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The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

• ghgdynb1 6y ago
  I used to think that the “holistic” criteria elite US colleges use to select students was a failure of meritocracy. My view was that the non-objective metrics were excuses for colleges to let in students who wouldn’t grind but wanted prestige and had rich parents. But if you tie a person’s social status to performance on a single test, you suffocate all the useful things people could be doing if they didn’t have to solely dedicate themselves to prep. So maybe we’re doing okay as-is.
  • endisneigh 6y ago
    elite colleges basically have to have positive sentiment. a purely meritocratic admissions process wouldn't be conducive to this, because "rich" people generally do things that increase the sentiment of their schools, like become president or start famous companies. This is why Stanford and Harvard are far more popular and recognizable compared to Caltech and MIT even though the quality of the students is virtually identical. if you work in admissions as a place like Harvard or Stanford they will tell you point blank they make those kinds of "sentiment" considerations. I'm personally not a fan, but I get it.
    • majormajor 6y ago
      I'm not sure I follow. MIT and Caltech are very niche, but inside that niche, seem to have a pretty clear reputational advantage over Harvard. (Stanford, on the other hand, has some more niche overlap in CS at least.) Sadly, it's not a niche that lends itself to "future President prestige." But is that really hurting either MIT or Caltech, or their grads?
      • selimthegrim 6y ago
        Compared to Stanford and MIT, Caltech is not getting the same caliber student since the late 70s-early 80s (and definitely since the mid 2000s) when looking at international Olympiad winners, etc
        • 908B64B197 6y ago
          > Caltech is not getting the same caliber student since the late 70s-early 80s (and definitely since the mid 2000s) Citation Needed.
          • selimthegrim 6y ago
            I’m a Caltech alum. It’s common knowledge.
      • caddemon 6y ago
        Yeah, and honestly "niche" is a strong word. Sure nobody is going to MIT for theater, but they have a great reputation across most STEM fields as well as in subjects like econ, business, philosophy, etc. When I think of niche I think more of a place like Juliard. I also think it's even arguable that MIT has more prestige than Harvard - of course this will depend how you're defining prestige, but people definitely assume high intelligence when they hear a student goes to MIT in a way they don't for Harvard. Which I have to imagine is at least somewhat explainable by the admissions differences. Caltech is a much smaller school and is maybe a better example of a school that's underrated by people who don't know better? But for any reasons that prestige would actually matter I doubt Caltech students have any problems either.
    • barry-cotter 6y ago
      > elite colleges basically have to have positive sentiment. a purely meritocratic admissions process wouldn't be conducive to this, because "rich" people generally do things that increase the sentiment of their schools, like become president or start famous companies. Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, the LSE, Sciences Pos, X, ÉNA are all counter examples. You can select purely on academics just fine.
      • dan-robertson 6y ago
        I don’t know what you consider academics but I went to a university in your list and they definitely had plenty of things other than what I’d consider academics to select on. Firstly they had basic biographical information (eg your name, which school you went to, I think your age). Secondly they had interviews where they could use whatever impression they liked. Thirdly they had discretion in the offer they made to you (ie “we’ll give you a place if you get these grades”) and discretion in which of the students not meeting their offers they chose to accept (“you didn’t meet your offer but we deliberately give out too many too-difficult offers and we’ve decided we prefer you out of the candidates who didn’t make it”). Obviously the people involved in the process were generally ethically minded but if this thread shows anything, it’s that two people may do quite different things while each trying to act ethically.
  • mochomocha 6y ago
    As a counter-example, I have gone through a relatable experience though not in India but France (our "preparatory classes" system also has similar high competitiveness/high pressure characteristics, to prepare for a few deciding exams). It only lasts for 2 years, but the stakes are somewhat similar from what I understand from the article. Having lived in the US for a decade now, one of the biggest culture gap I keep and that probably won't ever go away is how it's somewhat accepted here that "letting rich kids cheat/buy their way into Ivy League is not that bad, and look it pays for a new cafeteria".
    • ghgdynb1 6y ago
      I get it, and I actually agree that the culture you describe isn't a good look. What I'm going for is more the idea that if you consider the best alternative I can think of to the "holistic" approach, you get selecting applicants purely based on entrance exam scores. In such a world you'd be punishing a kid who plays with Arduino out of interest. Any energy devoted towards something other than test prep is energy wasted. In the American system, as I'm coming to see it, the kid who plays with Arduino is punished less. The test won't take you all the way anyways, and you even get a little "refund" on attention sunk into some types of activity which qualify as extracurricular.
