7 ms·

India is an interesting place at the moment and the pressure to succeed is immense (often to the detriment of personal wellbeing). So much so that cheating sche

by osrec 9y ago

India is an interesting place at the moment and the pressure to succeed is immense (often to the detriment of personal wellbeing). So much so that cheating schemes are commonly devised by large groups of people, and the ingenuity involved is often quite remarkable and creative. I've personally hired a number of people in my Delhi office from the local IIT, and these are a few things I've noticed amongst new grads: parrot fashion learning is rife across the board. Despite being smart, they often struggle to think on their feet. It's as if they want a fully defined a problem domain, AND want to solve problems only within that defined domain, much like an exam! Anything outside of their comfort zone is met with a rather damp response equating to "we haven't covered that in class yet". In business (and even development), that attitude is not a good one to have. What's funny, however, is that if you walk past an Indian shanty town, you will find examples of (often illegal) innovation at every corner, from stolen electricty to rigged water meters etc - usually concocted by people with little education. The innovative mindset exists in the heart of Indian society, but the education system somehow seems to restrict it by making people believe that the path to success is narrow and the same for everyone. Hence the competition. I feel the education system needs to encourage free thinking more than rote learning. I believe it would allow students to enjoy their subjects, rather than just looking at them as a stepping stone to success. Perhaps if students approached their studies with a sense of wonder and excitement, rather than competetive aggression, their mental state would be significantly better during their years of education.

