thingy.

1. The ratio of applicants to the number of seats is pretty high in Desh as compared to the best in the world infact may be 5x or more.

2. CAT as an exam fwiw is any given day more rigorous,exhaustive and unpredictable when compared to the GMAT or any equivalent exam in the world

3. Extra curriculars , work ex , GD and interview are given due weightage.

10th and 12th class marksheets are just for gauging one's consistency in academics ; a consistent record in academics might not guarantee a more appropriate selection but it certainly does tell a lot about one's diligence and hard work .

We have this tendency to be jingoistic and talk about true child prodigies , fundoos who are good at playing soccer as well as with numbers college drop outs and people without degrees who have made it big; and seriously kudos to em.But there is a breed out there which although not as gifted as some of the above do put their head down and burn the midnight oil and trust me there are plenty of examples of latter who too have made a mark for themselves.

As for the work experience, the scene is improving in India 5 years back the number of people with decent work ex pursuing an MBA in India was negligible as compared to what it is today , even the % of experienced people making it to the IIM's have increased ; yes it is no way close to the IVY league or even the top 20 in massa ,but we should understand that the education system in India cannot be appreciated in isolation from the corporate scene in India
unless the latter grows up the value chain and attains massa like prominence the B schools in India would not attract similar candidates as the IVy league.

vsudhir · Post by **vsudhir** » 11 Mar 2009 07:25

suvod,

How are placements like at the isb? 100% placement in 1 week types or longer drawn out? whats the batch size?

Whats the student body like? 100% desi or mix of phoreners, PIOs etc also?

Inquiring minds wanna know...

Rishi · Post by **Rishi** » 11 Mar 2009 07:53

vsudhir wrote:suvod,

How are placements like at the isb? 100% placement in 1 week types or longer drawn out? whats the batch size?

Whats the student body like? 100% desi or mix of phoreners, PIOs etc also?

Inquiring minds wanna know...

This year was pretty bad (as was at IIMs... tail end junta from IIMABC had to settle for 4-5 LPA PSU jobs).

ISB - the trick is to be in the presidential merit list (top 15 students) - that is when you get that McKinsey shortlist

Baki sab is (relatively) chill coz after that your grades wont matter, only your "profile" will.

negi · Post by **negi** » 11 Mar 2009 08:00

Rishi wrote: ISB - the trick is to be in the presidential merit list (top 15 students) - that is when you get that McKinsey shortlist Baki sab is (relatively) chill coz after that your grades wont matter, only your "profile" will.

Sala even in MBA this topper business exists ? Btw when you say top 15 is it the GPA you are referring to ?

Rishi · Post by **Rishi** » 11 Mar 2009 08:02

Peer group: Well when you have India's finest studying around you, what more can you expect?

Not really, and not by a long shot. At IIT, this claim would still stand scrutiny. (IMHO onleee!)

IIMs, these days, do get a lot of candidates who left ISB & even ivy league for the IIMs. The reverse is barely ever to be found. And there are also lots of ppl. who gave the CAT several times, but could not make it to the IIMs & ultimately went to ISB. Don't get me wrong, but IMHO, the IIM's selection process is no better or worse than the Ivy League or any top b-school in the world.

Simple economics only. ISB would set you back by 18L for 1 year. IIM (till last year) would set you back by 4L for 2 years. (Now it is some ridiculous ~10L for 2 years at IIMA). Other than fees, it is the "placements" of an MBA college that would make students choose one over another.

Rishi · Post by **Rishi** » 11 Mar 2009 08:05

negi wrote:
Rishi wrote: ISB - the trick is to be in the presidential merit list (top 15 students) - that is when you get that McKinsey shortlist Baki sab is (relatively) chill coz after that your grades wont matter, only your "profile" will.
Sala even in MBA this topper business exists ? Btw when you say top 15 is it the GPA you are referring to ?

Yes. Topper and profile business exists. If you are ex-IIT and 9+ CGPA, then your chance of a McK/BCG/Bain/Booze summer is excellent, especially if you have work ex in some decent co. before that. At end of year 1, if you are in top 5 or top 10 of your IIM class, chance of you being shortlisted for interview by ANY company increases 10X.

