Coaching IIT-JEE aspirants to victory
While comparing the calibre of the students of the Indian Institutes of Technology versus the teaching faculty there, Jairam Ramesh left out one crucial element in the equation: the coaching classes. Even if the much-vaunted tech schools' teachers do not match up to the environment minister's exacting world standards, our tutorial networks certainly do.
With places like Kota notching up a disproportionate number of successful 'candidates' , something has to be said for the unsung pedagogues in countless cramped coaching centres who turn raw talent into well-synchronised examination clearing machines. Judging by the array of young people who have charted their path to IIT and future success through their classes and postal notes, it may not be fanciful to imagine that without them, no world-class Indian child would ever clear the formidable IIT Joint Entrance Examination .
Then, horror of horrors, IIT teachers (substandard or otherwise) would be left with empty classes. Of course, brilliant students should not need coaching to clear an entrance exam. Their senior secondary level board exam results should, ideally, put them in line for selection. However, the elaborate network of coaching classes would then have to be shut down.
Curiously, while the government has tried to root out the tuition culture in the Indian school system, the high-pressure IIT-JEE and its coaching classes attract no such opprobrium. Maybe the government is chary of affecting the economies of countless small towns whose coaching classes and boarding houses would then be put out of business. But would they? They could always outsource their world class student-mentoring skills to the US, which is getting increasingly wary of China and India's brainpower anyway.
ET
With places like Kota notching up a disproportionate number of successful 'candidates' , something has to be said for the unsung pedagogues in countless cramped coaching centres who turn raw talent into well-synchronised examination clearing machines. Judging by the array of young people who have charted their path to IIT and future success through their classes and postal notes, it may not be fanciful to imagine that without them, no world-class Indian child would ever clear the formidable IIT Joint Entrance Examination .
Then, horror of horrors, IIT teachers (substandard or otherwise) would be left with empty classes. Of course, brilliant students should not need coaching to clear an entrance exam. Their senior secondary level board exam results should, ideally, put them in line for selection. However, the elaborate network of coaching classes would then have to be shut down.
Curiously, while the government has tried to root out the tuition culture in the Indian school system, the high-pressure IIT-JEE and its coaching classes attract no such opprobrium. Maybe the government is chary of affecting the economies of countless small towns whose coaching classes and boarding houses would then be put out of business. But would they? They could always outsource their world class student-mentoring skills to the US, which is getting increasingly wary of China and India's brainpower anyway.
ET
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