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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 exp

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.
    - nindalf 5y ago
      > The beauty of JEE Only a person who did well in JEE would say this. You talk about disadvantages for rural students. This is important, because the vast majority of people in India live in villages or small towns, not the big cities. Tell me though, how many students from villages and small towns do well in JEE without moving to a coaching centre in a bigger town? Personal anecdotes aside, you'll find that urban students are disproportionately represented in the top engineering institutes. There are some rural students certainly, but not like the 80% you'd expect if the system was truly egalitarian. You rail against the possibility of some students getting ahead because of advantages other than academic performance, but fail to consider that the current system is also based on the lottery of birth.
- 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.

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.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    > The beauty of JEE Only a person who did well in JEE would say this. You talk about disadvantages for rural students. This is important, because the vast majority of people in India live in villages or small towns, not the big cities. Tell me though, how many students from villages and small towns do well in JEE without moving to a coaching centre in a bigger town? Personal anecdotes aside, you'll find that urban students are disproportionately represented in the top engineering institutes. There are some rural students certainly, but not like the 80% you'd expect if the system was truly egalitarian. You rail against the possibility of some students getting ahead because of advantages other than academic performance, but fail to consider that the current system is also based on the lottery of birth.
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.