IIRC, at ISB, the merit list comes out after 2 or 3 terms (they have 6 terms in the full course). Generally, these are the chaps shortlisted by the big guns

gashish · Post by **gashish** » 11 Mar 2009 08:15

x-posting from Nukkad

Once upon time I used to dwell onlee in nukkad thread...took some months off from nukkad to prepare for GMAT/B-school applications..

after so many months i come back to BR to ask nukkad-worthy question..and here I find nukkad at the right juncture discussing b-schools...super coincidence!

Well the story is I have to choose between INSEAD and Chicago Booth..and i'm super confused given the economic environment.
INSEAD is fast 1 yr program..so will be out of school in July 2010..but if world economy doesn't rebound by then, I will be toast! 2 years at Chicago appear safer bet. But I'm 32 and want to move to India in few years..in normal times, INSEAD serves transition to India better than Booth.

B-school gurus, will highly appreciate your tips and advise! these types of questions are commonly asked on business week forum...i pose this here bcoz i value BR's unique perspectives!.

Do we have alumni of either of these schools on BR?
Will really appreciate if you can answer few of my queries: <my BR handle> AT gmail DOT com.

derkonig · Post by **derkonig** » 11 Mar 2009 09:25

Raja,
1. Have you seen the breakup of marks used by IIMB to grade the applicants? 10th & 12th scores do not have very high weightages as compared to some of the other components, so pl. have a look at the selection procedure before you jump to conclusions about how the bad bad IIMs are leaving out the talented ppl.

2. The 10&12 std., UG semester wise scores matter as they give you a much better understanding of a person's performance over a period of time. Given the fact that the ratio of students getting accepted to those who appear for CAT may be as high as 1:200, there are very few measures that can help you out. And why do you even assume that apart from acads, nothing else matter at the IIMs. The GD/PI take care of the other facets of your profile. As I have said, a quick check of student profiles will lay to rest lots of myths about IIM selections & profiles. But alas, most ppl. will never bother to check & harp about ISB's holistic selection process. Also, what in your opinion is then the perfect method to select candidates for MBA?

3. If using 10/12th scores is subjective, then isn't using SOPs even more subjective? Most Ivy League & other schools pay a great deal of emphasis on your SOP. Also, by the same logic, in't using GMAT scores subjective? I am sure those scores play a big role in getting an ISB shortlist. One might be brilliant all through out & yet not do well on the day of the GMAT. Are we to take GMAT scores as some indicator of a person's capabilities? Isn't using school & college scores a lot more better than the results of some exam, conducted by some body in US, a lot more revealing & therefore fair?

4. What great leaders has ISB contributed to the world till date? Have any great mgmt. concepts have come out of ISB till date? Why is this so inspite of their so-called 'robust' selections & diverse class profiles & what not?

5. As for MSFT & Amazon offering $100000000, well what did they pay for comparable jobs in India? Would you care to compare the IIM salaries with them? Do you know what range are the foreign offers @ IIMs, in? Why just stop at starting salaries, why not compare the salaries of IIM MBAs in mid mgmt, top mgmt roles when compared to similar Itvity profiles?
Do you think, itvity salaries will be aywhere close to the evil IIM MBA's package? If so why? If not why again?

7. Leaders/Managers: Does any b-school teach you how to be one, do they have courses like 'How to lead people 101'. Maturity & leadership qualities are *NOT* functions of your age or work ex. Never were, never will be. What work ex did Alexander have when he cam rolling all the way to India's frontier? what work ex. did all those founders of tech giants have esp. since most started right out of college or dropped out to start their cos.? Didn't they successfully lead the ppl. in their orgs.?

8. What do you mean by this

I define it based on the impact one's work has.

? How do you measure it?
Often these TFTA itivity cos. are pertty much dependent on the banks, mgmt. consults, etc. for their revenues; these are the places where MBAs are found in large proportions.

9. What is the amount of hit ISB took in its placements this yr. over last yr.? Compare that with the IIMs. I guess, there in will lie lots of answers esp. what do companies value more. Are companies happy with recruiting the SDRE 'acad-jihadis' of IIMs or the TFTA RAPE-like ISB grads?