      • mochomocha 6y ago
        Yes... It's a balance. I don't think tests-only admissions are the panacea either to be clear. The key problem is how to introduce some level of subjectivity in the admission process without creating doors wide open for corruption or cottage industries to "prep your application" with semi-fake accomplishments demonstrating your "soft skills".
        • dkdk8283 6y ago
          All gatekeepers are subject to corruption. This is a human issue.
      • 908B64B197 6y ago
        > In such a world you'd be punishing a kid who plays with Arduino out of interest. Any energy devoted towards something other than test prep is energy wasted. For course selection too. You'll have students picking out classes because they are known to be easy and not because they are curious about it. Because they have to keep their GPA at a certain level.
  • majormajor 6y ago
    The trick would be coming up with an exam you can't study for. But even "IQ test" style stuff hasn't been immune to this, and many attempts to do so fall victim to "select for people with upbringing like the test authors, so actually they did study their whole life, they just didn't realize that's what they were doing." Job interviews would benefit from the same thing, to go by the self-reported amount of time wasted on leetcode around here.
    • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      How would that help? Rewarding people for simply being born with high IQ is the opposite of meritocratic.
      • gumby 6y ago
        Really depends on your definition of "merit" (which is frequently misunderstood the same way evolutionary "fitness" is often misunderstood). Read Young's original book coining the term: it was both a satire and dystopian lament. Far from a term of approval! Certainly many people -- perhaps most -- believe that "IQ" (loosely defined) is in fact the proper definition of meritocracy. (In case it's not obviously I definitely disagree)
        • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
          If many people loosely equate IQ to merit then that is worrying to me. It's all well and good if you're smart because it increases your advantage two-fold. But it basically screws over everyone else.
      • majormajor 6y ago
        In theory, the purpose of the admissions test (or job interview) is to find people capable of doing the work, so they won't wash out from the hard, demanding programs. But none of these tests are rewarding people for doing useful or directly applicable work in the first place. So ideally you'd want a test that didn't require wasted zero-sum-game studying marathons, but would also correspond to the type of work involved... again, I don't think IQ tests are this. But such a thing would be useful, if it could be devised. If you still look at grades in addition to the standardized tests, like in the US, you'll wash out the not-willing-to-put-in-any-effort crowd like that. To steal another idea from the job interview discussions: what you want might be entry-level intro survey type classes that are broadly open to lots of people (maybe online) but have a high bar for completion to gain full admission, and focus on some of the hands-on aspects of the field in question. "Lower bar + weed out courses" is used in a lot of places that couldn't get away with the high bar of MIT or such. Alternately, I often suspect the best solution would be fully randomized admissions. Does it make sense to stratify by institution, so that you have one single gate into university, instead of looking at the output of four years of work across mostly-evenly-distributed places? Where you can more legitimately assume that what someone gets out of their time will be the result of what they personally put into it?
  • yudlejoza 6y ago
    False choice fallacy.
    • dan-robertson 6y ago
      I thought the GP had a reasonable suggestion for a common other way of doing things to competitive examinations. What alternatives did you have in mind?
      • yudlejoza 6y ago
        Consider a candidate both on a 'holistic-track' and a 'single-score track' and require them to meet standard on only one of the two.
  • akhilcacharya 6y ago
    I'm becoming convinced by the idea that meritocracy itself is bad and a terrible way to organize society. But perhaps I'm biased by being a failure in the meritocratic system.
    • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      I'm interested in hear about why you believe you're a failure in the meritocratic system. I also have some doubts about meritocracy for a couple of reasons: 1) Although we can try very hard to be objective, at the end of the day everything is subjective 2) So called "merit" seems to be largely based on genetic traits (Intelligence, personality, physical, etc)
      • akhilcacharya 6y ago
        That's around my line of thinking, pure meritocracy is both too subjective and far too harsh to the people who aren't in the lucky egg club, especially in increasingly global winner take all games (an inevitable consequence of globalization). I'm a failure by meritocracy by nature of losing at all of the tests we use to judge success and merit - test scores, elite school admission, elite institutions etc.
        • abc_lisper 6y ago
          What do you do now?
          • sfashset 6y ago
            he's a SDE at Amazon
            • abc_lisper 6y ago
              Why the feeling of failure then ? There is nothing there that is not in your company now. You are not a graded apple to be sold at a store. If you are intelligent you will recognize these are human constructs, and nature/problems don’t recognize your degree - they are available for everyone
  • olladecarne 6y ago
    I still think the "holistic" approach is flawed. The "holistic" criteria benefits upper-class students because lower and middle class kids are rarely trained from a young age to be involved in extra-curricular activities the way upper-class kids are. I experienced this first hand growing up, many future Ivy league students almost seemed to have been trained for it from the moment they were born. The parents had connections all over the place and their kids could study/work on all sorts of interesting hobbies. On the other hand the lower class people had no idea that this world existed and at best spent some time studying for the standardized exams if their parents were really invested in their future. Basically, whatever thing you choose as the metric, people with more resources and information will be able to optimize for it better. However, the more difficult the metric becomes to achieve, the more it benefits those who already benefit from the resource and information asymmetry.
