IIT JEE to IITs: Why don’t best students become best engineers

IIT JEE is hailed as the most difficult exam in the world. Yet, the quality of engineers IITs produce has failed to propel Brand IIT higher in world university rankings. Someone has rightly said, “JEE is like IRCTC Tatkal Booking. There are 0.004% chances that you will crack the exam and yet, it does not mean that you have a guarantee of luxurious train ride ahead.

Narayana Murthy of the Infosys fame has openly expressed his displeasure over the quality of IIT gradautes these days. He pegs down the problem to the coaching culture that sky rockets average or below average students into the institute by teaching them limited set of questions asked in the exam. According to Murthy, IITs need to overhaul its method of selecting students. Saurabh Shukla, a Math teacher in a government school, analyses, “IITs are not made of amazing buildings or excellent professors. It is made by the IITians. The slightly smarter candidates you get out of JEE go to the IITs have to undergo bureaucracy and red tapism for four years. On the other hand, students at other good universities abroad like Stanford or MIT can interact with their mentors freely. IITians study for fancy jobs and top salaries while students there are encouraged to work day and night on things they are really passionate about. The kind of environment students has makes all the difference to the outcomes. IITians who do pursue their real interests have done well worldwide too.”

Indra Singhal, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus, said, “Increasing the number of IITs has diluted Brand IIT overall. The old IITs still retain a value to their name but if you are from a new IIT, no one knows you.” New IITs, mostly located in smaller cities and towns, fail to attract good faculty or provide top-notch facilities like old IITs. A 2012 IIT-K passout shares, “The biggest secret IITs is hiding is that along with the brightest students it harbours, there are some dumbest students in its pack too. 70% of my batch had no practical knowledge about our subjects. Some of my batchmates who had A grade in wireless communications didn’t even know how voice propagates simultaneously in both directions on a single telephone wire (in landlines).”

Another IIT passout agreed, “One of the guys got an ‘EX’ (for excellent) in the lab even though he didn’t knew how to perform many of the experiments. The marks were awarded to nice graphs he made and not how he completed the experiment. I have known many IITians who did not attend any classes, submitted a fake medical report, and then emerged with nice grades in the subject. IITians watch more porn, movie shows or TV than housewives!”

Ashok Mittal, an IIT student, said, “Curriculum at IITs is too boring and outdated. We learn subjects that are of no use today. When the technology of the world is changing at a lightning speed, what kind of engineers would wans to be stuck with the decade-old courses? Students and faculty at IIT are both equally uninterested in what they are doing. Students are often physically or mentally absent in the classes while professors are boring and just concerned about completing the courses somehow.” It is high time for us to see what we are ‘missing’ here and revamp IIT education system and its selection criteria to make it more relevant to the present times.