10. Also, regarding students choosing IIMs over ISB, its got a lot to do with the amt. of learning at IIMs via-a-vis ISB & of course future 'prospects' than the input fee costs. If ISB were that good, it wouldn't stop anyone from taking out a loan for the 17l. Yindians in massa b-schools often take out huge loans to fund their MBAs. Hence, something somewhere does not hold up.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 11 Mar 2009 09:53

derkonig wrote:Raja,
1. Have you seen the breakup of marks used by IIMB to grade the applicants? 10th & 12th scores do not have very high weightages as compared to some of the other components, so pl. have a look at the selection procedure before you jump to conclusions about how the bad bad IIMs are leaving out the talented ppl.

derkonig,

Nobody's calling IIMs bad or evil or paki. Please re-read my post. My question is why have any weightage for such unreliable indicators.

3. If using 10/12th scores is subjective, then isn't using SOPs even more subjective? Most Ivy League & other schools pay a great deal of emphasis on your SOP. Also, by the same logic, in't using GMAT scores subjective? I am sure those scores play a big role in getting an ISB shortlist. One might be brilliant all through out & yet not do well on the day of the GMAT. Are we to take GMAT scores as some indicator of a person's capabilities? Isn't using school & college scores a lot more better than the results of some exam, conducted by some body in US, a lot more revealing & therefore fair?

I am not comparing ISB vs IIM vs Stanford or whatever in case you misunderstood. Re. SOP you are missing the point completely. Unlike grades which is a one-dimensional number, an SOP tells you much more about a person and his talents beyond how he did in his classroom..that is the reason good univs. pay attention to your SOP.

College/school scores in India do not have any standardization even at board levels. Comparing them is as fruitless as converting your percentage marks in college (non-IIT) into Amirkhani GPA and comparing.

4. What great leaders has ISB contributed to the world till date? Have any great mgmt. concepts have come out of ISB till date? Why is this so inspite of their so-called 'robust' selections & diverse class profiles & what not?

For some reason you seem to dislike ISB

but anyhow like I said I am not rooting for any particular school against another - neither for IIMs nor ISB.

5. As for MSFT & Amazon offering $100000000, well what did they pay for comparable jobs in India? Would you care to compare the IIM salaries with them? Do you know what range are the foreign offers @ IIMs, in? Why just stop at starting salaries, why not compare the salaries of IIM MBAs in mid mgmt, top mgmt roles when compared to similar Itvity profiles?
Do you think, itvity salaries will be aywhere close to the evil IIM MBA's package? If so why? If not why again?

Re-read my post. I am not comparing salaries of MSFT/Amazon with IIMs. In my example, I am actually comparing MSFT salary with Amazon to drive the point that high salary does not imply you are doing something great. Sometimes high salary is simply paid due to higher risk or turnover in that position so I dont go by high salary figures as sole indicators of how good/reputable an institute is. In India making statements that such-and-such IIM (or whatever b-school) got xx people getting 1 crore offers is the norm to show how good an institute is.

7. Leaders/Managers: Does any b-school teach you how to be one, do they have courses like 'How to lead people 101'. Maturity & leadership qualities are *NOT* functions of your age or work ex. Never were, never will be. What work ex did Alexander have when he cam rolling all the way to India's frontier? what work ex. did all those founders of tech giants have esp. since most started right out of college or dropped out to start their cos.? Didn't they successfully lead the ppl. in their orgs.?

For those of us, who are not endowed with management/leadership qualities from birth (like the co-founders of tech giants and Alexander)...experience brings maturity. Otherwise all of us would have been ready to work from class 1 itself! Experience also gives the person different perspective on the problems he faced as a non-manager, now that he is looking at it throught a manager's viewpoint. In order to manage, you have to know what you are managing....that involves experience (and growing maturity) in your chosen work area. That is a function of time for most ordinary people.

derkonig · Post by **derkonig** » 11 Mar 2009 10:28

Raja Bose wrote: My question is why have any weightage for such unreliable indicators.

Then ideally why have any weightage for acads at all? Just let anyone & everyone in.

I am not comparing ISB vs IIM vs Stanford or whatever in case you misunderstood. Re. SOP you are missing the point completely. Unlike grades which is a one-dimensional number, an SOP tells you much more about a person and his talents beyond how he did in his classroom..that is the reason good univs. pay attention to your SOP.