    • chrisseaton 6y ago
      > middle class kids are rarely trained from a young age to be involved in extra-curricular activities I almost can't think of something more middle-class than an aggressive dedication to as many extra-curricular activities as possible. SUVs full of children being driven from baseball to ballet to swimming? Seems a common part of culture for the middle-class?
      • MandieD 6y ago
        More like upper-middle, because those activities aren’t cheap. Ballet: lessons, costumes and shoes (make it onto pointe? New shoes every few weeks) Swimming: new suits every few weeks when the chlorine starts eating through and travel to swim meets. Baseball: if you want to really compete, you’re going to be on a travel team. And those SUVs require parents (usually moms) with the free time to do all that driving and managing.
    • 908B64B197 6y ago
      Whatever you build, it will inevitably get min/maxed. Every admission system prides itself in being the best but they all ultimately end up getting gamified. Because there is too much at stake.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • golergka 6y ago
    That's not the only two options. You could have a system that is based on objective, non-holistic metrics, but does not put all the pressure on a single test, single point in a person's life. Actually, most of adult working life is already like that: there's many potential job interviews, projects that you can compete to various level of success, etc. The "single test" typically only exists in systems of higher education.
  • abc_lisper 6y ago
    You also make the successful people entitled and failures on the test feel like a second grade person in that IIT system. While meritocracy is a valid thing, expecting that a 16 year old has enough maturity or suck it up ness to ace that test while not having enough opportunity Is bullshit
• shadowofneptune 6y ago
  So, when do the parents step out of the picture, if ever? Sounds like the worst affected would fly apart the moment they had to live on their own. This is a type of student I've heard of in the US of course, but this appears to affect a huge portion of the students.
  • analog31 6y ago
    For the elite, never. If nothing else, there is always a family safety net, and some starting capital.
    • twiddling 6y ago
      and the network of contacts...
  • avs733 6y ago
    Speaking as a US professor, and speaking of all my students not just international ones, Increasingly, never Had a students father drop off their mask for them before class last week because they forgot it This is one of the long lasting impacts I’m seeing covid have on society already
• bluefirebrand 6y ago
  There is an argument to be made that to be the best at something you have to commit like that. You could write a similar story about pro athletes probably, although team sports would include some level of socialization by default, not all sports are team sports. And I imagine a lot of other sacrifices (friendships outside the team or sport, hobbies, education) are made in pursuit of a pro athlete dream too. And of course there are tons of people who put that kind of work and sacrifice into becoming a pro athlete and never make it. I think the part that really makes this story stand out to me is the fact that even the ones who make it into this prestigious program don't actually wind up in some top echelon. The article says they find the skill gap between what the industry wants and what they have studied is too big. That is incredible. Absolutely bonkers to sacrifice so much at a shot at some "top" thing that basically never actually pays off for anyone.
  • Daishiman 6y ago
    It's not even being "at the top". Ultimately the difference in education in high-quality institutions just isn't really that big. And while it's true that it is a useful signal that you're sufficiently dedicated to study something deeply for a few years, the correlation between actual success or utility outside of that just doesn't seem to make it worth much.
    • bluefirebrand 6y ago
      > It's not even being "at the top" It seems to me that the kids pursuing it think it will take them to the top. I don't think anyone works that hard and sacrifices everything for a shot at being mediocre.
      • Daishiman 6y ago
        Kids do not usually have a well-formed idea of what exactly actually takes you places and what is merely tradition and formalities.
  • cmdli 6y ago
    It seems to me that the problem is what these students should be the "best" at. Taking tests and learning academic material? They appear to be super successful. Being able to navigate the world of business and working with other people? Well, they aren't learning all the soft skills and life experience they need. I see this partially as a failure of the metrics used for acceptance. Social skills and other activities are important to the success of an individual, and they should be measured as such when considering who to accept.
• endisneigh 6y ago
  I would love to see really elite schools lowering the threshold for the quantitative measurements like the JEE to say, 85% percentile, and just randomly selectively students who meet it. In my experience there's definitely a point in which better scores on things such as the JEE stop being correlated with both college performance, life satisfaction or even career earnings.
