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It's interesting to note that Ramanujan also completed SL Loney's books on Coordinate Geometry and Trigonometry before he turned 12. These books are today used

by xNeil 5y ago

It's interesting to note that Ramanujan also completed SL Loney's books on Coordinate Geometry and Trigonometry before he turned 12. These books are today used by almost every aspirant in the IIT-JEE, the engineering entrance exam in India. I'm trying to complete them, they're genuinely wonderful books. I believe they are also available on archive.org, although I use print editions.

nindalf 5y ago
For an international audience, the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is more like the Chinese gaokao than the SATs. In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. The stakes are pretty high, and only the top 1% get through. The remaining 99% try to move on with their lives or spend another entire year preparing full time for the exam.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- alex_smart 5y ago
  >In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. That's more due to Indian coaching companies preying on Indian's parents' extreme sense of desperation and FOMO for their children rather than any real need to start that early. I don't think any more than two years are required or recommended for preparation of the exam. The longer you stretch the preparation, the longer you have to get completely bored and burnt-out by the process. Source: I was top 10 in JEE and personally know more than half the people who were in top 100 in my year.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    That’s not a great source. Sounds like extreme sampling bias to me. What I’m saying is, you don’t know what it’s like being mediocre at school. I do. In my experience, being at the top is extremely motivating. It encourages you to put in even more effort. The opposite is also true - when you feel like you’ve given it everything but you’re still in middle of the pack, you get burned out. It’s easy for someone who probably never needed any coaching to tell people “nah it’s just FOMO”. It’s not. As distasteful as the industry is, a small edge means you do better than others at 14, which can motivate you to put in more effort. That effect compounds over time.
    - Ntrails 5y ago
      So, here's my thinking. The goal of the exams is not to find the children who are middle of the pack. The goal of the exams is to find the outliers. The unusually bright. What I think actually happens is you capture the top 0.1% because they're too smart not to make it, but the other 0.9% of passes is a mixture of highly trained, hard working kids alongside the intended targets. I guess I always wonder what could be done differently to capture just aptitude. Is that even a good idea? I myself was bright but didn't have much drive, so would have done poorly. I don't think that's a group you want to capture either.
      - dr_zoidberg 5y ago
        I've caught the exceptional by being a commited teacher. You notice that they are ahead of the pack, by different signs: some make great questions in class, others barely say a word but utterly ace the exams, others are incredibile driven and tell you about their interests, others aren't, but when challenged they respond with interesting solutions. Of course, that may not be a scalable way to find them. But if you had all the teachers in line with that "pay attention to the exceptional" objective, you'd probably find more than the current[0] "grind students forward into formal education" approach. [0] I say this being fully aware that may not be the particular case in a region/group, but it certainly seems like the broadly taken "strategy" by most of the education system where I live
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        > Of course, that may not be a scalable way to find them. That's the crux, though - the common theme behind failures of modern education, among other things. It seems to me that becoming a developed country comes with the desperate need to make everything scalable, and losing the ability to do things that do not scale.
        alex_smart 5y ago
        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.
  - boruto 5y ago
    > : I was top 10 in JEE This should be anti-source if you say you don't need to prepare hard enough.
    - alex_smart 5y ago
      I did have to prepare hard in those two years, but two years was more than enough. A lot about doing well in an exam as selective as this comes down to winning the genetic lottery. If you do not have the aptitude, then spending 5-6 years wholly devoted to an exam you are not going to crack is going to be an extremely demotivating way to spend your entire teenage life.
      - rob74 5y ago
        Well, this is not a binary classification: there are those fortunate few who have, as you say, won the "genetic intelligence lottery" and sail through school and exams such as this with little to no effort, then there are those who have to study hard for x years in order to make it, then there are those who need extra tutoring, and then there are of course some who even with all the help their parents can afford will not be able to make it. I (born in Romania, was programming as a hobby since age 12) was in the "extra tutoring" group BTW, then I barely passed the maths, physics etc. exams of the first semesters, but when the actual CS courses started I got better and graduated with pretty passable grades (not that any employer looks at those)...
        alex_smart 5y ago