110011 9y ago
Without a doubt all the years of exam preparation in the teenage years come at a steep cost. For a young person in their teens to not have the time to reflect, be self-aware, and explore what life has to offer, is necessarily a failure of the system as a whole. But that is the reality in India, and if students must trade all that for studying hard then it simply reflects their (I would argue correct) perspective on the potential rewards of a solid career and securing your future from the certain chaos that awaits the uneducated or even poorly performing students in India. In that sense I would say it is unfair to claim that Indian students graduating from an IIT can't do this or that; it is actually an achievement in and of itself that they managed to get there and out without turning out to be entirely dysfunctional. While I would not argue that competition in India (in the context of these national examinations) is much higher than the competition in the West in various spheres (sports, sciences, tech, etc.), the reality is that the breadth of options to a good place in life is extremely limited, and the competition is rather concentrated to a few possibilities. You cannot opt to become a YouTuber, pro basketball player or a digital nomad if you're born Indian. There is essentially a bunch of careers in science, engineering and medicine, and a few top institutions for each of these ends, whose pedigree can get you very far, and failing that, there is much uncertainty to be faced. And most Indian students, while unable to articulate this, clearly feel these pressures and act accordingly.
- pm90 9y ago
  I think you make a good point. The only issue, an important one at that, which I have is the last statement: "And most Indian students, while unable to articulate this, clearly feel these pressures and act accordingly." Students are younger and much more curious about the world and about what to make of their lives. I would argue its the parents that feel these pressures and transfer that onto their kids. And I don't believe it is simply to give them a good livelihood: both rich and poor parents want their kids to get into these elite institutions. And that is a huge problem. I grew up in India. While I lucked out that I was naturally inclined to find science and math interesting, a lot of the people I went to college with found it absolutely boring and even torturous to go through their coursework, which was deeply saddening for me personally. I would ask them why they did it if they wanted to do other things? Usually the answer would be because their parents wanted them to be an engineer.
- nradov 9y ago
  No one in any country can really opt to be a YouTuber or pro basketball player. I mean a few people manage to do it through a combination of talent, luck, and hard work but they're so few as to be statistically insignificant from a career planning standpoint. On average US and Indian high school students have approximately the same chance of becoming an NBA player: ≈0%.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  For a young person in their teens to not have the time to reflect, be self-aware, and explore what life has to offer, is necessarily a failure of the system as a whole. But that is the reality in India, and if students must trade all that for studying hard then it simply reflects their (I would argue correct) perspective on the potential rewards of a solid career and securing your future from the certain chaos that awaits the uneducated or even poorly performing students in India. The degree to which your sentences contradict each other seems remarkable to me. Surely, the student who relentlessly prepare for these exams also don't have time to reflect on whether or not their activity is worth it and so X being "simply their perspective" seems meaningless. Similarly, it would seem to be a failing of the system that there is no other path to success here.
adreamingsoul 9y ago
Sounds like they are copying the education system here in the USA.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
  The UK and Canada too based on my experience. In fact, I was like this up until just a few years ago in my life and have had to learn to unlearn things. May be the best schools do better but the ones I attended were about test taking. I would get good grades and then forget everything two weeks later. I also sought out well defined problem sets at work and the creativity only came out when I started working on my own projects.
- drzaiusapelord 9y ago
  I'd argue that the US, especially in tech, doesn't suffer from "credentialism" like countries like India do. You can go and become an IT professional with zero qualifications and if you're good you can move up the ranks. In other systems you need to have x degree, x certification, or be part of x union, etc. One of the US's biggest advantages is that low regulation environments help build a meritocracy of sorts as long as obvious corruption is curtailed. Try being a French tech startup compared to the US and tell me how bad the US's credentialism, education, and regulatory processes are. I think we have it easy and a lot of our culture rewards and encourages 'free thinking' at least for now.
- q12we34rt5 9y ago
  >Sounds like they are copying the education system here in the USA. >the USA. >USA Yes, of course. As always and forever. It is really all about the USA. And Americans. Please tell us more about where you live. As we all know, the USA is so much more interesting than the subject of the article. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the USA whatsoever. But that's boring. So, why don't you take the floor and tell us about what we're really all here to discuss. The USA.
- tathougies 9y ago
  India's education system is based off of the old UK educational system, which involves heavy standardized testing to gain entry to university. This is not knew. My grandparents grew up in british India, and my parents were born at the very end of it. They all sat through exams, and results were published publicly. It's just the way it was and still is. If anything, America has slowly drifted towards the old British model. India though is not copying anything.