  • airhead969 6y ago
    Why throw merit out the window? There's already a zillion legacy, sports, and diversity admits to Ivy/Pac12. Let those with the most merit and aptitude win rather than random chance or born attributes. If that means deemphasizing tests as much and looking for accomplishments like genuine leadership, projects, and other works, this would be fantastic.
    • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      It's quite a radical suggestion, but it's not throwing merit out the window. Top 15% is still pretty good.
      • airhead969 6y ago
        "Pretty good" compared to what? Top 15% of how many for how many spots?
  • barry-cotter 6y ago
    > In my experience there's definitely a point in which better scores on things such as the JEE stop being correlated with both college performance, life satisfaction or even career earnings. Bring the citations because the research shows that doing better on highly g loaded tests is basically an unalloyed good.
    • lordnacho 6y ago
      Does it really show that doing a bit better at the very top of the distribution is useful for something? I'd imagine it's a satisfaction type dynamic, where the benefits taper off.
• pizza 6y ago
  Couldn't help but wince at the irony that one of the entrance exams is called NEET, just like the catchall term for people who've fallen through the cracks (Not in Education, Employment, or Training)
• fireeyed 6y ago
  This is what happens when supply side overwhelms demand side. I remember in my teens, a person who graduated highschool with a modicum of technical aptitude could get hired as an entry level engineer in electronics, manufacturing, automotive etc. No longer the case. They won't even hire you for dog catcher with that background.
  • tenebrisalietum 6y ago
    Are we overpopulated?
    • Lammy 6y ago
      No, but we did move all the entry-level work overseas as a response to the successes of the civil rights movement. See also: Detroit, Camden, Gary, etc.
    • shadowofneptune 6y ago
      Over-accreditation might be the issue instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_inflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_... Hard to tell how you would easily stop the trend of educational inflation though, degrees are an easy way to sort through applicants.
    • ArkanExplorer 6y ago
      The USA has sub-replacement fertility, as do almost all Western countries. Population growth is entirely due to immigration. We should open our borders to other very-high-HDI countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev... (With diversity and equality requirements, eg. max 10% from any one country, max 49% males from any one country) And disallow immigration from all others.
      • BrianOnHN 6y ago
        In other words, let our population continue to shrink. Perfect for the "elite" who get to coast on trust funds while the unemployed poors die off. Not so perfect when an outside force decides to declare war.
• airhead969 6y ago
  Uhh, this may not be completely accurate. I worked with several CS IITians. They have/had other stuff they did growing up and took different career paths.
• sgt101 6y ago
  A colleague went to an IIT. I chatted with her about my daughters school and asked about her experience. She said that the pressure was intense in her late teens, but manageable "just three of the girls in my class killed themselves". She honestly didn't have a flicker on her face as she said it, it was haunting.
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  The IIT (Indian Institutes of Technology) system is almost an order of magnitude more competitive than the average Ivy League University in the US. About 0.9% of IIT applicants will be admitted. Compare to Ivy League Universities, which range from 4.5% (Harvard) to 10.6% (Cornell). That said, I spoke with one IIT graduate who tried to downplay the experience. I could never tell if he was being humble or polite, or if he really felt the difficult was exaggerated. He was smart, but he didn't seem to have missed out on a childhood for the sake of getting into IIT. Of course, I grew up with several smart peers who made getting into Ivy League universities look like a walk in the park.
  • analog31 6y ago
    I'm skeptical of acceptance rates, because the denominator is not controlled in any way. Maybe IIT's application fee is lower.
  • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    4.5% for Harvard honestly seems high to me. Do you have a source? (Not doubting, moreso curious about other Ivys).
    • perpetualpatzer 6y ago
      It was 4.5 in 2019 (the last non-COVID cycle).[0] [0]https://qz.com/1584304/acceptances-rates-at-top-us-colleges-dropped-further-for-the-class-of-2023/ https://qz.com/1584304/acceptances-rates-at-top-us-colleges-...
    • chrisseaton 6y ago
      Acceptance rates are pretty meaningless. For example Oxford and Cambridge have seemingly very high acceptance rates... but this is because in the UK students can only apply to one top-tier university. The Ivy League has tiny acceptance rates because many students apply to many of them. I guess you could apply to literally all of them if you wanted to? Does that make them harder to get into?