        >Well, this is not a binary classification You are missing that the context here is getting through an extremely selective competitive examination. Only the top 5% students by aptitude for math/science/engineering have any significant chance of getting through. The rest are just fodder for the coaching industry selling increasingly more and more extreme and ridiculous products. Soon they might start selling products for coaching the unborn baby by teaching maths to the mother too. None of what I am saying is intended to apply to the practice of actually being a professional engineer or having a successful career.
        5y ago
  - xNeil 5y ago
    Hi! I'm a JEE aspirant - is there any way I could contact you to have a bit of a chat? Of course, only if you're kind enough to accept - I'll understand if you don't, however :)
    - fizwhiz 5y ago
      I hate to be that guy, but this isn't Quora my guy.
      - xNeil 5y ago
        I get at what you're saying, but I figured I could give it a shot since he replied to my thread :)
  - timewarrior 5y ago
    I agree with this. Most people need just 2 years during grade 11 and 12. Starting earlier might give minor edge at best but more damage to other aspects of personality and growth! In IIT, in under 1000 rank, most people who spent more than 2 years were people who were intelligent but didn't take preparation seriously during their grade 11-12 but put in effort after that. I also know people who were extremely intelligent who could crack under 100 if they gave the exam in grade 8. But they were outliers.
    - alex_smart 5y ago
      Haha I know somebody who cracked JEE at the age of 14. I met him and found out that he was homeschooled with zero social skills. Warms my heart to know that he is doing well in life. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/Youngest-IITian-set-for-doctorate-stint-in-US/articleshow/47089650.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/Youngest-II...
      - timewarrior 5y ago
        I always wonder about kids who skip too many grades or who get college degree at 12. Even if they are intellectually there, socially life would be a nightmare. Imagine being a 12 year old which 17 year old peers. I can't imagine the emotional trauma! I didn't do any IIT coaching and was able to prepare for IIT only for one year in my grade 11. After that I got some major health issue and was harassed by armed bullies in my school, so couldn't study at all in Grade 12. This made me miss Top 200 rank. But this ended up being a blessing in disguise, because I couldn't get Computer Science at IIT. I have been passionate about computers since I was 8 years old. If I had studied Computer Science as a part of the course curriculum, I might have ended up hating it. Instead I pursued Computer Science on mine own, based on my interest. I have loved it every single day! I look forward to my work, versus most of my friends who feel trapped in their jobs!
        alex_smart 5y ago
        >Imagine being a 12 year old which 17 year old peers. I can't imagine the emotional trauma! In my experience, these kids are homeschooled so at least they get sheltered from bullying at school. Of course they also get "sheltered" from any opportunity to learn how to navigate social situations. And when the get into real life, it is into an academic environment that at least somewhat supports such eccentrics. To a smaller extent, I think almost everyone makes sacrifices in their social life and hobbies during that time period for a boost in career. For pretty much my entire first year, I had a single point agenda in life: get laid! >If I had studied Computer Science as a part of the course curriculum, I might have ended up hating it. You can pursue Computer Science on your own even while being enrolled in CS program and just use the curriculum as sort of a sanity check that you're making enough progress. That's pretty much what I did.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is more like the Chinese gaokao than the SATs" As someone not familiar with the JEE nor the gaokao, might I ask how they differ from the SAT?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
alex_smart 5y ago
The best part of these books were the exercises. I have very fond memories of spending hours trying to solve every single problem at the end of each chapter. You get more from solving those last two difficult problems you couldn't solve than solving hundreds of easy problems mechanically.
lqet 5y ago
A bit off-topic, but I just googled some IIT-JEE questions and found the following: A large number of bullets are fired in all directions with same speed u. What is the maximum area on the ground on which these bullets will spread. The provided answers all depend only on u, pi, and g. How can this be possible? Obviously, if I fire the gun from a tower, this area will be larger than when I fire it from the ground, and thus also depends on the height above ground of the gun.
- flaubere 5y ago
  Not sure why you are asking this in this thread, but the implication is that the bullets are fired from ground level, not necessarily horizontally. The maximum distance a projectile can travel when fired from ground level is the basic first result of ballistics.
  - tyleo 5y ago
    I think I understand. From height 0 figure out what gun angle gives the largest distance and then calculate the area of the circle with that distance as radius.
    - xNeil 5y ago
      In the JEE, you generally assume the range to be the distance the projectile covers before reaching the launch height again, unless specified otherwise.
- xNeil 5y ago
  You have to assume the angle of projection is 45 degrees, in which case the range of the projectile becomes (u^2/g). (Since Range = (u^2)(sin2(theta))/g) Hope I helped!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by xNeil 5y ago

