The problem with this approach is that it is too dependent on the goodness and honesty of said teachers. Anytime you rely more on human beings, you also bring in the typical human problems like self-interest, politics, biases, connections etc.
Your approach is not going to work in a country like India. We are a resource-starved nation where people have the mentality of securing every little advantage they can find for themselves without spending half a thought about social consequences. What happens if I am a talented student but I go to a school in a smaller town and references from teachers there carry a lot less weight that teachers from famous schools. What happens if my math teacher wants to promote a student of his own caste over other more qualified students. Will secondary-school teachers with laughably low salaries not feel incentivized to sell their recommendations to the highest bidder?
In a country where most systems are fraught with such human problems from head to toe, the beauty of JEE is that it is a completely objective system.
My issue with JEE and the entrance examination system as a whole in India is that it grades students based on a combination of just 3 subjects, physics, chemistry and maths. It dosent matter if you are passionate about computer science and you have the talent to code well, it won't get you a seat into the CS department at any IIT. Atleast it was like this when I was preparing for it. I don't know if the system is the same currently. It would be nice if there was some other optional exam that you could take to prove your competence in other subjects.
If you spend five minutes thinking about the problem at hand, you will yourself realize why things have to be the way they are.
Anyway, you can take heart in the fact that if your goal is just to learn programming, a computer science department at an IIT is probably the last place you want to be. I'm only half joking. The curriculum is tilted heavily towards theory, reflecting the attitudes of the professors who obviously come from an academic background (most of them have probably never programmed professionally).
There was only one course where anyone is actually going to even try to teach you programming, but that is actually a pretty basic programming course in the first semester. Everything else you are supposed to learn on your own, through "assimilation". There are several courses in your third year that require significant programming skills, so if you haven't learnt those skills on your own outside the classroom by that time, you're kind of fucked.
I don't understand why universities can't give a certain weightage to some specialized examinations. Like some international Olympiad for CS. We already have something like this if you are a KVPY scholar. But all universities only look at your entrance exam marks. Other than just trying to maintain the status quo I don't know why they can't change this current system.
Also even if the subject taught at IIT is not worth it it opens a lot more doors than what my college can ever do. In things like research.
Only a person who did well in JEE would say this. You talk about disadvantages for rural students. This is important, because the vast majority of people in India live in villages or small towns, not the big cities. Tell me though, how many students from villages and small towns do well in JEE without moving to a coaching centre in a bigger town?
Personal anecdotes aside, you'll find that urban students are disproportionately represented in the top engineering institutes. There are some rural students certainly, but not like the 80% you'd expect if the system was truly egalitarian. You rail against the possibility of some students getting ahead because of advantages other than academic performance, but fail to consider that the current system is also based on the lottery of birth.
>Only a person who did well in JEE would say this.
Please forgive me for considering, in a country fraught from top to bottom with corruption and casteism, an objective system that offers an opportunity for young, talented students, irrespective of their backgrounds, to devote two years of their lives to serious study and meaningfully transform their lives "beautiful". It MUST be because of my single-digit rank.
>Tell me though, how many students from villages and small towns do well in JEE without moving to a coaching centre in a bigger town?
If you count Kota, there are plenty of students from small towns who do well in JEE by moving to a coaching center in a smaller town.
Why is "without moving to a different town" such an important consideration? Rural areas almost by definition don't have any scale.
>There are some rural students certainly, but not like the 80% you'd expect if the system was truly egalitarian.
Most rural students don't even have access to good primary schools. There is a huge information asymmetry between people from villages and big cities. That is not a problem an engineering exam can solve.
You replace JEE with a less objective system, and much fewer rural/small-town students will get in.
> irrespective of their backgrounds, to devote two years of their lives to serious study
I don't know how you can make such a statement with a single digit rank.
JEE offers the middle and upper middle class an opportunity to leap into the rich class. What percentage of India is middle class?
How many lower middle class and poor folks can send their kids to kota to study for JEE?
How much would it cost the Indian government to develop detailed coaching videos by IIT professors and upload it for free to YouTube? Yes JEE is a good entrance exam, but let's not romanticize it as something that can cross boundaries of caste and class. If so, we can also claim that capitalism doesn't care about your caste and class either! The harrassment faced by students of lower caste who get in through affirmative action is also well known.
> How much would it cost the Indian government to develop detailed coaching videos by IIT professors and upload it for free to YouTube?
I realize this is entirely tangential to the thrust of this sub-thread, but I don't think the government really should be encouraging coaching (with some caveats). The goal of the JEE is to identify the top 1% of applicants, or more accurately the top n number of candidates. In 10 years the JEE might have to pick the top 0.5% of applicants as the population grows and the seats do not. Making the JEE more equitable doesn't change that - more seats aren't created to meet demand. The difficulty of the JEE has to scale & adapt to the level of the students who appear in the exam. Yes, coaching classes can teach tricks that exploit weak patterns within the JEE. I would much rather see the JEE continually redesigned to be resistant to coaching in general.
Coaching classes actually do teach physics. It is not simply a shop teaching tricks. You cannot simply qualify for JEE by learning tricks for 2 years.
I should probably have used the word "teaching" instead of "coaching".