No sir. A SOP is not about what you did but more about what do you intend to do. True, what you intend to do in the future is a function of what you already know, but do remember, the SOPs that are submitted to b-schools are more about the candidates plans for the future & how does the MBA degree fit into those plans.
I, personally, have seen enough about this SOP business. (Have you ever written/seen a b-school SOP?)
Also, do you think the candidates really mean to do all that they mention in their SOPs. I have seen a fair no. of SOPs of candidates who have made it to the so-called top b-schools & I can vouch for sure that those SOPs are as fictional as it gets. If anything, SOPs are a good test of your eloquence with words, nothing more. And giving out calls on the basis of a 'promising' SOP is a sure recepie for disaster. What stops a candidate from doing everything apart from what (s)he mentions in the SOP, after getting into a b-school? Those dear old acad scores are atleast exact & cannot be tailored by the candidates. SOPs OTOH are almost always tailored depending on the school to which the application is being sent to.
If you feel that the IIMs have a flawed & subjective selection process, may be you should take a real hard look at the practices at the other TFTA schools.

College/school scores in India do not have any standardization even at board levels. Comparing them is as fruitless as converting your percentage marks in college (non-IIT) into Amirkhani GPA and comparing.

Scores are normalized before taking them into account.

For some reason you seem to dislike ISB but anyhow like I said I am not rooting for any particular school against another - neither for IIMs nor ISB.

I do not dislike the ISB or for that matter any other b-school. IMHO, its live & let live only. But, we do as a part of our course, interact with students from pretty much every top b-school worldwide & we do know very well as to where we stand.

I am actually comparing MSFT salary with Amazon to drive the point that high salary does not imply you are doing something great. Sometimes high salary is simply paid due to higher risk or turnover in that position so I dont go by high salary figures as sole indicators of how good/reputable an institute is. In India making statements that such-and-such IIM (or whatever b-school) got xx people getting 1 crore offers is the norm to show how good an institute is.

The obsession with salary figures, my dear sir, is more to do with the media hype than anything else. When the times are good, the media will praise you sky high based upon the salary figures that they obtain. And in times like now, pretty much everyother news channel seems to be gloating in the fact that placements & avg. salaries at IIMs are down this year.

For those of us, who are not endowed with management/leadership qualities from birth (like the co-founders of tech giants and Alexander)...experience brings maturity. Otherwise all of us would have been ready to work from class 1 itself! Experience also gives the person different perspective on the problems he faced as a non-manager, now that he is looking at it throught a manager's viewpoint. In order to manage, you have to know what you are managing....that involves experience (and growing maturity) in your chosen work area. That is a function of time for most ordinary people.

This issue has been discussed threadbare at the IIMs & yet there is no definite answer as to how does work ex help.
Maturity & leadership is not the sole preserve of those with work ex. Also, if maturity is merely a function of time, does it mean that a persons maturity linearly or continously grows with time? More often than not, breakdowns in 'maturity' are common regardless of how experienced one is. Neither is maturity a function of diversity of work ex. In short there is no clear definition of maturity.

I also remember you mentioning about your friends who didn't go to the IIT/IIM/AIIMS & yet have done exceptionally well. Similarly, there are enough examples of people with litte or no experience in leadership turning out to be great leaders themselves. So if it is conclusive proof to you, that one need not have a degree from these institutes to be successful (your friends being the example, you gave), then by the same logic, shouldn't the example of Alexander & those startup techies be conclusive proof that maturity is not something one earns over time?

Arya Sumantra · Post by **Arya Sumantra** » 11 Mar 2009 11:01

derkonig wrote:This issue has been discussed threadbare at the IIMs & yet there is no definite answer as to how does work ex help.
Maturity & leadership is not the sole preserve of those with work ex. Also, if maturity is merely a function of time, does it mean that a persons maturity linearly or continously grows with time? More often than not, breakdowns in 'maturity' are common regardless of how experienced one is. Neither is maturity a function of diversity of work ex. In short there is no clear definition of maturity.

The work ex helps in understanding HR, Organizational structures, Operations and strategy. Discuss on these topics in class and you can make out who has work-ex and who hasn't any. To a freshie its all pure theory whose importance he is yet to realize. Whereas a guy with work-ex realizes why things were done a certain way in his previous job. He figures out why some things did or didn't work at his last job. The difference is huge. After all, knowledge absorption is expansion of common sense onlee.
If you want to become a pure quant or trader it may not be so significant.

andy B · Post by **andy B** » 11 Mar 2009 11:07

Gurujano:

I am currently about to start a mast. in appd finance, decided on it after arguing for a while between that and yeem bee aaa I figured better set up my technical knowledge of finance before going on to do mba. Do we have any BRF people done this sort of a course? Any advise is greatly appreciated.