chongli 9y ago
What you're witnessing is the contradiction between real education (designed for learning) and credentialism. The truth is that the world is facing a massive crunch. Billions of people are struggling to get out of the circumstances they're trapped in. Getting a credential and getting a professional job is seen as one of the only paths out of the mire. People who are desperate have no interest in free thinking. Their goal is to escape. That's it.
- osrec 9y ago
  Ironically, I think it is seen as the only path, because it is marketed as such. Education is big business in India, and there is a banner advertising a trashy "college" on every corner. The quality is rarely great, yet the price is relatively steep. It just pushes people further into poverty, because the education fails to generate the opportunities it promises.
  - vram22 9y ago
    > there is a banner advertising a trashy "college" on every corner. Right. In the computer field, for example, private "institutes" offering "post-graduate diplomas" are a dime a dozen, in every city, in the downtown as well as suburban areas. The standard signboards or ads for them show that they teach "C/C++, Java, .NET, web design, ASP.NET, Oracle, AutoCAD, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, ...". And it's mostly former "graduates" of the institutes that do the teaching, with no real life experience. As for the virtual version of these, I regularly get contacted by training companies (middlemen) for conducting courses for clients on Python, Linux or other skills I have. Many of them turn out to be shady in their practices and I have to fob them off.
- scarface74 9y ago
  Credentualisn hasn't gotten so bad that if I see a resume with certifications, I take that as a negative signal when I am interviewing candidates. On the other hand, I've done a few certifications in my day but mostly to force myself To learn something. I usually leave the certifications off of my resume because of the stigma. I will talk about projects that I've done using the technologies.
110011 9y ago
The pressure to succeed is immense everywhere, this is hardly a notable feature of Indian society. Others have mentioned this already on this thread but let me paraphrase, basically no one is satisfied with some objective notion of success (like a high standard of living), rather success means to do better than those around you. So if you have three cars parked in your garage in the USA and are living an impossibly comfortable life, materially, by all measures, it is nevertheless almost surely the case that you feel the "pressure to succeed".
- osrec 9y ago
  Are you suggesting the pressure to succeed in the UK, where there exists a fairly comprehensive safety net in the form of welfare handouts, is the same as the pressure to succeed in India, where your government leaves you pretty much to fend for yourself? If that's what you're suggesting, I disagree.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    Yes. People aren’t motivated by economic statistics. Everyone wants to do well relative to their peers. Talk to suburban high school seniors and they’ll rank themselves from the Ivy League to the people who settled for Duke, down to the future townies getting a job or girls who got knocked up. From my observation, kids with certain strong cultural affiliations have the added pressure of family. It’s tough to be an American born Chinese kid whose extended family assumes you are a lazy loaf who has it easy — they are under intense pressure to succeed.
  - 110011 9y ago
    The answer is a bit nuanced and I am suggesting that it is the case, perhaps about the same instead of being exactly the same. You can argue that the apparent cost of not studying hard in is wildly different in these two countries (basic welfare support vs complete lack thereof). Yes, I agree that when you look at providing for basic material comforts in dire circumstances it obvious which country a person ought to choose, when presented with this hypothetical choice. But that simply fails to capture the stresses of everyday life. The average person on welfare checks can hardly be assumed to happy and is probably facing intense, if subtle, negative societal feedback for the choices he is forced to make. Do you think this person is happy to eat at McDonalds and wear cheap clothes when everyone around him is upgrading their smartphones. That's why I say that providing for basic material comforts hardly does much to improve the mental well-being. The pressure to succeed is present everywhere, and failing to do so is stressful in all such circumstances, and I would imagine that it would be roughly the same. Again this is an article on suicides and it is the most extreme form of pressure that anyone can face. The extent to which we can compare the stress on people that aren't doing well (by societal norms) is hard to pin down exactly, and I don't want to make any bold claims there that the stresses must be exactly the same. But I do see that there is a basic similarity here.
ythn 9y ago
Reminds me of an anecdote Richard Feynman had in his book on the Brazilian education system [1]. Basically, the students could memorize crap from books but didn't really comprehend what they were learning, such that when Feynman would ask a question such as "if I hold a glass of water in front of this picture, what will it look like?" they couldn't answer. But if he asked "What is the refractive index of water?" they would answer instantly. [1] http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
- mncharity 9y ago
