Murthy said the quality of students entering IITs has deteriorated over the years due to the coaching classes that prepare engineering aspirants.
NEW YORK: Voicing his displeasure over the quality of engineers that pass out of the IITs, Infosys chairman emeritus N R Narayana Murthy has said there is a need to overhaul the selection criteria for students seeking admission to the prestigious technology institutions.
Addressing a gathering of hundreds of former IITians at a ‘Pan IIT’ summit here, Murthy said the quality of students entering Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has deteriorated over the years due to the coaching classes that prepare engineering aspirants.
He said the majority of the students fare poorly at jobs and global institutions of higher education.
“Thanks to the coaching classes today, the quality of students entering IITs has gone lower and lower,” Murthy said, receiving a thundering applause from his audience.
He said apart from the top 20% of students who crack the tough IIT entrance examination and can “stand among the best anywhere in the world,” quality of the remaining 80 per cent of students leave much to be desired.
Coaching classes teach aspirants limited sets of problems, out of which a few are asked in the examinations.
“They somehow get through the joint entrance examination. But their performance in IITs, at jobs or when they come for higher education in institutes in the US is not as good as it used to be.
“This has to be corrected. A new method of selection of students to IITs has to be arrived at.”
Drawing a road map to put IITs among the top engineering institutes in the world, Murthy said it has to be ensured that IITs “transcend from being just teaching institutions to reasonably good research institutes” at par with Harvard and MIT in the next 10-20 years.
“Few IITs have done well in producing PhDs but in reality when we compare ourselves to institutions in this country, we have a long way to go,” he said.
More emphasis has to be given to research at the undergraduate level and examinations should test independent thinking of students rather than their ability to solve problems.
Murthy said in order to produce good research at IITs, the Indian government has to be persuaded to create institutions that fund research projects.
In addition, faculty members should also be evaluated annually on their research performance by an independent committee, Murthy said adding that India must shift from the tenure system for its faculty to a five year contractual appointment system.
The Infosys mentor also lamented the poor English speaking and social skills of a majority of IIT students, saying with Indian politicians “rooting against English”, the task of getting good English speaking students at IITs gets more difficult.
“An IITian has to be a global citizen and must understand where the globe is going,” he added.
Murthy also stressed the need to have the governing council of IITs made up of its alumni.
The only way IITs can become better is if 80-90 per cent of members on their governing council are alumni.
“Nobody is bothered about an institution more than its alumni. We must somehow persuade the government of India to let go of its control and make sure majority of the council members is the IIT alumni.”
Murthy urged IITians spread across the globe to work with their alma mater to ensure that IITs are among the top 10 engineering schools of the world.
He said while only a couple of IITs feature in the top 50, there should be at least five IITs in the top 10 engineering schools in the world in the next 10-20 years, he added.
Anand Kumar, who founded Super 30, Bihar's widely acclaimed free coaching centre for IIT aspirants, has blamed the institute's exam panel for the poor quality students making the cut, a concern voiced by Narayan Murthy.
Anand Kumar said if poor quality students, as felt by Narayan Murthy, were able to get into the IITs, it was the responsibility of the joint entrance examination (JEE) committee.
He said that students went to private coaching institutes simply because they don’t find the school education system up to the mark for the JEE.
“The IITs should frame questions in such a manner that the real talent reaches there. The IITs should try to bring in greater transparency and have a proper examination pattern,” Kumar told IANS.
“It is because of the lack of knowledge about the IITs’ pattern that the students have to run around the coaching institutes to acquire that little bit extra, which makes the ultimate difference,” he said.
Anand Kumar, who welcomed the reforms announced by the IITs for the JEE, said that the students needed to be applauded, rather than criticised. It is their hard work that makes them crack arguably the toughest competition.
“Once the students reach the IITs, it is the job of the teachers there to provide the environment where they grow. Blaming the coaching institutes will not solve the problem. It is the professors and the teachers to teach in a manner that brings the best out of the students, who are from different backgrounds and social classes.” he said.
He said it was a shame that in a country like India, Hindi is plays second fiddle to English. Just because students cannot speak English, his talent can be undermined.
Addressing a gathering of hundreds of former IITians at a ‘Pan IIT’ summit in New York, Murthy said the quality of students entering IITs had deteriorated over the years due to the “coaching classes that prepare engineering aspirants”.
Anand Kumar’s Super 30 has helped many poor students from Bihar to enter the prestigious IITs. He had set up Super 30 to prepare 30 students for the IIT-JEE in 2002, providing free boarding, lodging and coaching to the selected aspirants. In the last nine years, 236 students from Super 30 have made it to the IIT-JEE.
Most of the successful candidates have been from the less privileged sections of society.
Anand Kumar, who could not go to Cambridge University in the UK for higher studies due to extreme financial constraint after the death of his father, started the Ramanujam School of Mathematics in 1992 and founded the Super 30 a decade later.
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