      • 6y ago
• primitivesuave 6y ago
  I have been hiring IIT graduates and building a team in India for several years now. They are all really smart people with a strong work ethic, but their approach to work tends to be the same as the approach they needed to succeed in a test-based education system. The engineers will grind until any hour of the night to ensure that all feature requirements are met and JIRA tickets checked off, but nobody will stop to ask why things are being done a particular way, or offer up some alternative. When success is measured solely on hard metrics (e.g. ticket completion, bug reports), there isn't much emphasis placed on critical analysis or many of the "soft skills" referred to in the article. I don't mean to say that IIT graduates lack creativity - there are many well-known examples to the contrary. My point is that an academic system where success is predicated on test-taking ability will produce great test-takers who function quite well as cogs in the machine. The system does not cultivate enough creative thinkers who can imagine the machines that have not yet been built.
  • mywittyname 6y ago
    Don't write this off as a solely as a symptom of education. Being able to question the judgement of an authority figure / decision maker is a privilege. A squeaky wheel gets the grease but a raised nail gets the hammer. Engineers generally lean more nail than wheel in most orgs, and being a minority or otherwise less respected subset of that group makes you feel even more like a nail. Dotting I's and crossing T's is exactly the kind of behavior one would expect from a person who is smart enough to recognize something is a stupid idea, knows that they lack the authority to make any changes, and will bear the bunt of the inevitable failure.
    • Aeolun 6y ago
      > Dotting I's and crossing T's is exactly the kind of behavior one would expect from a person who is smart enough to recognize something is a stupid idea Maybe? But it makes them useless for my purposes. Which requires them to think for themselves.
      • sriram_sun 6y ago
• vishakad 6y ago
  I went through the IIT system 10+ years ago. At that point, it was 3,500 people to be selected from a pool of 250,000 or so. These ratios have remained the same over the years I think. My hobbies were largely desk-bound/sedentary --- coding, trivia --- that I was able to carry out at a reduced pace, and resume after I cleared the exams. The pressure during the ages 15-17 was definitely quite intense --- I'd typically come home at 3 in the afternoon, and work until midnight with a few short breaks in between. However, I think I did create a narrative of what I was going through that led to me actually enjoying the reading and problem-solving (in spite of feeling stressed out). At that age, it can feel like a superpower to be given a list of chemicals and predict what structures would emerge in a chemical reaction, or be able to compute the motions of particles in an EM field. With over 10+ years of hindsight now, I feel the following --- -- The notion of an "ideal" childhood being lost depends on how you define the ideal. (edit : There was no pressure to have a girlfriend or boyfriend at that age. No "jocks" bullying studious "nerds". The "nerds" were the "cool" kids all through in fact. ) Of course, I don't imagine that people killing themselves or burning out would count as normal in any culture. -- I'd say the ability to slog things out for many hours of the day across weeks many is something that has stayed with me. At the same time, there are numerous great scientists and engineers who have developed this ability without having to go through this process (edit: at ages 15-17). -- As one person in the article points out, yes, I definitely was very late to pick up many life skills that are likely second-nature to teenagers in the West. -- While I could solve problems and apply concepts easily, it was from a shallow understanding of topics. I definitely did not develop a meta-understanding of why, say, Newton's laws are structured that way, or what consequences it has for the structure of physical laws relying on Newton's laws. These skills I had to learn much later on.
  • reducesuffering 6y ago
    > The notion of an "ideal" childhood being lost depends on how you define the ideal. (edit : There was no pressure to have a girlfriend or boyfriend at that age. No "jocks" bullying studious "nerds". The "nerds" were the "cool" kids all through in fact. ) Immediately thought of that relevant Silicon Valley scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKz0M6SmQ8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKz0M6SmQ8c
• listmaking 6y ago
  As data, here is a list of each year's top-ranked student in the IIT "joint entrance exam" (JEE) since 1979, and what they're doing now: https://dev.studentgiri.com/last-38-years-iit-jee-toppers/ https://dev.studentgiri.com/last-38-years-iit-jee-toppers/ I know a couple of them personally, and a fair number of other IIT graduates besides, and while many of them did work hard, all of them did/do have hobbies and all that, not quite fitting the "No life, no hobbies, burnout, lost childhood" headline or the rest of the picture painted here.
  • lokeshk 6y ago
    I didn't exhaustively scanned each entry, but sampled many (> 15) and one thing that I found to be odd was that all of them were male. I'm not sure if it's cultural but it's quite interesting.
• mprovost 6y ago
  And yet from the US tech side of things there is basically a complete lack of awareness on the part of American (or European) staff of which schools are considered good (or the equivalent of Ivy League) in India. I would bet if you asked any engineer or manager who conducts interviews for a FAANG to name the equivalent of MIT in India they would be stumped. (Unfortunately I count myself in this group.) Then there's also a general lack of trust in credentials - does anyone actually check that you went to the school that you said you did? I suspect this is one reason for the notorious whiteboard interviews - it doesn't really matter where you went to school, you just have to be able to reverse a binary tree.