  Yes... It's also worth being able to see this "other" in the mirror. Chemistry education research describes US pre-college chemistry education content as "incoherent". A challenge when teaching high-school stoichiometry, is students not viewing atoms as real physical objects. ... I've had repeated conversations of the form "What do you think of this alternate way to teach X, which seems to yield a deeper understanding?" "Nifty! But... my students take the MCAS [high-stakes exam for medical school] soon, and all they need to know there is [rote-memorized superficiality]. Instruction time is short, and I'd be doing my students a disservice to spend time doing better." ... Plug-and-chug is a thing. Among teaching staff too. A widely-used text, repeated revised, for years had a problem 'apply the idea gas law to <conditions which would make it a solid> Argon'. ... Innumeracy is pervasive in society. There's more than a half century of journal letters from professors complaining that their physics/geology/other PhD candidates lack a quantitative feel for the field. http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/ http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/ started with one graduate student realizing their own lack, and trying to do something about it. ... A five-year old wishing to know what color finger paint to use for the Sun, had best not ask first-tier astronomy graduate students, who pervasively get this wrong. Of the few local outliers, as many learned it in a seminar on misconceptions in astronomy education, as in their "successful" astronomy education. Asking a follow-up question of "what color is sunlight?" often elicits as double take, as two rote-memorized inconsistent factoids collide, apparently for the first time. You can do good astronomy research, without an informed five-year old's knowledge of Sun color. Years ago, a front-page NYTimes article went by, accurately reporting(!) a claim... that the Universe is green. Some folks working with spectra, had for outreach pushed them through some buggy open-source color code, and lacked the basic understanding to recognize the result as nonsense. The then Brazilian education system was capable of training for rote regurgitation. But not for research. The US system is capable of training for research. But not for numerate multidisciplinary understanding. As is perhaps needed, for example, to create non-wretched science education content. So as we look at the dysfunctional memorize-and-regurgitate of the Indian education system, it's worth remembering that we're facing similar challenges^W opportunities for transformational improvement.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vram22 9y ago
Good points in general. >What's funny, however, is that if you walk past an Indian shanty town, you will find examples of (often illegal) innovation at every corner, from stolen electricty to rigged water meters etc - usually concocted by people with little education. The innovative mindset exists in the heart of Indian society, Yes, very true. Seen stuff like this myself. A couple of examples: 1. When living in Bhopal (city in central India) in teens, I used to frequent auto mechanic shops to get my bike or jeep fixed. Over many such visits over years, I was often amazed to see the way they innovated and managed with less resources, scrounged, adapted, etc., to get parts, to fix things, etc. I remember multiple cases where they were fixing a vehicle problem and needed a rod or wire or screw, and would just look around a bit, and almost inevitably would find some piece of metal nearby that fit the need, and make use of it, maybe with a bit of tweaking, such as filing, bending or hammering it. Of course, in a mechanic's shop you expect parts and scrap to be lying around, but still, it was uncanny. In North and Central India they use the word jugad a lot (some spell it jugaad, and it has a Wikipedia entry too, IIRC), for this ability or approach (not just related to mechanic's work but for anything in life), and that is what inspired me to name both my blogs "jugad", since the broad topic of both is software innovation. The older one, jugad's Journal, which was at jugad.livejournal.com, is not available now, after LiveJournal was acquired (except maybe via the internet Archive), but I've been blogging at the newer one, jugad2.blogspot.com, since 2008, except for some gaps. 2. In Pune, once, I was looking for C. K. Prahlad's book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid". [1] I first went into a well-known bookstore, Manny's, and asked the salesperson there for it. He had a lackadaisical manner and almost did not bother to reply, just mumbled something. maybe saying no. Then I went out and just nearby, saw a bookstall on the footpath. I mentioned the book to the guy. Not only did he know the book title, he also knew the author's name, and mentioned a few other books by him. He then said he did not have the book right then, but could arrange to procure it in a few days. Sure enough, when I went back there a few days later, he had the book available, in the original, and I bought it. Very enterprising people, they often are, the roadside vendors and such, often more than more privileged people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Prahalad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Prahalad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_the_Pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_t...
- 9y ago
Kluny 9y ago
They seem efficient and ingenious. It's clear that they're optimizing for their incentives. They're incentivized to pass the test, so they come up with these brilliant schemes for cheating. I can't even get three friends to agree on a place to have lunch, how much organization, skill, and leadership does it take to cook up a class-wide cheating scheme? How valuable would that skill be in the workplace?
yourstruly33 9y ago
Italian here. In Naples we've been having those 'smart people who steal electricity and rig water meters' for a looooooooong time. You might want to find your exceptional talents here. Yours truly.
eric24234 9y ago
This is an accurate observation on the IIT students. A student in an IIT is an demonstration for their will power to sacrifice their social life in their teens to know all the common problems(past years exam questions) by repeated practice. The one thing that makes harder to work with IIT students is they feel entitled forever and feels they belong to a higher caste. That is why its always best to form teams with only IIT graduates. Also another important thing to note is IIT as an under graduate is much tougher to get in to rather than as an IIT post graduate.