The problem is that the quality of science education in India at the high school level is really poor. To make the exam more equitable, we have to push for higher quality educational content accessible to everyone.
To give an example of how poor high school science education is - I was taught ohm's law in 8th grade when I didn't know what voltage was? Voltage was actually defined 3 years later, which is super ridiculous.
This causes students to believe that science is about memorizing equations and learning how to apply simple templates to solve problems derived from the same template. They are not even aware that they don't understand the terms they use. These students confuse familiarity with understanding. I have met so many electrical engineers who don't know what voltage is. They simply repeat the definition they learned in 8th grade. Voltage is potential difference. However, they don't know what potential difference is. They don't think they even need to know that. The actual definition is simply physics esoterica for them.
Such a student will be completely stumped on how to solve a simple ohms law problem, if we change the wording of the question from voltage to force and distancing and electric current to the speed of charged particles.
>I don't know how you can make such a statement with a single digit rank.
I don't quite follow why having a single digit rank should stop me from having an opinion on the subject.
I come from a middle class family from the poorest part of the country. I have a lower caste background (OBC), and my father was the first in my family to receive a university education. For innumerous Biharis, JEE and other competitive examinations have been the road to salvation.
I know someone who literally learnt swimming by hanging on to the tail of buffalos and went to a CS program of a top IIT.
>How many lower middle class and poor folks can send their kids to kota to study for JEE?
A lot more than you think. Kota is probably at least 30% students from UP and Bihar, the most backward states of the country.
>but let's not romanticize it as something that can cross boundaries of caste and class
It crosses boundaries of caste and class by a, being objective and b, not testing based on criteria (such as extra-curricular activities, knowledge of English) that only the upper urban class have access to.
>If so, we can also claim that capitalism doesn't care about your caste and class either!
I don't quite follow the analogy, but capitalism cares much less about caste than the feudal systems that it replaces.
>The harrassment faced by students of lower caste who get in through affirmative action is also well known.
It is also more exaggerated than real. A few bad cases should not be taken to represent the system in its entirety.
> I don't quite follow why having a single digit rank should stop me from having an opinion on the subject.
Rather, I expected someone with a single digit JEE rank to have a better, more rational perspective on JEE; instead of over the top romanticism. I know a few folks with a similar JEE ranks and their perspective is different.
> A lot more than you think. Kota is probably at least 30% students from UP and Bihar, the most backward states of the country.
Introspect on what I said and what your reply was. Families that are able to send their kids away to a different state for lodging and coaching for 2 years are at the very minimum middle class, if not rich or upper middle class. In fact, most American families can't do this at all. The fact that there are a lot of poor people in Bihar or India in general does not invalidate what I am saying.
My dad earned 500$ per month as an engineer in India. I am not going to pretend that I rose up via some extremely objective and meritocratic system inspite of tremendous economic disadvantage. The simple fact is that my dad was an engineer, while most of the kids in India at the time had illiterate parents.
> It crosses boundaries of caste and class by a, being objective
There are several exams of these kind in India, all entrance exams can be considered objective by default by this narrow definition. The exception of the JEE, UPSC etc. is the high bar. However, the amount of parental support, financial and otherwise - clearly shuts out the vast majority of India - the lower middle and the poor (SC/ST and some OBCs). With politicians expanding the scope of OBC, going beyond Shudras to include Vaishyas, OBC has been quite diluted. Significant population of OBCs also belong to the creamy layer.
I reiterate that, the JEE is a vehicle for the middle and upper middle to move to the rich class. For the vast majority of Indians, it is not an option. Better than the American system, but not some magic elixir.
> It is also more exaggerated than real. A few bad cases should not be taken to represent the system in its entirety.
It was quite common to bring up the affirmative action boost of these kids in newsgroups. The DASA students were also not spared. Posts like "Apna Mahesh problem solve kar diya. Aaj galati se tube light jal gaya :D". AIR was in the lifeblood of these students. You brought it up as well, while it was quite unnecessary.
> My father was the first in my family to receive a university education
I can't participate in good faith in a discussion with someone who doesn't have the ability to be respectful to opinions different from his own. Have a good day.
I grew up in a small village and hadn't heard of JEE before I entered the 12th grade. I tried to prepare by myself and failed spectacularly. A lot of the questions rely on tricks or insights that you typically learn only in coaching classes. My neighbor's son, who actually went to school in a nearby big town, had signed up for coaching classes. He did much better than me, and from chatting with him (post-exam), I could tell he had learned these tricks in his coaching classes.
So, clearly, lack of coaching classes hurt my chances.
In any case, I never joined the IITs, but joined another engineering college thanks to my scoring very well in the final exam.
Your approach is not going to work in a country like India. We are a resource-starved nation where people have the mentality of securing every little advantage they can find for themselves without spending half a thought about social consequences. What happens if I am a talented student but I go to a school in a smaller town and references from teachers there carry a lot less weight that teachers from famous schools. What happens if my math teacher wants to promote a student of his own caste over other more qualified students. Will secondary-school teachers with laughably low salaries not feel incentivized to sell their recommendations to the highest bidder?
In a country where most systems are fraught with such human problems from head to toe, the beauty of JEE is that it is a completely objective system.