nindalf 5y ago

For an international audience, the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is more like the Chinese gaokao than the SATs. In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. The stakes are pretty high, and only the top 1% get through. The remaining 99% try to move on with their lives or spend another entire year preparing full time for the exam.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alex_smart 5y ago
>In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. That's more due to Indian coaching companies preying on Indian's parents' extreme sense of desperation and FOMO for their children rather than any real need to start that early. I don't think any more than two years are required or recommended for preparation of the exam. The longer you stretch the preparation, the longer you have to get completely bored and burnt-out by the process. Source: I was top 10 in JEE and personally know more than half the people who were in top 100 in my year.
- nindalf 5y ago
  That’s not a great source. Sounds like extreme sampling bias to me. What I’m saying is, you don’t know what it’s like being mediocre at school. I do. In my experience, being at the top is extremely motivating. It encourages you to put in even more effort. The opposite is also true - when you feel like you’ve given it everything but you’re still in middle of the pack, you get burned out. It’s easy for someone who probably never needed any coaching to tell people “nah it’s just FOMO”. It’s not. As distasteful as the industry is, a small edge means you do better than others at 14, which can motivate you to put in more effort. That effect compounds over time.
  - Ntrails 5y ago
    So, here's my thinking. The goal of the exams is not to find the children who are middle of the pack. The goal of the exams is to find the outliers. The unusually bright. What I think actually happens is you capture the top 0.1% because they're too smart not to make it, but the other 0.9% of passes is a mixture of highly trained, hard working kids alongside the intended targets. I guess I always wonder what could be done differently to capture just aptitude. Is that even a good idea? I myself was bright but didn't have much drive, so would have done poorly. I don't think that's a group you want to capture either.
    - dr_zoidberg 5y ago
      I've caught the exceptional by being a commited teacher. You notice that they are ahead of the pack, by different signs: some make great questions in class, others barely say a word but utterly ace the exams, others are incredibile driven and tell you about their interests, others aren't, but when challenged they respond with interesting solutions. Of course, that may not be a scalable way to find them. But if you had all the teachers in line with that "pay attention to the exceptional" objective, you'd probably find more than the current[0] "grind students forward into formal education" approach. [0] I say this being fully aware that may not be the particular case in a region/group, but it certainly seems like the broadly taken "strategy" by most of the education system where I live
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        > Of course, that may not be a scalable way to find them. That's the crux, though - the common theme behind failures of modern education, among other things. It seems to me that becoming a developed country comes with the desperate need to make everything scalable, and losing the ability to do things that do not scale.
      - alex_smart 5y ago
        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.
- boruto 5y ago
  > : I was top 10 in JEE This should be anti-source if you say you don't need to prepare hard enough.
  - alex_smart 5y ago
    I did have to prepare hard in those two years, but two years was more than enough. A lot about doing well in an exam as selective as this comes down to winning the genetic lottery. If you do not have the aptitude, then spending 5-6 years wholly devoted to an exam you are not going to crack is going to be an extremely demotivating way to spend your entire teenage life.
    - rob74 5y ago
      Well, this is not a binary classification: there are those fortunate few who have, as you say, won the "genetic intelligence lottery" and sail through school and exams such as this with little to no effort, then there are those who have to study hard for x years in order to make it, then there are those who need extra tutoring, and then there are of course some who even with all the help their parents can afford will not be able to make it. I (born in Romania, was programming as a hobby since age 12) was in the "extra tutoring" group BTW, then I barely passed the maths, physics etc. exams of the first semesters, but when the actual CS courses started I got better and graduated with pretty passable grades (not that any employer looks at those)...
      - alex_smart 5y ago
        >Well, this is not a binary classification You are missing that the context here is getting through an extremely selective competitive examination. Only the top 5% students by aptitude for math/science/engineering have any significant chance of getting through. The rest are just fodder for the coaching industry selling increasingly more and more extreme and ridiculous products. Soon they might start selling products for coaching the unborn baby by teaching maths to the mother too. None of what I am saying is intended to apply to the practice of actually being a professional engineer or having a successful career.
      - 5y ago
- xNeil 5y ago
  Hi! I'm a JEE aspirant - is there any way I could contact you to have a bit of a chat? Of course, only if you're kind enough to accept - I'll understand if you don't, however :)
  - fizwhiz 5y ago
    I hate to be that guy, but this isn't Quora my guy.
    - xNeil 5y ago
      I get at what you're saying, but I figured I could give it a shot since he replied to my thread :)
- timewarrior 5y ago
  I agree with this. Most people need just 2 years during grade 11 and 12. Starting earlier might give minor edge at best but more damage to other aspects of personality and growth! In IIT, in under 1000 rank, most people who spent more than 2 years were people who were intelligent but didn't take preparation seriously during their grade 11-12 but put in effort after that. I also know people who were extremely intelligent who could crack under 100 if they gave the exam in grade 8. But they were outliers.
  - alex_smart 5y ago
    Haha I know somebody who cracked JEE at the age of 14. I met him and found out that he was homeschooled with zero social skills. Warms my heart to know that he is doing well in life. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/Youngest-IITian-set-for-doctorate-stint-in-US/articleshow/47089650.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/Youngest-II...
    - timewarrior 5y ago
      I always wonder about kids who skip too many grades or who get college degree at 12. Even if they are intellectually there, socially life would be a nightmare. Imagine being a 12 year old which 17 year old peers. I can't imagine the emotional trauma! I didn't do any IIT coaching and was able to prepare for IIT only for one year in my grade 11. After that I got some major health issue and was harassed by armed bullies in my school, so couldn't study at all in Grade 12. This made me miss Top 200 rank. But this ended up being a blessing in disguise, because I couldn't get Computer Science at IIT. I have been passionate about computers since I was 8 years old. If I had studied Computer Science as a part of the course curriculum, I might have ended up hating it. Instead I pursued Computer Science on mine own, based on my interest. I have loved it every single day! I look forward to my work, versus most of my friends who feel trapped in their jobs!
      - alex_smart 5y ago
        >Imagine being a 12 year old which 17 year old peers. I can't imagine the emotional trauma! In my experience, these kids are homeschooled so at least they get sheltered from bullying at school. Of course they also get "sheltered" from any opportunity to learn how to navigate social situations. And when the get into real life, it is into an academic environment that at least somewhat supports such eccentrics. To a smaller extent, I think almost everyone makes sacrifices in their social life and hobbies during that time period for a boost in career. For pretty much my entire first year, I had a single point agenda in life: get laid! >If I had studied Computer Science as a part of the course curriculum, I might have ended up hating it. You can pursue Computer Science on your own even while being enrolled in CS program and just use the curriculum as sort of a sanity check that you're making enough progress. That's pretty much what I did.
pmoriarty 5y ago
"the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is more like the Chinese gaokao than the SATs" As someone not familiar with the JEE nor the gaokao, might I ask how they differ from the SAT?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