• hintymad 6y ago
  What's wrong with students doing everything they can to get into IIT? How is it different from the US? A student aspiring to get into HYPM in the bay area often needs to get full GPA, complete more than 10 AP courses, be the leader in multiple voluntary groups, be a captain in a sports team, sleep 5 hours a day, and take illicit smart drugs. Do such students have a childhood? Do they have life? Do they have true hobby? So it's okay to toil for so-called "holistic admission", but it's not okay to play the game in India? What kind of twisted moral superiority is this? And how is different from a Korean students doing everything they can so they can get into the top medical school? And how is it different from a Japanese kid fighting to get into Tokyo University? And how is it different from a Chinese student who walks 10 miles every day to attend high school so she can get into a top-tier university? Do Americans even know that some countries do not have as many universities as the US? Do they know that national entrance exams can be the most fair system a country could afford? Do they even know that building leadership in high school can be a luxury that millions of family wouldn't even dream to have, yet the families can still produce brilliant students? Holistic my ass.
  • internetslave 6y ago
    IIT is a complete waste of time. You guys force your youths to spend their lives memorizing.
    • hintymad 6y ago
      I'm not sure if everyone survives IIT by rote memory. I'm sure some people thrive by truly understanding the fundamentals. For those who want to really learn a hard subject, IIT is wonderful. On the other hand, I have a hard time imagining anyone could survive a STEM subject through mere rote memory. A STEM subject is built on layers and layers of abstraction anyway. If someone could use things like "any subgroup of a commutative group is normal" or things like BPP=co-BPP to solve problems via sheer rote memory, what can I say? Hmm... Kudos? Seriously, though, we should look at statistics instead of individual samples to assess the value of education. I mean, how many students can really solve a JEE question like below by rote memory? I'm sure there are some who got lucky, but I'd rather believe most of the students who could solve such problem truly learned some math: If f(x) is a differentiable function and g(x) is a double differentiable function such that |f(x)| <= 1 and f'(x) = g(x). If f^2(0) + g^2(x) = 9. Prove that there exists some c \in (-3, 3) such that g(c)g"(c) < 0.
• savanpatel 6y ago
  Last year, 1.5 million students took the JEE to qualify for 13,000 seats in 23 IITs across the country – in other words, for each seat there were 115 aspirants. -- Wrong Math. Count in the reservation. General Category Students have to compete more for a seat. Ratio will be higher for them.
• lordnacho 6y ago
  "Like a 23-year-old machine learning engineer based out of Florida, who started his JEE preparation as early as Class 8, because his peers had started as early as Class 6. The engineer says he was so engrossed in his prep that he ignored basics such as good hygiene, good grooming, or even making friends." Wow, this is insane. For all the kids in the world who are doing this sort of thing, JEE or Gaokao style 1-in-100 pass rate, keep some things in mind: - When you're older, you will appreciate your school friends more than any others. They're the only people whose parents have fed you. You know their life stories. You're each other's support network. Today, my friend from school lost his dad. I drove right over. We phoned another classmate who had the same thing happen to him the week before. I don't know what people do if they don't have these kinds of relationships. - Very few people will pass, but everyone can learn the material. You can learn the material (Machine Learning, civil engineering, linear algebra, etc) to a high standard, and still forgetting one little thing will make you not be top 1%. We can't all be top, but CAN all understand the knowledge that people before us have discovered. - When you leave university, there are no more exams. If you optimize your whole life towards passing exams, you will suddenly come to a point where somehow you will be judged on things other than finite, concisely answerable questions. Both open ended questions like "how should we design this system" and more vague ones like "how do we all work together". - To even have a chance of passing a 1% bar, you need a fair bit of privilege. You're likely to have come from a better off, stable family. You also need some luck at that level. The simple fact of the examiner deciding to include a topic that is fresh in your mind could be the difference between passing and failing. - You're not actually learning things when you study for an exam of this high a bar. You're memorizing tables, because if you don't happen to have that trigonometric identity in your head, you won't pick up that marginal point. Or you memorize constants that in any real life situation would be a lookup in a book. Or you memorize proofs so that you don't have to spend valuable exam time actually thinking. - Even after you pass through the eye of the needle, you will not feel that special. I went to a top, world-famous uni, and people were mostly ordinary. I'd say half of my higher level math and physics classmates from high school would have done just fine. I didn't think there were many especially smart people there, maybe a few reasonably hard workers. But none of the John Nash in A Beautiful Mind kind of striking genius. - It's turtles all the way down. What's natural after you pass this exam is that certain businesses will present their hiring pipeline as the next step. Don't buy their crap. There's just more and more filters, and the ones in the corporate ladder are brutal. There's no official exam result, and very few places in the next round of musical chairs. Someone is bound to pass every single hurdle, but it won't be you. - This style of exam belongs in math contests. I used to enjoy those in high school, and framing it as an extracuricular allows the people who don't want to compete to opt out. It's totally fair to have a high bar in a math contest, and it's totally fair to ask unintuitive questions like that IMO question with the windmill. In the end it's a bit of extra exercise for the brain with low cost of failure. You don't have to feel bad if you get a math contest question wrong. Finally, I think the real problem is that India is a huge country that really ought to have more spaces. If you're at a point where over 100 kids are competing for one space, you can add some spaces and get more engineers out, without compromising quality. Making extra lessons for people to pass doesn't increase the number of spaces, the majority of the effort of crawling over your cohort is wasted.