by osrec 9y ago

110011 9y ago

Without a doubt all the years of exam preparation in the teenage years come at a steep cost. For a young person in their teens to not have the time to reflect, be self-aware, and explore what life has to offer, is necessarily a failure of the system as a whole. But that is the reality in India, and if students must trade all that for studying hard then it simply reflects their (I would argue correct) perspective on the potential rewards of a solid career and securing your future from the certain chaos that awaits the uneducated or even poorly performing students in India. In that sense I would say it is unfair to claim that Indian students graduating from an IIT can't do this or that; it is actually an achievement in and of itself that they managed to get there and out without turning out to be entirely dysfunctional. While I would not argue that competition in India (in the context of these national examinations) is much higher than the competition in the West in various spheres (sports, sciences, tech, etc.), the reality is that the breadth of options to a good place in life is extremely limited, and the competition is rather concentrated to a few possibilities. You cannot opt to become a YouTuber, pro basketball player or a digital nomad if you're born Indian. There is essentially a bunch of careers in science, engineering and medicine, and a few top institutions for each of these ends, whose pedigree can get you very far, and failing that, there is much uncertainty to be faced. And most Indian students, while unable to articulate this, clearly feel these pressures and act accordingly.

pm90 9y ago
I think you make a good point. The only issue, an important one at that, which I have is the last statement: "And most Indian students, while unable to articulate this, clearly feel these pressures and act accordingly." Students are younger and much more curious about the world and about what to make of their lives. I would argue its the parents that feel these pressures and transfer that onto their kids. And I don't believe it is simply to give them a good livelihood: both rich and poor parents want their kids to get into these elite institutions. And that is a huge problem. I grew up in India. While I lucked out that I was naturally inclined to find science and math interesting, a lot of the people I went to college with found it absolutely boring and even torturous to go through their coursework, which was deeply saddening for me personally. I would ask them why they did it if they wanted to do other things? Usually the answer would be because their parents wanted them to be an engineer.
nradov 9y ago
No one in any country can really opt to be a YouTuber or pro basketball player. I mean a few people manage to do it through a combination of talent, luck, and hard work but they're so few as to be statistically insignificant from a career planning standpoint. On average US and Indian high school students have approximately the same chance of becoming an NBA player: ≈0%.
joe_the_user 9y ago
For a young person in their teens to not have the time to reflect, be self-aware, and explore what life has to offer, is necessarily a failure of the system as a whole. But that is the reality in India, and if students must trade all that for studying hard then it simply reflects their (I would argue correct) perspective on the potential rewards of a solid career and securing your future from the certain chaos that awaits the uneducated or even poorly performing students in India. The degree to which your sentences contradict each other seems remarkable to me. Surely, the student who relentlessly prepare for these exams also don't have time to reflect on whether or not their activity is worth it and so X being "simply their perspective" seems meaningless. Similarly, it would seem to be a failing of the system that there is no other path to success here.

adreamingsoul 9y ago

Sounds like they are copying the education system here in the USA.

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
The UK and Canada too based on my experience. In fact, I was like this up until just a few years ago in my life and have had to learn to unlearn things. May be the best schools do better but the ones I attended were about test taking. I would get good grades and then forget everything two weeks later. I also sought out well defined problem sets at work and the creativity only came out when I started working on my own projects.
drzaiusapelord 9y ago
I'd argue that the US, especially in tech, doesn't suffer from "credentialism" like countries like India do. You can go and become an IT professional with zero qualifications and if you're good you can move up the ranks. In other systems you need to have x degree, x certification, or be part of x union, etc. One of the US's biggest advantages is that low regulation environments help build a meritocracy of sorts as long as obvious corruption is curtailed. Try being a French tech startup compared to the US and tell me how bad the US's credentialism, education, and regulatory processes are. I think we have it easy and a lot of our culture rewards and encourages 'free thinking' at least for now.
q12we34rt5 9y ago
>Sounds like they are copying the education system here in the USA. >the USA. >USA Yes, of course. As always and forever. It is really all about the USA. And Americans. Please tell us more about where you live. As we all know, the USA is so much more interesting than the subject of the article. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the USA whatsoever. But that's boring. So, why don't you take the floor and tell us about what we're really all here to discuss. The USA.
tathougies 9y ago
India's education system is based off of the old UK educational system, which involves heavy standardized testing to gain entry to university. This is not knew. My grandparents grew up in british India, and my parents were born at the very end of it. They all sat through exams, and results were published publicly. It's just the way it was and still is. If anything, America has slowly drifted towards the old British model. India though is not copying anything.

chongli 9y ago

What you're witnessing is the contradiction between real education (designed for learning) and credentialism. The truth is that the world is facing a massive crunch. Billions of people are struggling to get out of the circumstances they're trapped in. Getting a credential and getting a professional job is seen as one of the only paths out of the mire. People who are desperate have no interest in free thinking. Their goal is to escape. That's it.

osrec 9y ago
Ironically, I think it is seen as the only path, because it is marketed as such. Education is big business in India, and there is a banner advertising a trashy "college" on every corner. The quality is rarely great, yet the price is relatively steep. It just pushes people further into poverty, because the education fails to generate the opportunities it promises.
- vram22 9y ago
  > there is a banner advertising a trashy "college" on every corner. Right. In the computer field, for example, private "institutes" offering "post-graduate diplomas" are a dime a dozen, in every city, in the downtown as well as suburban areas. The standard signboards or ads for them show that they teach "C/C++, Java, .NET, web design, ASP.NET, Oracle, AutoCAD, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, ...". And it's mostly former "graduates" of the institutes that do the teaching, with no real life experience. As for the virtual version of these, I regularly get contacted by training companies (middlemen) for conducting courses for clients on Python, Linux or other skills I have. Many of them turn out to be shady in their practices and I have to fob them off.
scarface74 9y ago
Credentualisn hasn't gotten so bad that if I see a resume with certifications, I take that as a negative signal when I am interviewing candidates. On the other hand, I've done a few certifications in my day but mostly to force myself To learn something. I usually leave the certifications off of my resume because of the stigma. I will talk about projects that I've done using the technologies.

