127 - Reservation in IITs will require Suicide watch by Rambo

Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:34:52 +1000
Conversation: Reservation in IITs will require Suicide watch

I believe that many IITians especially those who come from the cities and who have attended private schools in cities etc may not be in a position to comprehend the kind of torture it will be for a student from a country town, (even if he is a forward caste) to come to IIT where most students are behaving like white men from a different planet. It will scare the shit out of a village kid and whose first thoughts would be to cut loose and run back to his environment.. Can we catch a monkey from the trees of a jungle and expect the monkey to perform in a circus without training.

Imagine you are from a village and badly dressed and wearing chappals when every one around you is carrying a lap top and iPod and wearing expensive Nike shoes...Will this impact a village student even if he is from the forward caste... Like mad..

Now imagine this same kid is from the Sc/St class and does not even live in the main village and lives on the periphery in a hut and the father is a day labourer...
Imagine this student sitting in CLT with 200 other students listening to a lecturer teaching maths or physics expecting every student (because he is clever enough to get admission to IIT) to follow all that is being taught.. ( Most often these maths and physics lecturers are PG's who have little teaching skills adding to the woes of such a student)
Remember this village student does not understand a word of English and every day every subject is being taught in English at a lightening pace. Do faculty care about students who are struggling to keep pace. No Sir not at IITs..

Hey I went to an English medium school and attended Loyola College. I had no problem with English, physics or chemistry the way they were taught. But Maths was a nightmare for me.. I was learning calculus for the first time as we did not have calculus in PUC in our time.. The nerds had taught themselves before classes had commenced. Me the Mr cool assumed at IIT they will teach you everything from scratch and I was WRONG. In the first year my maths teacher was good Mr Koteeswar Rao but he had no time for the minority who had not done calculus at school. Man I never understood what dy/dt was. We then had a Prof Srinivasan who faced the black board for all two or three hours and scribbled on the black board the whole time. Did I learn Integral calculus ? No Sir.

At the end of the first year I told my dad it was a mistake to join IIT and I should have gone to Guindy college.. His answer was I told you so. Then I had my friend DLN Sastry who was brilliant but had never learnt English. He struggled the first three years and still topped the Aero Branch in the 5 year B Tech course.

Today thanks to coaching classes maths physics and chemistry are a breeze.. Students find the first two years so easy to score marks that they all get well over 90% and then when their real branch courses start they just float along and get marks in the 70% range and still end up with very high averages overalll to get a first class.. I have spoken to fresh graduates who say that they relax in the last two ears and teach themselves computer programming so thy can apply for jobs in IT....

If SC/ST/OBC students are to succeed in IITs and compete on equal grounds, HRD must pick these students and send them to coaching schools as opposed to the extra one year at IITs where faculty do not do real justice....to these disadvantaged students..

I know some one like Suresh will refute this charge but he is a faculty member and will not understand the subjective issues faced by reservation students.

       Rambo
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    On 2/7/08 3:37 PM, "Ramanan R"  wrote:

So that is it.

The routine at IIT, as Rambo routinely puts it, is intimidating for somebody who suddenly gets transplanted from a culture where there a celebration when the student just "passes" the exam. They need help to transit to this new culture which outwardly looks without a "human touch". But no institution of excellence can behave benign.  It was not easy for small towners like me when I came from a small town called Hyderabad 30 years ago. To add, I used to be called half golti.

If you do not prepare students, it is torture for them.

That is why I protested that 290 Govt. schools were being closed right here in Hyderabad. Can you imagine what would be the state in the countryside. And all these kids want to go to any engg college where transparency would less than 50% of what you get at IITs. That is why I say the supporters of reservation are not fighting for the depressed, but for get more freebies for themselves. Else creamy layer would have pushed very hard by Karunanidhi, Lalu Prasad, Mulayam et al.

regards
ramanan (late)
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From: "Prof. P. Sriram"  Reservation in IITs will require Suicide watch

On Wed, 2 Jul 2008, Ram Krishnaswamy wrote:
[lots of accurate things, but also]

(Today thanks to coaching classes maths physics and chemistry are a  breeze.. Students find the first two years so easy to score marks that  they all get well over 90% and then when their real branch courses  start they just float along and get marks in the 70% range)
we have just compiled the statistics for the last 7 years or so; in the last 3 years, there has been a dramatic dip in the scores of students in maths, physics and chemistry, very notably in maths. they dont get 90% and breeze through. last year, for example, in maths 1, about 200 (out of 500)
students failed and were given a re-exam, even after which some 75 or so failed. the grades in departmental subjects are actually better.

( If SC/ST/OBC students are to succeed in IITs and compete on equal grounds, HRD must pick these students and send them to coaching schools as opposed to the extra one year at IITs where faculty do not do real justice....to these disadvantaged students.. I know some one  like Suresh will refute this charge but he is a faculty member and  will not understand the subjective issues faced by reservation students.)
actually, this may be a better idea than the present system of iits running the preparatory course. i even suspect suresh may be in favour of this, especially if it means we will shut down the preparatory course.

sriram
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From: Bhamy Shenoy
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 15:36:23 +0000
Subject: Reservation in IITs will require Suicide watch

Ram,

I completely agree with you regarding the problem students from villages and small towns face. In fact what you have described explains in every small details what I faced when I landed in IIT.

Today if any student from a village by chance gets into IIT B.Tech course will face the problems you describe. But I venture to say that any slum student from a city or even from a rich family from village getting admission to IIT is very slim. They just do not have access to good schooling.  This is also connected with caste problems.

It is a pity that we tend to concentrate only on reservation (I agree that it is a significant problem) and ignore more burning problems of all children not having access to primary and secondary schooling.

Regards
Bhamy 
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