• haltingproblem 6y ago
  tl;dr - the writer passes of systemic flaws as those peculiar to one elite institution in search of clickbait without presenting (non-existent) alternatives. This is what happens when a reporter at a online publication of a quality between Buzzfeed and Slate writes a clickbait article on why an apex institution is destroying youth. Admission to the IITs is widely considered in India to writing a golden ticket in life. They can study abroad at virtually any university, get hired by multinationals in India or abroad etc. etc. The points the reporter makes might be factually correct but are misguided and erroneous. This is not like students who don't study for the IITs get a more holistic education. Ask what exactly would the kids do if not study for the IITs? Workout, train physically, work with their hands on vocational skills? All these are either absent in Indian society or looked down upon. The whole Indian system by virtue of demand >> supply due to 70 years of socialism/quais-communism is about state monopoly on education. Indian spend 10s of billions of dollars sending their children abroad for undergraduate and masters education because supply is so meagre. If your family is not wealthy then this is the only guaranteed way out, rather used to be, as things are slowly changing. Hate to say this but there is also an element of sour grapes to the writer's lament - IIT graduates command social prestige, job opportunities and mating opportunities. Now go write about how kids in the US work so hard to pass BUDS spend all their lives perfecting their physical endurance in detriment to their mind. Or the football players who devote all their energies to get noticed by college scouts. IIT's are no different just in a different realm. I would almost argue that the IIT exams are superior as they are atleast not damaging their body and wasting prime years of their lives not developing their minds.
• univalent 6y ago
  I went through this in 1998. Went from around 130 or so pounds in grade 10 to 200ish by the time I got into college. Would get up at 2am every day to study and spend every waking minute studying. The only exercise I got was walking around while still reading books. Still struggling with my weight after all these years. The pressure I went through those 2 years was indescribable. Spare a thought for folks who went through all this and didn't even get in.
  • vishakad 6y ago
    Absolutely. Knew of some who didn't get in and their self-esteem was pretty shot for some years.
    • univalent 6y ago
      I was one of those 'not so smart' kids that got in. I know this because I struggled mightily once I did get i to maintain a respectable GPA. I think the system is most brutal on middle of the road students like me. If you know you aren't good enough, you get an out. Or if you are really smart you can coast in. The average folks get hosed :)
      • vishakad 6y ago
        "Float to the top, or sink to the bottom. Everything else in the middle is the churn." - Amos Burton.
• darth_avocado 6y ago
  This article is a gross misrepresentation of what it takes to get into IITs. I got into one, and I can guarantee that this article pretty much picks and chooses data points as it wants. Yes it is academically challenging to get into IITs, but there's two ways you can get into one: Devote your entire life towards "cracking" the game that's the entrance exams, or just study enough that you've mastered the understanding of math and science, but don't kill yourself over it. Me and my batch of high school buddies managed to get into IITs (and NITs which are a step down from IITs) while putting in some work, but not killing ourselves. All of us were athletes, so a 2-3 hours of sports daily for us was a must. All of us did some amount of coaching, and though the coaching classes gave us enough exercises to last us the entire month, daily, we had enough sense to figure out how much practice was enough practice. (Surprisingly, it's not a lot) Most of us did have other hobbies, some of us ended up pursuing them full time. Yes we always had the kind of students the article mentions, spending each moment they're not asleep on DPPs (daily practice problems). Guess what, some of them made it into IITs (which they would have even if they put in less effort), but a lot of them actually never made it despite putting in that effort. Not all of us are the soulless robots described here.