110011 9y ago

The pressure to succeed is immense everywhere, this is hardly a notable feature of Indian society. Others have mentioned this already on this thread but let me paraphrase, basically no one is satisfied with some objective notion of success (like a high standard of living), rather success means to do better than those around you. So if you have three cars parked in your garage in the USA and are living an impossibly comfortable life, materially, by all measures, it is nevertheless almost surely the case that you feel the "pressure to succeed".

osrec 9y ago
Are you suggesting the pressure to succeed in the UK, where there exists a fairly comprehensive safety net in the form of welfare handouts, is the same as the pressure to succeed in India, where your government leaves you pretty much to fend for yourself? If that's what you're suggesting, I disagree.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Yes. People aren’t motivated by economic statistics. Everyone wants to do well relative to their peers. Talk to suburban high school seniors and they’ll rank themselves from the Ivy League to the people who settled for Duke, down to the future townies getting a job or girls who got knocked up. From my observation, kids with certain strong cultural affiliations have the added pressure of family. It’s tough to be an American born Chinese kid whose extended family assumes you are a lazy loaf who has it easy — they are under intense pressure to succeed.
- 110011 9y ago
  The answer is a bit nuanced and I am suggesting that it is the case, perhaps about the same instead of being exactly the same. You can argue that the apparent cost of not studying hard in is wildly different in these two countries (basic welfare support vs complete lack thereof). Yes, I agree that when you look at providing for basic material comforts in dire circumstances it obvious which country a person ought to choose, when presented with this hypothetical choice. But that simply fails to capture the stresses of everyday life. The average person on welfare checks can hardly be assumed to happy and is probably facing intense, if subtle, negative societal feedback for the choices he is forced to make. Do you think this person is happy to eat at McDonalds and wear cheap clothes when everyone around him is upgrading their smartphones. That's why I say that providing for basic material comforts hardly does much to improve the mental well-being. The pressure to succeed is present everywhere, and failing to do so is stressful in all such circumstances, and I would imagine that it would be roughly the same. Again this is an article on suicides and it is the most extreme form of pressure that anyone can face. The extent to which we can compare the stress on people that aren't doing well (by societal norms) is hard to pin down exactly, and I don't want to make any bold claims there that the stresses must be exactly the same. But I do see that there is a basic similarity here.

ythn 9y ago

Reminds me of an anecdote Richard Feynman had in his book on the Brazilian education system [1]. Basically, the students could memorize crap from books but didn't really comprehend what they were learning, such that when Feynman would ask a question such as "if I hold a glass of water in front of this picture, what will it look like?" they couldn't answer. But if he asked "What is the refractive index of water?" they would answer instantly. [1] http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

