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>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

>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.
      - 5y ago
  - flaubere 5y ago
    Yes, what people competing to get their children into the 0.9% miss is that 1. There are going to be other tests and hurdles in the future which differentiate your child from those with very high natural aptitude. 2. If your child worked 10 times as the top achievers to attain a similar level, at the next stage they will have to work 20 times as hard, then 100 times as hard, until it simply becomes impossible. 3. While they are sacrificing their youth for this, they are missing out on discovering what they are good at and do want to do.
    - ItsMonkk 5y ago
      Unless this is the bottleneck and Standford isn't harder than NJIT and at Google you work at on some project that gets cancelled and you never actually had to be all that good to stay with the Elite. Intelligence is speed. Knowledge is distance. If you are very smart and other kids are not as smart, if you give them more time then they can reach the same benchmark as you. When metrics become targeted, it is a sign that your community has scaled beyond what it can handle, and you have lost personal accountability. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
      - alex_smart 5y ago
        >When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The success of JEE in selecting excellent students year after year is evidence to the contrary. When the measure is set high enough, it actually becomes an excellent motivating factor in itself. Do you think the people participating in the various Olympiads (IMO, IPhO etc) not benefit from the experience? How about the Olympics?
        ItsMonkk 5y ago
        While I am not Indian and the only thing that I know of this is what I have read here and from having watched 3 Idiots(2009), all metricization is the same. You can not test intelligence, you can only test knowledge. But everyone wants to know intelligence. The examples you cite are finding the farthest distance in their field, and the only people capable of going that distance are people who move fast AND work hard. It only works when the participants are geeks for exactly the thing that is being tested. As the people who study for a long time keep increasing their studying, the scores naturally improves, and therefore they need to make the test harder to keep the same pass rate. This only works so long as the juice is worth the squeeze. We see this with the interview circuit. Top engineers, instead of studying up on CICO choose to interview elsewhere where real problems are asked. They have turned down working on esoteric problems that no one faces in the real world, even though if they were to face it would easily be able to solve it - likely by themselves from first principles. We care about intelligence. The only way to learn someones intelligence is by seeing them work. It's by seeing them understand a problem new to society. Tests can not measure intelligence. Only personal accountability will work, but personal accountability doesn't scale. The key is living in a society that doesn't scale.
- flaubere 5y ago
  It seems like you are advocating, for a bright but not exceptional child, that they do get pushed to the point where they burn out, just in case they manage to win the lottery of appearing to be in the exceptional group. Even if this dubious plan succeeds, sooner or later it will become clear that they are not as good as their results.
- tanaypingalkar 5y ago
  You were not mediocre, school told you that you are mediocre. I am 14 and i do want to give JEE as I want to be a cs student. I do coding and i love it, but i am at such a place that i think jee is the only option. I have not even studied more than 2 hour from a year because of our schools are close. People always demotivate me and they tell that if you won't have good college (especially IIT), you will fail and all you coding will not worth. And they are not wrong because I have heard this 10 thousand times. Is IIT JEE really needed to learn CS. If you are any boy here, he will say he want to "become jee", how can he become jee. Elders tell that if you get into IIT you will get 10 crore of package. Is is real? I am telling this from view of a kid who lives in this NEET/JEE only world.
  - alex_smart 5y ago
    >Elders tell that if you get into IIT you will get 10 crore of package That's nonsense. I'm from CS at a top IIT, and only a handful of my batchmates have that kind of compensation, and that is after >5 years of experience. Absolutely nobody is going to give you a 10 crore salary fresh out of college. For students from other not so popular streams, in India, a salary of Rs 10-20 lakh a year is more realistic. Again, this is after 4-5 years of industry experience. Even after IIM, the average salary is around 20-30 lakhs.
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.

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.
    - 5y ago
- flaubere 5y ago
  Yes, what people competing to get their children into the 0.9% miss is that 1. There are going to be other tests and hurdles in the future which differentiate your child from those with very high natural aptitude. 2. If your child worked 10 times as the top achievers to attain a similar level, at the next stage they will have to work 20 times as hard, then 100 times as hard, until it simply becomes impossible. 3. While they are sacrificing their youth for this, they are missing out on discovering what they are good at and do want to do.
  - ItsMonkk 5y ago
    Unless this is the bottleneck and Standford isn't harder than NJIT and at Google you work at on some project that gets cancelled and you never actually had to be all that good to stay with the Elite. Intelligence is speed. Knowledge is distance. If you are very smart and other kids are not as smart, if you give them more time then they can reach the same benchmark as you. When metrics become targeted, it is a sign that your community has scaled beyond what it can handle, and you have lost personal accountability. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
    - alex_smart 5y ago
      >When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The success of JEE in selecting excellent students year after year is evidence to the contrary. When the measure is set high enough, it actually becomes an excellent motivating factor in itself. Do you think the people participating in the various Olympiads (IMO, IPhO etc) not benefit from the experience? How about the Olympics?
      - ItsMonkk 5y ago
        While I am not Indian and the only thing that I know of this is what I have read here and from having watched 3 Idiots(2009), all metricization is the same. You can not test intelligence, you can only test knowledge. But everyone wants to know intelligence. The examples you cite are finding the farthest distance in their field, and the only people capable of going that distance are people who move fast AND work hard. It only works when the participants are geeks for exactly the thing that is being tested. As the people who study for a long time keep increasing their studying, the scores naturally improves, and therefore they need to make the test harder to keep the same pass rate. This only works so long as the juice is worth the squeeze. We see this with the interview circuit. Top engineers, instead of studying up on CICO choose to interview elsewhere where real problems are asked. They have turned down working on esoteric problems that no one faces in the real world, even though if they were to face it would easily be able to solve it - likely by themselves from first principles. We care about intelligence. The only way to learn someones intelligence is by seeing them work. It's by seeing them understand a problem new to society. Tests can not measure intelligence. Only personal accountability will work, but personal accountability doesn't scale. The key is living in a society that doesn't scale.
flaubere 5y ago
It seems like you are advocating, for a bright but not exceptional child, that they do get pushed to the point where they burn out, just in case they manage to win the lottery of appearing to be in the exceptional group. Even if this dubious plan succeeds, sooner or later it will become clear that they are not as good as their results.
tanaypingalkar 5y ago
You were not mediocre, school told you that you are mediocre. I am 14 and i do want to give JEE as I want to be a cs student. I do coding and i love it, but i am at such a place that i think jee is the only option. I have not even studied more than 2 hour from a year because of our schools are close. People always demotivate me and they tell that if you won't have good college (especially IIT), you will fail and all you coding will not worth. And they are not wrong because I have heard this 10 thousand times. Is IIT JEE really needed to learn CS. If you are any boy here, he will say he want to "become jee", how can he become jee. Elders tell that if you get into IIT you will get 10 crore of package. Is is real? I am telling this from view of a kid who lives in this NEET/JEE only world.
- alex_smart 5y ago
  >Elders tell that if you get into IIT you will get 10 crore of package That's nonsense. I'm from CS at a top IIT, and only a handful of my batchmates have that kind of compensation, and that is after >5 years of experience. Absolutely nobody is going to give you a 10 crore salary fresh out of college. For students from other not so popular streams, in India, a salary of Rs 10-20 lakh a year is more realistic. Again, this is after 4-5 years of industry experience. Even after IIM, the average salary is around 20-30 lakhs.

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.