  • haltingproblem 6y ago
    Accuracy and a balanced nuanced view does not create click-bait articles. I did not go to an IIT but know plenty who did and while some are uber-nerds others are on the opposite end of the spectrum. Mixed-bag. Nothing different than what you would find at an elite US institution.
  • desi_ninja 6y ago
    that's the print is for you.
  • addicted 6y ago
    It also depends when you got into the IIT. My dad got into an IIT and it was basically like you describe it. I got into IIT and it was like how this article describes it. It’s also gotten easier since I took the JEEs because they’ve quadrupled the number of seats available by enlarging the existing IITs and making a bunch of new colleges IITs, so I suspect it’s easier now than when I was taking those exams.
• bvoq 6y ago
  Isn't this the same place everywhere that has a meritocratic system? In Japan/South Korea it's the final test at high school, in Switzerland it's the 1st year of university, etc. I prefer the system in Switzerland, because everyone gets a shot at studying in the university but only those who can pass the exams can continue studying. Of course it means that the entire university experience is high pressure but it's more meritocratic, since different high schools have different standards for a good grade.
• samfisher83 6y ago
  It's the chance for a lot of kids to chance to get out of the hood and change their entire family's fortune. It's a competitive world.
• whack 6y ago
  Everyone here is decrying how awful this meritocratic system is, and I'm just thinking about how awesome it would be if they made some tweaks to their entrance criteria. Give students a score-bonus for: - Completing a triathlon - Doing 60 push-ups in a minute - Performing 500 hours of community service Even if it doesn't change how competitive the system is, at least you'll end up with an army of nerdy buff do-gooders. Hardly the worst outcome for any society.
  • fellellor 6y ago
    Haha. It’s actually not a bad idea. Making good health, community service and social skills a core requirement to get admission seems like a great idea. Can this also be gamed? Sure. It’s not like the existing criteria are not being gamed by families with a lot more money. It is futile to complain about how the admission system cuts kids off from society and takes a toll on their health. Fierce competition for scarce resources is inevitable. Sure, the government can do a much better job of spending whatever resources are at hand, but even efficiency can only go so far. This kind of out of the box thinking is more likely to yield results than pining for ideal situation that simply doesn’t exist.
• Aeolun 6y ago
  It has never made sense to me to spend my entire childhood stuck in books (or computers). That’s not to say I don’t like them. I read tons, but I wasn’t chained to it. Maybe the situation is different over here, but I guess it’s because I never felt that I needed to score top 1% to even be considered for positions? The Netherlands has a fairly hierarchical hiring system, so if you score into one of the 3 levels you’ll generally be considered for a job at that level. Jobs at level 3 aren’t making shitloads more money that level 1 either (maybe some 2x more).
• known 6y ago
  By the time they achieve their aim, if they do, many realise they have lost out on social skills, ability to communicate easily with others (an attribute now known as soft skills), and of course, some part of their youth. Reminds me of movie https://yts.mx/movies/gifted-2017 https://yts.mx/movies/gifted-2017
• known 6y ago
  Asking WHY is a taboo/prohibited in India's Education System/Society due to 2700 years old https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism) based Casteism;
• quantified 6y ago
  It’s also the price paid by many who don’t get that seat. What happens to them?
• musicale 6y ago
  Seems like a sad lottery if 1.5M students are competing for 13K slots. A lot easier to get into MIT or Caltech, but of course there is no way they could process 1.5M applicants. > No life, no hobbies, burnout, lost childhood — the price students pay for a prized IIT seat Even in the US there is something wrong when you have to skip courses in (for example) fine arts (e.g. visual arts, music, drama) because they aren't considered serious "college preparatory" subjects and usually won't help your admission chances unless you are a superstar.
• TrackerFF 6y ago
  Every time I read these testimonials from Asian students - how they're basically devoting their entire youths for some entrance exam, or college majors, I can't help but feel incredibly thankful that I'm from a western/nordic country. It just sounds so alien that people would live like that - but at the same time, it's completely understandable. The payoff can be life-altering, so it's really no different than would-be athletes here, that devote their lives for the sport, because first prize could be pro-sports contract with multi-million salaries, while second prize is basically a set of stake knives, in the long run. When I grew up, I spent maybe an hour on homework? If that. Granted, we had very, very little rote learning, and the school system put a lot of emphasis on conceptual understanding. We simply did not participate in problem-grinding. Same for college and university. Undergrad was quite hectic, but the workload was much higher than anything I had experienced before. Still, I don't know a single student from my class that studied from morning to night. If anything, I hope they got the payoff they were hoping for.