mncharity 9y ago
Yes... It's also worth being able to see this "other" in the mirror. Chemistry education research describes US pre-college chemistry education content as "incoherent". A challenge when teaching high-school stoichiometry, is students not viewing atoms as real physical objects. ... I've had repeated conversations of the form "What do you think of this alternate way to teach X, which seems to yield a deeper understanding?" "Nifty! But... my students take the MCAS [high-stakes exam for medical school] soon, and all they need to know there is [rote-memorized superficiality]. Instruction time is short, and I'd be doing my students a disservice to spend time doing better." ... Plug-and-chug is a thing. Among teaching staff too. A widely-used text, repeated revised, for years had a problem 'apply the idea gas law to <conditions which would make it a solid> Argon'. ... Innumeracy is pervasive in society. There's more than a half century of journal letters from professors complaining that their physics/geology/other PhD candidates lack a quantitative feel for the field. http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/ http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/ started with one graduate student realizing their own lack, and trying to do something about it. ... A five-year old wishing to know what color finger paint to use for the Sun, had best not ask first-tier astronomy graduate students, who pervasively get this wrong. Of the few local outliers, as many learned it in a seminar on misconceptions in astronomy education, as in their "successful" astronomy education. Asking a follow-up question of "what color is sunlight?" often elicits as double take, as two rote-memorized inconsistent factoids collide, apparently for the first time. You can do good astronomy research, without an informed five-year old's knowledge of Sun color. Years ago, a front-page NYTimes article went by, accurately reporting(!) a claim... that the Universe is green. Some folks working with spectra, had for outreach pushed them through some buggy open-source color code, and lacked the basic understanding to recognize the result as nonsense. The then Brazilian education system was capable of training for rote regurgitation. But not for research. The US system is capable of training for research. But not for numerate multidisciplinary understanding. As is perhaps needed, for example, to create non-wretched science education content. So as we look at the dysfunctional memorize-and-regurgitate of the Indian education system, it's worth remembering that we're facing similar challenges^W opportunities for transformational improvement.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

vram22 9y ago

Good points in general. >What's funny, however, is that if you walk past an Indian shanty town, you will find examples of (often illegal) innovation at every corner, from stolen electricty to rigged water meters etc - usually concocted by people with little education. The innovative mindset exists in the heart of Indian society, Yes, very true. Seen stuff like this myself. A couple of examples: 1. When living in Bhopal (city in central India) in teens, I used to frequent auto mechanic shops to get my bike or jeep fixed. Over many such visits over years, I was often amazed to see the way they innovated and managed with less resources, scrounged, adapted, etc., to get parts, to fix things, etc. I remember multiple cases where they were fixing a vehicle problem and needed a rod or wire or screw, and would just look around a bit, and almost inevitably would find some piece of metal nearby that fit the need, and make use of it, maybe with a bit of tweaking, such as filing, bending or hammering it. Of course, in a mechanic's shop you expect parts and scrap to be lying around, but still, it was uncanny. In North and Central India they use the word jugad a lot (some spell it jugaad, and it has a Wikipedia entry too, IIRC), for this ability or approach (not just related to mechanic's work but for anything in life), and that is what inspired me to name both my blogs "jugad", since the broad topic of both is software innovation. The older one, jugad's Journal, which was at jugad.livejournal.com, is not available now, after LiveJournal was acquired (except maybe via the internet Archive), but I've been blogging at the newer one, jugad2.blogspot.com, since 2008, except for some gaps. 2. In Pune, once, I was looking for C. K. Prahlad's book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid". [1] I first went into a well-known bookstore, Manny's, and asked the salesperson there for it. He had a lackadaisical manner and almost did not bother to reply, just mumbled something. maybe saying no. Then I went out and just nearby, saw a bookstall on the footpath. I mentioned the book to the guy. Not only did he know the book title, he also knew the author's name, and mentioned a few other books by him. He then said he did not have the book right then, but could arrange to procure it in a few days. Sure enough, when I went back there a few days later, he had the book available, in the original, and I bought it. Very enterprising people, they often are, the roadside vendors and such, often more than more privileged people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Prahalad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Prahalad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_the_Pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_t...

9y ago

Kluny 9y ago

They seem efficient and ingenious. It's clear that they're optimizing for their incentives. They're incentivized to pass the test, so they come up with these brilliant schemes for cheating. I can't even get three friends to agree on a place to have lunch, how much organization, skill, and leadership does it take to cook up a class-wide cheating scheme? How valuable would that skill be in the workplace?

yourstruly33 9y ago

Italian here. In Naples we've been having those 'smart people who steal electricity and rig water meters' for a looooooooong time. You might want to find your exceptional talents here. Yours truly.

eric24234 9y ago

This is an accurate observation on the IIT students. A student in an IIT is an demonstration for their will power to sacrifice their social life in their teens to know all the common problems(past years exam questions) by repeated practice. The one thing that makes harder to work with IIT students is they feel entitled forever and feels they belong to a higher caste. That is why its always best to form teams with only IIT graduates. Also another important thing to note is IIT as an under graduate is much tougher to get in to rather than as an IIT post graduate.