alex_smart 5y ago

The best part of these books were the exercises. I have very fond memories of spending hours trying to solve every single problem at the end of each chapter. You get more from solving those last two difficult problems you couldn't solve than solving hundreds of easy problems mechanically.

lqet 5y ago

A bit off-topic, but I just googled some IIT-JEE questions and found the following: A large number of bullets are fired in all directions with same speed u. What is the maximum area on the ground on which these bullets will spread. The provided answers all depend only on u, pi, and g. How can this be possible? Obviously, if I fire the gun from a tower, this area will be larger than when I fire it from the ground, and thus also depends on the height above ground of the gun.

flaubere 5y ago
Not sure why you are asking this in this thread, but the implication is that the bullets are fired from ground level, not necessarily horizontally. The maximum distance a projectile can travel when fired from ground level is the basic first result of ballistics.
- tyleo 5y ago
  I think I understand. From height 0 figure out what gun angle gives the largest distance and then calculate the area of the circle with that distance as radius.
  - xNeil 5y ago
    In the JEE, you generally assume the range to be the distance the projectile covers before reaching the launch height again, unless specified otherwise.
xNeil 5y ago
You have to assume the angle of projection is 45 degrees, in which case the range of the projectile becomes (u^2/g). (Since Range = (u^2)(sin2(theta))/g) Hope I helped!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]