Dhanyavad.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 11 Mar 2009 11:09

derkonig wrote: Then ideally why have any weightage for acads at all? Just let anyone & everyone in.

Thats like saying why just stop at class 10 and 12...let's take into account all school grades from class 1 itself!

For higher degrees, acads make sense from college level not from school level. Otherwise the practice of only looking at grades of your last major academic qualification wouldn't be so universal.

No sir. A SOP is not about what you did but more about what do you intend to do. True, what you intend to do in the future is a function of what you already know, but do remember, the SOPs that are submitted to b-schools are more about the candidates plans for the future & how does the MBA degree fit into those plans.
I, personally, have seen enough about this SOP business. (Have you ever written/seen a b-school SOP?)
Also, do you think the candidates really mean to do all that they mention in their SOPs. I have seen a fair no. of SOPs of candidates who have made it to the so-called top b-schools & I can vouch for sure that those SOPs are as fictional as it gets. If anything, SOPs are a good test of your eloquence with words, nothing more. And giving out calls on the basis of a 'promising' SOP is a sure recepie for disaster. What stops a candidate from doing everything apart from what (s)he mentions in the SOP, after getting into a b-school? Those dear old acad scores are atleast exact & cannot be tailored by the candidates. SOPs OTOH are almost always tailored depending on the school to which the application is being sent to.

In case you are not aware SOP also talks about what one has done in the past and is usually accompanied by proof of that. SOP is never read as a stand-alone document so you can fudge your future plan but can hardly fudge your past. The acad scores from school may be exact but like I said it does not tell anything. You already have college scores, CAT results to judge....bringing in high school scores only confounds, does not contribute. For that matter even the number of fingers I have is exact...hardly means that will be used as a criteria to estimate anything.

Scores are normalized before taking them into account.

In a country where even in the same board (say for example, CBSE), scores differ by vast amounts depending on region....how is normalization going to work? It is good on paper, impractical in practice. One might argue that since IIM intake quality is good, their process works. However, one forgets that in a vast pool of talent such as India where each seat is fought over by 100s, even if the process is flawed by a good amount, it will still produce great results because you might miss some talented candidate but then you have many more where he came from.

I do not dislike the ISB or for that matter any other b-school. IMHO, its live & let live only. But, we do as a part of our course, interact with students from pretty much every top b-school worldwide & we do know very well as to where we stand.

Nobody's dissing the quality of IIMs (whichever one you are in) but that does not imply they have everything perfected.

The obsession with salary figures, my dear sir, is more to do with the media hype than anything else. When the times are good, the media will praise you sky high based upon the salary figures that they obtain. And in times like now, pretty much everyother news channel seems to be gloating in the fact that placements & avg. salaries at IIMs are down this year.

Unfortunately perception is everything, rest comes secondary. One likes to think that reputation depends on solid stats and 'people in the know' are dispassionately looking at them....truth is far more humble.

This issue has been discussed threadbare at the IIMs & yet there is no definite answer as to how does work ex help.
Maturity & leadership is not the sole preserve of those with work ex. Also, if maturity is merely a function of time, does it mean that a persons maturity linearly or continously grows with time? More often than not, breakdowns in 'maturity' are common regardless of how experienced one is. Neither is maturity a function of diversity of work ex. In short there is no clear definition of maturity.

Breakdowns in maturity are there because everybody is human. But on an average, experience counts and scores over inexperience. Maturity is a function of experience which in turn is a function of time unless one is fundamentally flawed in intellect, ability or character. I am not just talking about maturity of character but maturity w.r.t work (how to work in an org, ethics, decision making, accountability, processes....). Otherwise, experience would count for nothing as everybody would be ready to manage in middle school itself and all new employees in an organization would be qualified to manage!

Management is less about the MBA degree itself and more about the traits one imbibes on how to manage. This is not something that is just taught in class or in mock sessions....it has to be learned on the job. One must learn how to work before one learns how to manage. That is the reason most top b-schools require work-ex and have a slightly older student profile because they have a fair idea on what is expected of them, when they go back to work because they had similar expectations of their manager. In India, classroom learning has usually been the end-all be-all in almost all fields (medicine excepted) - management is definitely less guilty but only comparative to other fields of study in India....not healthy at all.